Too Little Information

Part of the job of the Help Desk is to gather as much information as possible on a problem, then, if the problem can't be solved by the first level, send it on to the appropriate person.  That's how it would work in a perfect world, anyway, if the Help Desk first level (i.e. me) wasn't also doing fifteen other things.  In reality, I glance at tickets and make a split second decision as to whether it should go to me or to one of the programmers.  That's usually an easy call.  The hard part is trying to figure out which set of programmers it should go to, as we've got a bunch of different systems.  I'll generally make the best educated guess that I can, and let my fellow on-call IT personnel bounce it around for themselves.  Half the time, they don't know what the user wants, either.

That's because most of these tickets say something like: "I'm having trouble with my report.  Is there something wrong with the system?"

What report?  Which system??

So in my ongoing effort to Educate the Users I sent out a cute little email entitled "TMI and the Help Desk," which gently explained that in the case of the Help Desk, there was no such thing as Too Much Information.  I gave specific examples of information which might be useful to impart.  I made sure that it wasn't too technical, wasn't too dry, wasn't too long, and sent it off.  And for a while, maybe for two hours or so, it seemed to work; for instance one woman who never leaves her name, calls from anyone's phone but her own and leaves me cryptic messages like: "I can't get to the gracky, bye," actually called me up and left me her name and her extension.   So I was hopeful that perhaps we were making progress.

Two days later I receive a reply on this email, get up, and start banging my head on the wall.

Underneath the subject line entitled "Re: TMI and the Help Desk" is the single sentence:

"What if you forget your signon?" 

What signon??  To which system?!? 

tags: new job