I work in IT. I usually call my job “IT support” but I’m also technically the system admin, and network admin.
Today, I had someone ask me to delete a calendar for them in Outlook. It wasn’t a shared or special calendar, it was literally just a calendar in their normal outlook.
Bear in mind, they didn’t ask how to do it. They asked me to do it.
That’s a skill issue right there. I’m not in the business of doing other people’s work for them. Now and then I’ll entertain the odd request of “how do I do x” and show someone how to get something done, mainly because it’s a lot less effort than telling them that I didn’t go to university for teaching, and all the ensuing arguments thereafter, because there’s always arguments.
But this was straight up “do my job for me”.
Lol, no, I have my own shit to do.
The number of people who think that IT is supposed to know how to use every program and fix everything within those programs is a lot. I’ve had several engineers, programmers, designers, accountants, executives of who knows what consistently ask to fix their work or how to do whatever it is. I always try to point them in the right direction or help but other people in my field hate even that because it sets a precedent that the next time they need help they think they can ask again.
If I knew all of their jobs thoroughly like they seem to think, I wouldn’t be getting paid half what they are. I would need to be paid twice what they are, to support all of those positions in that way.
I’m a lot like you. For the most part, I try to look beyond the question being asked, and find the root cause. If the root cause is because of a skill issue, I’ll direct them to the next logical resource. If it’s not a skill issue, or I can’t determine that it’s a skill issue, then I’ll continue to test until I can make that determination.
9 times out of 10, if I find a solution to make a thing work in a program, I’ll share that with them, and let them take it from there.
A lot of the people I support are working in the finance space and my company has an entire support department for finance applications. I’ll either bounce the problem off of them, or just direct them to the finance support team for guidance.
This wasn’t either of those things. It wasn’t even asking how. It was straight up telling me to do a thing for them, in a program they should know how to use. It’s not a complex finance program or anything, it’s literally Outlook.
Yeah, Outlook has a lot of little things that throw people. Just getting people to find the view settings they want is tough sometimes, and font size in outlook doesn’t change with the character size of the OS being changed. Automatically disabling com add-ons that are supposed to not disable by group policy do to “slow start times” of outlook. Online calendars are a mess, sync issues, filter issues, spam issues, the spam blockers within the admin console of o365. Convincing people to get rid of .pst files. .pst files not being compatible with onedrive, importing .pst files to their online archive (which is really just a second email storage on the back end). Takes forever, then half don’t import properly, then you get them to re-run it and maybe it works but you have duplicates. Deleted emails that need recovery a month after they realized they needed it.
Sometimes it makes me realize why companies push users to just use the Webapp, but there’s always something.
Didn’t even touch the distros or shared emails/calendars yet lol
The short version is that I explained that we have a company policy that we are support, not education.
This is not a support issue because no technical issue is preventing the user from getting this completed.
At a previous company, we would tag tickets in Zendesk based on the type of question it was so at the end of the year we could see which categories could use more explanation in our documentation. One of the category types was “LMGTFY”
