To fully appreciate this little story you need to know a little of how IT departments are organized. In this case the Help Desk and Desktop Support.
The Help Desk is one or a hundred people who’s job it is to answer the phones and provide answers to all sorts of computer questions and problems. When the Help Desk can’t help they assign a trouble ticket to Desktop Support. That’s me. The Help Desk people are tied to their desk all day. Desktop Support is always running around working on computers. In this case both Help desk and Desktop Support report to the same boss.
One day the boss calls a meeting of her department. The boss discussed the usual BS about how we need to close trouble tickets more promptly, stop poking fun at the users when they are around, who had what days off, yadda yadda yadda. Your typical weekly 30 minute yawn-fest. She concludes the meeting with one last item , “A New Punishment.” Woken out of a pleasant daydream our jaws snap shut mid-yawn.
It seems that the four Desktop Support techs would occasionally “forget” one of our two pagers. In fact it was getting to be quite an epidemic, what with us ignoring our instructions. Yes open rebellion on the absurdity of carrying the old pager and it’s replacement.
It is vitally important that the support people in any IT department to be reachable instantly. When a critical computer dies, someone has to be dispatched that second to go fix it. This, annoyingly enough, gets in the way of nap-time and other preferred activities, but it’s part of the job.
Did you notice the part about two pagers? The ones that IT had been using here for years were merely one way radios. Dial an extension, enter the pager number and your voice came out on that person’s pager.
A few months previous to this meeting we had been given new pagers. Pagers that were automatically hooked up to our call assignment system, notifying you immediately of any new call assignments. You could also send a short email to the pager. this made it easy for anyone to reach us. A quick email “Call Joe User at X7623, his computer is smoking.” is all it took.
As you can imagine everyone in Desktop Support was annoyed about having to carry two pagers when we should have just dumped the old ones. But our boss didn’t see it that way.
On to the New Punishment.
The boss had noticed that Desktop Support was neglecting to carry both of our pagers. Shaking her head in disappointment she said, “The next person caught without both pagers would be punished!”
And the punishment?
“The next person to forget both pagers will be punished by spending a day on the help desk.”
Silence.
We are looking around wondering if we heard correctly. Did she really say this? And in front of the the three help desk people? Imagine their surprise to discover that their jobs were difficult for a very specific reason, it was punishment.
She saw nothing wrong with this announcement. Even after a heated discussion where words like “stupid”, “demeaning”, “unnecessary” and “stupid” were used. She was adamant that it was necessary to carry both and about the punishment.
Fortunately her boss was actually qualified for his job. The old radio pagers were collected later that day.
Originally posted before I added WordPress to this site. Published date is approximate.