What is Irking me today...

One thing that absolutely drives me crazy, is the seeming uncontrollable need some people have to pass the buck or justify their desire to do nothing to help when asked.  I work in IT for an office of about 200 end users.  Now normally, my day can be pretty boring since if everything works, I have nothing to troubleshoot or fix.  However, every so often, a day like today comes along and I get a bonafide real issue that needs to be looked at.

Now procedure here, is to open a "help desk" ticket for any issues we are unable to fix ourselves.  Then a prgrammer for that will look into it, being they are the "experts" on the stuff they write.  So I open my ticket and the programmer calls me.  We go through some basics, mostly things I had already done before even contacting them, but I understand that procedure is procedure.  As we continued to talk about the issue and what was happening, each time I tried to interject a point or explain what procedures we used, the programmer kept interrupting me mid-sentence to tell me what I had to do.  Finally, after not being able to complete a single sentence in about 5 minutes of conversation, I got a little aggressive.

"If you would just let me finish my sentence, I would tell be able to explain that we already tried that."

He apparently was not pleased with this response from someone as lowly as a support tech, because at that point, the only advise I was given was the generic "have the user reboot the machine and let me know if that works."

The IT blow off.  If all else fails, its not a program issue its a reboot issue.

Well in the end, the programmers information was useless and it wasnt until I spoke with a few other users in the building to see if they too were having the same problem, that we were able to figure out the problem.  Us, the non-programming, actually give a shit people that use the program day to day.

So if we were able to fix it, what is my beef? 

This simple thing.  Take pride in your work and do not be so quick to pass blame or push an issue or problem off on others.  Your attitudes and effort are noticed by the people around you.

And for those other "regular" folk out there.  Believe in yourself and know that any problem at all can be solved with just a bit of stubborness and due dilligence.