There are probably people who can look at a pile of cooked spaghetti and see it as multiple intertwined yet nonconnected strands. These people would likely use arcane phrases to describe that scene, something like 'geospatially nondeterminate multiple curvilinear simplex intersection-variant hypercoagulated transfixed elements with a meatball'.
These are the people who should design help desk systems. More specifically, these are the people who should design the systems that would tell you, when something is broken, who to call.
(Cue the Ghostbusters theme)
This morning, I was happily banging away at a customers system, installing a software product on the quick, and I had just done a test of the change when -- thud. My session hung. I sat looking at the frozen screen for about thirty seconds, waiting patiently...and then not so patiently...for it to come back. But it didn't. I went off to compose and send a couple of emails, and still nada. EMS1166E Relay mode logon request failed for application is such a graceful phrase, don't you think?
So I called the help desk. Now I did this knowing that the chances of actually getting help were small. But heck, any nonzero number in a storm. So I did, and found myself talking to a chipper person in Mumbai who informed me very quickly that while it was true that the automated system said to call him for connectivity problems, it was wrong: they had just changed that, here, I'll put you back in the queue, press two, then two again, goodbye.
Okay. So I hear the recording start. And it says 'To hear this message in English, press one.' And then in French, what I assumed was 'to hear this message in French, press two.' Well, okay, thats obviously a non-starter. So I hung up and dialed back in, and this time I found myself talking to an American. (Amazing how you think they might know more just because you can actually understand them.) This guy said that well, yes, this was the network help desk, but he didn't actually fix network issues, all he did was reset passwords. But wait, maybe he could find who did fix them.
Five minutes later he came back triumphantly, saying that he'd found the people who did, but their line was busy, so he was going to connect me to them, good luck.
A couple of minutes later, I was talking to a person who asked good questions, then said Gee, we don't really handle that. Let me see if I can figure out who does. And she went off, coming back in a minute to say Okay, I found out who does, let me connect you.
Well, theres no reason to stretch this out further. Just let it be known that at the end of it I was actually talking to someone who really did know how to fix it. He couldn't, as it turned out, because the problem was not just me, but a Major Network Outage. He advised me to try again later. The implication being, much later.
What would it have taken for me to get him in the first place?
I know, I know -- as systems become more interconnected, its not always obvious who can fix them; its not always obvious what the problem even is, let alone the resolution. But somewhere there was a Right piece of spaghetti, and if I had just started there, I'd have been done sooner.
But finding that piece....ah, theres the rub.
2 comments:
Spaghetti really works for this. The tangle is everywhere now on the other end of most phone lines, hard to find anyone right away who can help you. And most of the time I get a machine that refers me to another machine.
Enjoyed the post. Happy Thanksgiving.
I always think that there's someone who Knows The Answer. There usually is. But sometimes they're invisible, and those who don't actually know sound just like them. To be fair, sometimes those who don't know really do think they do, and under other conditions, they'd be right -- but not always. For me, the trick is whether they can speak intelligbly about their solution. If they can, I tend to believe them.
Post a Comment