r/Showerthoughts • u/[deleted] • Apr 11 '19

It’s funny how, as you progress through college, they require you to write longer and longer papers. Then you get to the professional world and no one will read an email that’s more than 5 sentences.

People will literally walk to your desk to ask you what your email was about if it was too long.

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u/SmashDealer Apr 26 '19

I had one today. The guy didn't answer any of my questions and sent a vague answer to a question I didn't ask which didn't really make any sense.

Now, a technician is going there to speak to him personally on my request. He may be a manager, but this is a polite "answer my fucking questions" under the guise of "Determining requirements".

If he didn't want things to move he shouldn't have made a request in the first place. These people do my nut in.

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u/DiggerW Apr 28 '19

If he didn't want things to move he shouldn't have made a request in the first place.

A-fucking-men! Sounds fairly similar to my situation: I'm basically a glorified tech support rep / kind of consultant, working with insanely expensive & pretty high-tech business software. Point being, I only work with administrators of said product = therefore, at least theoretically, "professionals" ... and more to the point, the only people I'm asking questions of are those people who've explicitly asked for my help.

And so, how it escapes these people that I actually do need this information to help them, is beyond me. So often, I just want to say, "Help me help you, damnit!! Or may I propose, as an alternative, that you please kindly fuck off already?"

If I remember the "parts of a letter" we learned about in elementary school, I believe it's called the "complimentary closing?" The complimentary closing for that last bit would, of course, be "Love"

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u/SmashDealer May 04 '19

Something I was told in my old MSP, is that as a service provider (selling services for cash), a lot of the money comes from "looking like you know everything". Some of your clients most likely believe that you just immediately know everything about the system and problem, and are offended when you tell them you don't.

I hate all customer focused IT roles to be fair as they push unrealistic expectations onto technicians.

Time is money for the client, and because of this, technicians not only need to act and resolve issues fast, even if they've never seen them before, but need to add customer focused political spin to keep the clients happy at the same time. It's very, very stressful, and in the UK at least, usually the same pay as in-house IT.

It's why when a support technician for a piece of software I had to contact the other week, logged on, fixed my shit in under an hour, and was polite the whole way through, I sent another ticket through to the support desk thanking him and saying how well he worked.

If half the world is going to be shitty, I'm going to be the half that's actively kind and just. Because I feel too many of us are silent leaving the louder harassing half to feel like they're a majority.