help desks suck

In another (edit: I mean previous) life I used to manage help desks. And they were good. They were _helpful_. But I've switched careers into more project management and I decided that I didn't need to fix help desks. Or carry a beeper and be on call, so I stopped.

But today almost brought up feelings of trying to fix these helpless desks. Besides the computer, what's the most important thing a telecommuter needs? Network connection. After determining it's not our network at all, nor even the VPN, but something local to my machine I called our help desk.

Oh.my.god.

I made it clear I was working from home and then decided to let the help desk do it's appropriate thing, which I thought would mean they'd call me back within say, 30 minutes. Two hours later I called back. The ticket hadn't even been "picked up by a tech". So, I politely pointed out that not having this working is detrimental to my productivity today and I can only do so much with webmail, could they please find someone to help me? They did. But.

This person asked me just a few "Did you?" questions. It was like, "Did you reboot?" "Are you sure you can get to the VPN?" "Are you sure your home network is up?" "Did you trye wireless versus using a cable?" Yes, yes, yes, yes. So, she then says, "Well, I'm going to have to forward this to desktop and you'll have to talk to them tomorrow when you're back in the office."

*blink* I'm thinking, "This doesn't help me."

So I said, "You mean you're not even going to look at my DHCP or DNS settings or other network properties? Have me do an Ipconfig? Or any other remote things besides reboot?"

Her: "Well, has anything changed on your desktop?"

Me: "No, but I'm constantly receiving SMS packages and how do I know if that hasn't changed settings? Recently my home page settings got wiped out of IE, so how can we be sure?"

Her: "Fine. Bring up your network settings....etc."

There were some odd things in the network card settings. We changed some of them. And it worked.

Jeebus.

Posted by jennj at December 11, 2006 05:20 PM