Late last century, I started working in a divisional IT group for a multinational manufacturing company. I'd started as a contractor on a helpline supporting engineering users with IT problems. We had a lead and four other contractors on this helpline, and we handled everything from in-house applications to Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office. We covered VAX, Macintosh, and Windows. We also had some project involvement, and did desktop visits as needed.
Shortly after I got placed there, another guy, named Ron (not his real name), also started. Unfortunately, the six months Ron spent with us didn't always involve user support issues, but he was often more of a hindrance than a help.
On Ron's first day, he was introduced to everyone, and made a point of sharing his personal contact information, and asking for everyone else's. This was a little odd, but OK. He was being very friendly and outgoing.
Ron got a desk next to me. Unfortunately, given the arrangement of cubes along our aisle, I was the only other helpline person to sit next to him; as a result, I got most of his questions.
His question on the first day?
How do I turn on my computers?
Now, this was very odd. Having a new contractor who didn't know how to power-on his Windows machine, his Macintosh, and the associated monitors didn't really reassure me (or anyone else) of his skills, but what the heck. You show him, you move along.
One of the helpline contractors -- let's call him Chill -- had a small refrigerator under his work table, suitable for a refrigerated lunch item or a couple cans of pop. Said contractor told Ron about it, and said, "feel free to put in something." Ron said,
Cool, I brought some Mountain Dew.
About a half-hour later, Chill checked his fridge and found over ten cans of Mountain Dew filling the interior. He told me later he resolved to talk to Ron about it when Ron was around, it wasn't until after lunch. The conversation went like this:
Chill: Hey Ron, come here a second, I want to show you something.
Ron: Sure, Chill, what's up?
Chill opens his small fridge to reveal only two cans of Dew remaining
Chill: Uh, there were more cans of Mountain Dew in here...
Ron: Oh yeah, I brought in a case, and put them in this morning, but I've been drinking through them.
Yes, Ron basically went through cans of Mountain Dew the way a chain-smoker goes through cigarettes.
Ron wasn't terribly good at troubleshooting, and didn't necessarily grasp the technical nuances of the systems and applications we supported. We were hard-pressed to figure out how he got his job at the contract house, let alone at the helpline. We found out later that while he told managers stories of how much he liked the multinational company, or the contract house, he didn't tell them the stories he told us.
I'll gloss over them, but they involve hunting cows, child-care with a water from a water hose, sleeping in meetings, easily-won bets lost, lying...but here's one that's relevant to IT:
Ron told me how, in college, he had a computer course on Excel where he had to do something (might have been with macros, I don't recall the details). He didn't really understand it, so he worked out a deal with another student who was a computer whizz, and with whom he shared an English class. He offered to do the bibliography for an upcoming English paper in exchange for the Excel homework. Whizz agreed, and Ron got to just put his name on the Excel assignment, and thought he'd come out ahead because Whizz still needed to write his paper. Ron did say he was puzzled because Whizz got a lower grade on the Excel homework than Ron did, even though it was the same. He only realized, when we spoke about it, that the professor probably thought Whizz would do better quality work.
But what struck me was that Ron had admitted to me that he cheated in classes in his degree, classes involving software we supported. This, and the other stories, were directed to our lead, because it was starting to get problematic. But my final straw happened about four or five months in.
I had received an early color Macintosh laptop (might have been a 540c) from a user, who was requesting it be set up with all the standard software. Not a problem, I told him it should be ready by the end of the morning.
Everything went fine, and I had just finished installing the boot sector password protection software when the user showed up to collect his laptop.
User: Hey, $me, is it ready?
Me: I just finished the install of the last piece, now we just reboot.
Mac laptop plays death chimes
Me: Huh, that's odd. Let's restart it and see if it is happier.
Mac laptop reboots and plays death chimes again
User: Is there a problem?
Me: Yeah, I'm not sure why it is giving us the sad-Mac here....
Ron: piping in from his adjacent cubicle Guess you shouldn't have gone poking around in the hard drive with that paperclip, huh?
I could feel the blood drain from my face as the rage built
Me: Ron...just be quiet. to the user Our Mac expert is out to lunch, I'll check with him when he gets back and see what's going on. I'll let you know.
User: OK, sounds good.
Now, I'd had no reason to even eject a floppy via paperclip on this machine, and Ron had no involvement in this support activity, and it was singularly inappropriate to chime in at that point.
It turned out that we had an outdated version of the boot sector password software, and an updated version fixed the problem. But I ended up telling our lead about Ron's comment; eventually, Ron's probationary period expired, and his contract was not extended.
Submitted March 02, 2017 at 01:12AM by DrHugh http://ift.tt/2lzJWVr talesfromtechsupport
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