The boss had made up his mind – my
department will be able to work remotely to support in various
situations such as year end reporting or during Christmas. It was a
bit of an empty threat as most issues that would come up were
something that required IT assistance to correct. Not difficult
things, it could be as simple as delete that bad datafile or re-run
that process. I like IT, some of my best friends are in IT, but it
tends to be difficult to reach anyone from that group outside of
normal business hours when these types of issues occur.
The command came from on-high so I
tried to connect from home and was pleasantly surprised that most of
my daily activities worked just fine. I did encounter a few small
things that didn’t work that were important enough to get fixed. So
I filled out the form on the intranet which although convenient
didn’t really allow for much in the way of details. In a nutshell, I
could give my details and a small description of the problem and
attach a single document.
I tried to describe everything and the
attachments had screen-shots showing all the errors. The way support
works at my company is not very different than trying to report a PC
problem to the manufacturer. It involves emails, no telephone calls
unless they call you.
I don’t want to say that my boss is
impatient but that is the impression he gives so I had to show him
where the process was breaking down. The first time it was ticket
about two connectivity issues and the second ticket was almost the
same as the first but it included a new issue.
Every week or so I created a ticket
asking for information or status on my original tickets but this
didn’t seem to make any progress. Finally about five weeks later
someone actually stopped by and looked at all three errors and could
see that indeed the program didn’t work. He then called other
specific support groups for each issue but all he managed to do
during that hour was update my company profile permissions, which
didn’t solve anything.
I thought his efforts were benign until
a few weeks later when I actually needed my laptop, now nothing
worked remotely. It took half a day and a few phone calls before it
was working as it had previously – sigh.
I told the boss that he would need to
escalate this through other channels and he said he would do so. I
was quite surprised the next afternoon to receive a contact from
support who wanted more information. The questions are almost
exactly like talking to a large PC manufacturer in the sense that
most of the information was either already provided or the question
didn’t apply.
What I found to be really annoying was
this was not the support person, but rather the situation. They sent
someone who did not understand any of my issues nor who could
actually make any corrections to my environment. She only wanted to
gather more information for the rest of the support group who had not
to this point even seen my request.
I suggested I could try to gather up some of this information but my account is that of a normal user and most this was not available to me such as which IP addresses of the destination computers or what ports am I using. My support person did have a solution to how I could get this information, she suggested that I fill out another support ticket asking for that information.
I guess if this was a soccer game, it
would be support 1 user 0. The only thing that has happened is that
two months have passed and no issues have been solved. I guess that
my boss doesn’t have quite the power I had thought.
