What would Techexams members do? Dealing with verbally abusive Tier2/Tier3 support

JockVSJock

Ha ha funny.

However, not the answer I'm looking for. I'm a lover, not a fighter.

captobvious wrote: »

I vote cage match!

*grabs popcorn and settles in*

JockVSJock

Dynamic, I agree with you. However there are a ton of people like this, in IT and any industry. They are everywhere.

What I'm trying to learn and take away from this is, in a sense, verbal judo.

1. Want to have my s**t together when I have to go to tier2/tier3, because I want to have an air-tight case. Remember, I don't have any mentoring going on.

2. Want to remain cool as ice. Want to remain non-reactive.

3. Want the security guy to lose his cool, who is the fool now?

dynamik wrote: »

Everyone has off days, but if that's the way things always are, don't waste your time trying to remedy the situation. It's never going to happen.

I'd double my study efforts and find a new job asap. I don't have the patience to deal with that type of garbage.

Plantwiz

JockVSJock wrote: »

Dynamic, I agree with you. However there are a ton of people like this, in IT and any industry. They are everywhere.

.....

3. Want the security guy to lose his cool, who is the fool now?

Unfortunately, it will be you who is the fool.

The only one you can control is yourself, so get the experience and your education and more forward. IF the facts are this person is as rotten as you state, he will prove it over and over again. IF your perception of the situation is incorrect, the more you do to destroy the other guy, the more likely it will completely backfire.

Go for the knowledge and more on if it contiues to get bad. Otherwise, chalk it up to one of those very bad weeks.

JockVSJock

I agree with you on the email part, however, I have tried to pick up the phone and call this person before in the past. Got the same results as being described above.

I did the email because I was stuck and wasn't sure where to go. Again, I don't have any mentoring at work, so I have to turn to the support of this group.

Kaminsky wrote: »

Email is impersonal and you get much better responses just by picking up the phone and talking to people. If you had picked up the phone and called this guy with "I done this and that but can't figure out what to do next", chances are he would have said just fire the call over to him.

Devil's advocate here..
You can't just assume this guy knows nothing and is hiding behind a smoke screen of aggression so that nobody finds him out. Highly likely he knows a lot more about how these connections work under the hood. By sticking it in a CC'd email, that suddenly makes it formal and brings with it some threat of blame if they can't fix it. Why you thought security rather than server first would also cause an issue.

An informal call starting with "Hi I'm Jock from support are you busy? I've got a call here I'm not sure what to do with next and could use a bit of advice." You see this way, you are still owning the incident but asking for advice rather than just handing the whole thing over to him in an email and cc'ing other people on it which is like pointing the finger as far as I am concerned. He could advise that because of this and that, you should fire the call either to him or someone else. We all on the same team after all and teir2/3 were teir 1 once. You do get some that are well up themselves but typically, most senior support are quite helpfull to the junior ranks if approached in the right way.

You may have been told to fire emails off in that kind of situation but put yourself in his shoes if one of those comes in and you don't feel it is in your area to fix. You would fire an email right back denouncing their choice of escalation and, seeing as they had cc'd in others, I would cc in your chain of command too.

Also, the guy turned up at your bosses office. He could have been giving advice on how to handle these types of calls in the future. You can't just assume he turned up just to slag you off. If you are going to escalate it, you don't cc in the end user on the same email. You email them seperately.

And never be afraid to pick up the phone and ask senior support. You'll also make good contacts that way. Handle it badly and you are making your future progression in that company more difficult. Office politics have to be handled correctly.

rsutton

The world is full of arse nuggets, hot heads and know-it-alls. Best thing is to learn how to work with them in a civil manner. Just when one is gone, there will be another one around the corner waiting to piss on your day. Even if you can't figure out how to be their buddy, you will be the better person by remaining professional. Be proud of that.

jojopramos

Kaminsky wrote: »

Email is impersonal and you get much better responses just by picking up the phone and talking to people. If you had picked up the phone and called this guy with "I done this and that but can't figure out what to do next", chances are he would have said just fire the call over to him.

