'He's got... 20,000 tickets to close': Boss ignores employee's simple solution to help desk issue

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    Computer keyboard - ATT IT Help Desk 155-0340 'The tools team are...saying, "Well, we need a ticket for every call that's going off, or we can't do anything about it." CH4 3ANN ww Assignment Notification MEINE Seaking Ste BALE 5 Ad
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    Font - Tickets, Please... M OC It's been more than 20 years, I think I can get away with talking about this. In the late 1990s, I worked for the internal helpdesk of a fortune 500 company. Employees would call in and enter their employee number into the phone system, and when we answered the call, we had a system that automatically opened a problem ticket with their employee number (which would prefill the rest of the ticket). Until it didn't.
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    Font - It started slowly at first-- maybe one call out of ten was coming up with the wrong employee's information. And this was annoying, because first we'd have to close the ticket that was opened in error, then we'd have to open a new ticket.
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    Font - So my boss went to the team that was responsible for fixing it, and they said "Sure, just have your agents open a ticket for our team everytime there's a problem." And almost nobody did this, because filling out a ticket takes time, and there was a customer on the phone already waiting for us to close out one ticket.
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    Font - Within a few days, it was every call that was affected, and my boss goes back to the tools team who are sitting their with their feet metaphorically propped on the desk saying "Well, we need a ticket for every call that's going off, or we can't do anything about it."
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    Font - My boss explodes. As it stands, the average call time for the desk is up by more than a minute, which is WAY worse than it sounds because we're talking about several thousand calls a day. It's just not reasonable or possible for them to expect--
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    Font - --and that's where the tools team made their mistake. They pointed out that there was one agent whose call times were completely unaffected, and who was, in fact generating a ticket for every single call. That agent... was me.
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    Font - That's when my boss shows up in my office and asks, "Okay, how the hare you doing it?" I shrugged. "Macros."
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    Font - Basically, the system we were using for tickets was on a mainframe, and we accessed it through an advanced kind of terminal program that had macro functionality. I'd created macros for our most common types of tickets, and when the problem first started, I created a macro that would close the ticket out and open a new one. When we were told to create a ticket for the tools team, I modified that macro to copy the ticket number before it closed out the ticket, then create a new ticket for t
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    Font - was actually kind of astonished to learn that nobody else was doing this, because it was childishly simple. And because literally every single affected employee was a tech, all it took to deploy the macro to everyone on the desk was an email with an attached file and instructions how to install it.
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    Font - A few days later there's a backlog of over ten thousand tickets and climbing in the tools team's queue. The head of the tools team has gotten a call from his manager's manager because it's the largest backlog of tickets in the history of the company, and he goes to my boss and asks him to have us stop.
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    Font - "No. You said you needed every single agent to open a ticket for every single affected call, or you couldn't trace the problem." "Well, maybe if you had just one agent--"
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    Font - "We had that. You told us it was insufficient. That you couldn't do anything without that kind of information. Well, now you have it. We've had this problem for over a week now and you haven't been able to fix it, I want to make sure you have all the tickets you need to solve this problem." The problem was fixed within four hours.
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    Font - Two day later, the head of the tools team is in my office. It turns out that he's got somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand tickets to close, and could I please show him how to use macros?
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    Font - reviving_ophelia88 Moral of the story- be careful what you ask for, you just might get it. 677 Reply Share Iteration Five OP. Also, be careful your B.S. excuse for not doing your job doesn't blow up in your face.
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    Font - Geminii27 +3 could I please show him how to use macros? "Lessons are $500/hr, purchasable in blocks of ten. They're very expensive lessons to learn."
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    Font - summertime_fine Imaoooo I hope you got a raise. or at least a generous bonus! 170 Reply Share Iteration Five OP. I was a contractor at the time-- a few months later they hired me full time. I left the company when that boss retired.
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    Font - Present-Wait-7704. could I please show him how to use macros? sure. just create a ticket, boss. then reply with a link to a random website that talks about macros, not necessarily (read: definitely not) of the same type/compatibility as yours.
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    Font - muusandskwirrel +3. Best part is, you should refuse to make a macro for this, because if he bulk closes tickets other legitimate tickets will get swept under the rug Reply Share na 12 IterationFive OP. I mean... I only gave him a macro that would close a ticket that was already open. He still had to open each ticket manually. <evil grin>
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    Font - PecosBillCO +2 You would think the TOOLS TEAM would know how to use a tool like macros

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