Incoherent Babble

I frequently gripe and complain about things at work. No office environment is perfect, but for a vast majority of us it’s just a given necessity to having a job. Besides, when you’re trying to do desktop support, telecommuting just isn’t practical at times.

So here are two things that annoy me on a regular basis about people at work in general.

It’s broken! Fix it ASAP, because…
When you come running over and scream that something on your machine is broken, I accept that it’s a problem for you. Unfortunately, I have about 60 people in this office doing that constantly, and who knows how many clients relying upon me directly or something broken for one of those other employees.

I appreciate your urgency, but I’m sorry, I have to prioritize things on a much larger scale than your job function alone. This applies to everyone, not just you. I make the VPs of the company wait if there’s a major problem on my plate just like I make you wait. That’s right, no special treatment from me at this company (and I get support from my boss on that, so it does work that way).

Also, I honestly don’t care why it has to be fixed immediately. If you’ve got a research problem for your boss due soon, I’m sorry. The fact that you can’t open PDF files pales in comparison to the salary updates I’m doing on 7,000 employees from our largest client that have to be done by 4pm so we can send another data export to them so they can pay people this week. It’s all about perspective….

Oh yeah, I fixed that already. You can go back to your desk…
Well if you got it to work, why in the name of hell didn’t you tell me?! You can running over and interrupted my train of thought when it was broken. Why did I have to waste my time opening a support ticket for you and dropping what I’m doing to come all the way across the building, wait for you to get off the phone, and ask you to show me what’s wrong only to find out that you got it to work?!

Seems to me just to be common courtesy to let me know when I don’t need to allot some of my valuable time to fix your problem because you got it to work (likely due to user error)… Maybe that’s just me, though…