Devil's advocate here..
You can't just assume this guy knows nothing and is hiding behind a smoke screen of aggression so that nobody finds him out. Highly likely he knows a lot more about how these connections work under the hood. By sticking it in a CC'd email, that suddenly makes it formal and brings with it some threat of blame if they can't fix it. Why you thought security rather than server first would also cause an issue.

An informal call starting with "Hi I'm Jock from support are you busy? I've got a call here I'm not sure what to do with next and could use a bit of advice." You see this way, you are still owning the incident but asking for advice rather than just handing the whole thing over to him in an email and cc'ing other people on it which is like pointing the finger as far as I am concerned. He could advise that because of this and that, you should fire the call either to him or someone else. We all on the same team after all and teir2/3 were teir 1 once. You do get some that are well up themselves but typically, most senior support are quite helpfull to the junior ranks if approached in the right way.

You may have been told to fire emails off in that kind of situation but put yourself in his shoes if one of those comes in and you don't feel it is in your area to fix. You would fire an email right back denouncing their choice of escalation and, seeing as they had cc'd in others, I would cc in your chain of command too.

Also, the guy turned up at your bosses office. He could have been giving advice on how to handle these types of calls in the future. You can't just assume he turned up just to slag you off. If you are going to escalate it, you don't cc in the end user on the same email. You email them seperately.

And never be afraid to pick up the phone and ask senior support. You'll also make good contacts that way. Handle it badly and you are making your future progression in that company more difficult. Office politics have to be handled correctly.

This is a good advice....well done Kaminsky...

cc'ing the user when coordinating with colleagues is not a good practice. Kaminsky is right. it is like pointing a finger to someone. You can e-mail the user regarding the resolution of the problem once you figure out what was really the problem. The users just want thier computer issues resolve and nothing more. and one thing, try to win his freindship (the security guy)... I remember the days when I was just a Tier1 support, I try to befriend everybody, and I learned a lot from my senior engineers.

ally_uk

That is one thing I hate about working in I.T, people with no communication or people skills and people who refuse to pass on their knowledge to fellow co-workers, I have this ethos where if somebody doesn't understand a piece of technology or needs some pointers I will take the time to sit down with them and walk them through the process with out being patronising or arrogant.

To sum it up I have worked with a few morons in my short I.T career (4 years
Some people can be so damm rude and arrogant. Although my first role was support and we had a pretty good team, I was on 1st line and if I had a similar situation where I encountered a problem and couldn't resolve it anymore, so I logged everything I did, informed the end user that I would have to escalate the call further up the helpdesk, Asked my colleague I was encountering difficulties and needed a hand in resolving the issue in which He was very understanding and helpful infact not only did he walk me through the process of troubleshooting the issue, he also provided me with some further reading materials.

My second role was a bit worse, the sysadmin was under alot of pressure basically had bit off more then he could chew, This person was very technicially minded, had a good understanding of Linux and Open Source technlogies but had this attitude that Linux was the best and that Windows is useless and anyone who uses it is a idiot. As you can imagine trying to provide I.T support to a windows network under this guy was a joke, His failure to embrace Wndows aswell as Linux proved to be a costly mistake and he shot himself in the foot. I on the otherhand used both on a daily basis and continued to study up on both as I knew I would need to understand the concepts of troubleshooting and deployment.

Being new to Linux at the time if I had a question like how do I perform something in the command line I would get my head chewed off, and told something along the lines of " dont you know this"

This person had no people skills whatsoever we had a receptionist who encountered a printer issue she was told by him to fix it herself I was like this is a complete joke,

It was a nightmare my role was to fix numerous computers on a day to day basis and part of this included me applying drivers to machines, but this was impossible because half of the well known driver sites were blocked by the proxy server, anyone would of thought we were working in Area51 he was very **** with security,

Anyways I put in a official complaint against this guy after a incident where he shouted at me for not understanding some linux stuff, I expressed my concerns for his lack of willingness to listen and act as a team player and he moved on.

Things have been much better since