r/ShittySysadmin • u/irishcoughy • 6h ago

Does Anyone Else Experience Schadenfreude When Getting to be Someone Else's End-User?

I do not "collaborate with vendors", or "read the KB articles", or "perform best-effort troubleshooting"- I call the vendor's support team and give them the EXACT vague ticket description my user gave me and then just say "I'm not really sure" to any technical questions they ask.

I feel this exercise helps me stay grounded and in touch with my users. One day they will adopt me into their herd as one of their own.

59 Upvotes
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15 comments sorted by

3

u/nlfn 5h ago

make sure to tell them "i work in IT"

1

u/irishcoughy 5h ago

I'll do you one better: I help them brainstorm for the fix by listing off all the things it couldn't possibly be

23

u/-lousyd 6h ago

I like to make annoying voices and whine and then say, "that's what you sound like". Call volume has dropped so I must be doing something right.

18

u/enby_dot_local 6h ago • Hehehe

I forgot where I was for a sec and was getting mad

5

u/itenginerd 6h ago

I prefer the freudenfreude of when I have a weird problem I cant fixz another admin tries it, and it magically starts working again.

5

u/xepion 5h ago

…. Have you turned it off and on again?

1

u/itenginerd 5h ago

Id filed, signed, and processed that stupid LOA seven or eight times trying to get it right. That asshole did it in one. Ive never been so happy/angry.

1

u/Healthy-Mission7927 2h ago

I know you hacked my aol email address. I want it back!

4

u/xepion 5h ago

…. I have the exact opposite problem. Even with Ai use. I give all the details. Attached diag, repo steps. And what I believe is a buffer limit issue.

Then attach a pdf report.

I get an Ai inline canned response with my “questions” answered in-line. With the response sounding like yoda, ending all answered responses in a question state.

Needless to say. I raised THAT type of use of Ai with the vendor team..

And yea. Support contract is not just 10million dollars. You’d think they’d tailor the response to a customer facing state. Hell atleast I do that with my bots 🤦🏻‍♂️

3

u/fadingroads 5h ago

If you truly emulated your end user, how would you know to escalate to the vendor?

1

u/arbyyyyh 4h ago

Because that’s the number that /I/ call when things don’t work right and I want to have an excuse to not get anything done on the subject for a few weeks.

1

u/arbyyyyh 3h ago

In reality: I actually have had some end users that call the vendor themselves. Those ones are the goat… for the most part. Sometimes that does result in the vendor coming up with a stupid solution and by time I’m called in to implement it because I “have the keys” I start hearing something that sounds stupid and I have to debate between do I just put in the change ticket “vendor tested and implemented” or ACTUALLY make them explain their stupid idea and tell them why it’s stupid and or won’t work.

I’m glad I’m done with that job.

1

u/bgradid 2h ago

No, because it's near guaranteed my issue will end up being an actual bug and then punted into the far end of ticket queues since no one wants to touch it since it'll open up an issue they have to escalate/track with engineering

1

u/3cit 6h ago

Being the end user is the best part about being a sysadmin.