Anyone ever come across a case of "clash of the help desk techs"

CodeBlox

Say you work at a help desk and someone from another helpdesk calls your helpdesk asking you to do something like give permissions to a user to a share drive. You already know you don't have admin rights to do so. They insist you do something about it because they can't. I wasted a good 30 minutes explaining to a guy that I could not make his change and that he needed to contact the owner of his share drive...


There was also the other help desk tech who called in trying to take control of my call. Telling me what to do. He called, told me to rebuild this guys profile. thing is, he wasn't the customer, the owner of the profile was. This guy didn't even back up the data anywhere that I could find it and left - _ - So the customer had none of his data after my profile rebuild because the other guy moved it all without a trace and not telling me. He didn't leave it where he should have put it either.

How would you guys handle these calls?

Essendon

Best thing to do, tell your team leader. No need to take sh!t from anyone.

Psoasman

Document everything you did and said to CYA. These things have a way of coming back to bite you.

Everyone

I've probably been a little guilty of doing it myself, however I try to be nice about it, and I can usually recognise when the tech on the other end of the phone either doesn't have the knowledge, or the permissions required to get the job done, and will ask them to pass me on to whoever does.

I made some poor guy at my cable company cry once. He insisted that I was renting my cable modem, even though I had never had a rental unit, I purchased my own cable modem before ever having cable installed. I was having problems with dropped packets, and I knew it wasn't my equipment, because I could trace the packet loss to one of the cable company's routers. I tried to make it very simple for the guy and told him what they needed to look at. He wanted to argue with me instead, so I kinda went off on him. In this case, he was wasting MY time, while I was trying to make it as easy as possible for him to make my call a quick one.

cyberguypr

Long story but shows the clash.

My wife works for a small business. They had a support contract with an "IT company". I was always aggravated when I heard that they screwed up a server or a workstation. Their answer to everything was "it's a virus, we need to format and reinstall everything".

An epic fail occurred when my wife started working from home. She opened a ticket with them to install the driver for her printer (Brother MFC-490) on the terminal server. They replied that there was no need to install any driver as it would pass over automatically. I told my wife that only happens if the server has the proper driver already. She relayed my comments and they said I was wrong. Being the nice guy that I am, I checked the event viewer on the server and took a screenshot of the error showing the need for a driver. After she emailed it to them, along with a link to the appropriate driver, they came back saying (with an attitude) they were not installing the driver as it wasn't needed. They instructed her she needed to delete the printer and reinstall the drivers on her PC. I told her that was wrong. I imaged the PC as I was sure they would screw it up. After playing their game she let them remote into the PC and as expected, they screwed it up as they had no idea what they were doing. 2 hours lost and nothing achieved.

What drove me over the edge was when they installed an HP 4L driver and said "see? I put an universal driver and it still doesn't work. You need to buy a new printer". At that point I asked my wife to cease communication with them. I redacted a nice email with a long technical explanation on how printing works on a terminal server. I also explained how hours of downtime could've been avoided by taking 3 minutes to install the right driver on the TS. I added a nice summary of my experience and skill set. My wife sent the email to her boss on a Friday around noon.

I heard back form her at 4pm and she said she was finally able to print. It turned out her boss had no idea the IT company sucked. She confronted them with my findings and they basically accepted they didn't know much about TS. They were fired on the spot. It took someone literally 2 minutes to follow my instructions and install the driver.

CodeBlox

Heh, I don't even have admin rights for this share drive. Our company didn't even own it. The guy insisted that we did. I simply referred him to the owner of it. I can't just hang up on people so I had no choice but to sit out the 30 minutes of "why I can't do it". I even consulted a tech lead about it!