Thank god for censoring "stole". I don't know what I would have done had I been able to read that word.
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Oh man, my workplace switched to an external IT support company, InfoSys, which pulls basically the same scam.
When you open a ticket, they immediately write something underneath – typically a question that's already answered in the ticket – because it shows up in their statistics as low response times.
Then they'll do shit like split up your ticket into three new tickets for no good reason.
And if you happen to be on holiday for a few days and therefore don't respond, they'll close your tickets due to inactivity.
Then you have to open a new ticket and link to the old ticket, if you can still access it, and then re-answer the same braindead questions again.
Basically, if it's something you can solve yourself, you should, because it will take more time to communicate back and forth with InfoSys.
When you open a ticket, they immediately write something underneath – typically a question that's already answered in the ticket – because it shows up in their statistics as low response times.
Fuck! So THAT'S why! I had wondered why the fuck companies would quickly restate my problem "just to confirm" and then take several days to respond after that 🤦🤬
I work in IT and in similar systems, the reason from my perspective to do this is when a ticket comes in a timer will start ticking. Whenever the ball isn't in our court that timer is cancelled. If i set status "pending user" and throw a dumb question it is paused. If more than 10% or whatever amount was agreed on when the contract was signed our company has to pay for not living up to expectations.
There's a lot of rule bending to make this work in our favour.
Of course different providers will use different metrics like how long before the ticket was handled etc.
Online retailers, too. Item goes from ordered to processing to shipping in a half hour. Takes a week or more to go from shipping to shipped.
Item can’t be cancelled without a restock fee if it’s in shipping — which is fine (I guess) if the item takes the provided time estimate to arrive.
InfoSys
Thanks for the name. Though in this case it's more the pattern you should watch out for.
Yeah, I think, it's important to name and shame, because they actively avoid providing the service that they advertise, but I do also expect this to be a common pattern in the industry. If you actually solved problems and did so permanently, you'd be out of business very quickly. External support providers have an inherent interest for things to work as badly as possible, so long as it does not get their contract cancelled.
If you actually solved problems and did so permanently, you’d be out of business very quickly.
Naw, PEBKAC and ID10T issues provide an unlimited supply of tickets. Support is a gravy train even when done effectively.
Require condition of solved for payment, in the contract?
Then you get other side-effects, like them ignoring or infinitely delaying tickets that are harder to solve. It's a somewhat universal rule of capitalism: As soon as there is a metric for success, the goal is to game that metric as much as possible, because that maximizes the supposed success while minimizing costs.
You can try to define multiple metrics to make this more difficult. And you can set a higher target value than necessary, so that even with the gaming, it's still within an acceptable margin.
But IMHO it's still better to just treat it as a cost of doing business than to invest lots of money to try to make it measurable in an attempt to reduce the money spent.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- Goodhart's law
This is 100% correct in the IT world. I have a split IT dept due to mergers (its a whole thing, people are fighting to not give up knowlage on systems so their position looks useful to mgmt... its fucked) and the other side of the fence are the most useless window-lickers ever because their tier 1 just closes things almost at random to bump their numbers up.
Any system that can be gamed, will be gamed.
Pls cross post this to !illegalism@lemmy.dbzer0.com lol
We're truly fucked as a society if the word "stole" offends/triggers/shocks anyone.
as a thief, I am offended. btw I'm suing you because your transgender flag in your bedroom triggered my PTSD when I was "re-appropriating" it.
It offends advertisers. To be honest I would be really interested in seeing if anyone has actually studied if any of this shit even does anything. Like it seems like complete nonsense that seeing a coca cola ad next to a post about theft would make someone less likely to buy coke in the future but we are currently ruining society based on this premise.
I do get tired of every piece of every thing we produce in any fashion being something to monetize somehow for ad revenue.
I don't know if anyone has studied it, but I know why it exists
It's to sell higher quality ad slots. When a company goes to buy ads through AdSense, they get a ton of customization options. This one would be something like "avoid mentions of criminality". And a lot of companies just check that, because why not?
Companies do actually care about appearing next to NSFW stuff, because it "taints their image"
How much does it actually affect sales? Who knows, marketing has kind of lost the plot, and Google has been caught rampantly lying about conversion metrics and the ad slots themselves in all kinds of ways, so I don't think the data to answer that question actually exists
I know why it happens, I just refuse to believe that these ad spaces are actually higher quality by any meaningful metric, especially considering how much they are ruining society.
IT,
Thank you for replying to my ticket. Unfortunately, the key word in your recommendation appears to be censored. Could you take a look at the safety filter and try again?
- Peter
Close your eyes OP, I'm about to say a naughty word.
Stole.
The real question is: how did the receptionist file the ticket?
On screen keyboard would be my bet. Another few possibilities I can think of would be on their phone, or even in person.
Another pc in the building? Asking a colleague? There's 100s of options really..
"Hey ! Isn't that my keyboard ?!"
My bet would be they made up a funny story for internet points. But maybe I've been online too long and become cynical.
At first I was reading bone structure and was wondering how that would work
Does anybody else’s company do this with laptops? You tell them something doesn’t work so they take it and just give you someone else’s that had an issue they didn’t fix?
Um no... I work for a normal organization that has a financing deal for laptops and they don't give a shit how many we go through as long as it's not the contracts upper limit. Honestly I wonder where all these laptops go at the end of their 3 year term...
Sort of. Only because they don't maintain their asset register correctly and the ticket system is shite. Dodgy equipment does end up going out but not always at the fault of the person issuing it.
An anecdote tells of the British government's bounty on dead Indian cobras giving locals the perverse incentive to start breeding the snakes, to be able to kill more of them
I kind of hate this idea of a "Chad" and how we're supposed to be this muscle bound meathead in this image
Also fuck Twitter and fuck censoring words.
Smartest IT guy.
Not IT Professional. IT Guy.
Big difference. My dumb ass could be an IT guy. I can fix printers and replace peripherals. I can't troubleshoot a database. I am not an IT Professional.
As soon as a metric becomes a goal, it stops being a useful metric. This is management 101
Why tf is "stole" censored?? We can't even discuss crime now?
Close them anyways and gaslight them when they complain. Tell them to open another ticket and repeat. This is called the Sisyphus method.
One of our desktop techs was found to be opening/closing tickets for the work of processing tickets. It was strongly suggested that she not do that.
I remember a director asking me to speed up getting a large order out before the end of the week even though I had already put in the best guess as a week later.
I reminded him I work by the hour and not on commission and he was like "ooh yeah that makes sense, alright carry on"
Had this once, had a prize for most tickets closed. Every morning I'd be first to grab all the easy garbage tickets. I won.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
the receptionist filed another ticket: "My keyboard is missing."
Impressive. Voice dictation, on-screen keyboard, or they had a help desk that is actually slightly workable on mobile? (The third is imaginary.)
Called them?
Or for modern times it's a laptop dock so they just opened their laptop and entered the ticket that way
Called and transcribed by the lowest tier help desk tech or call center.
The question is, how did she fill out the ticket without a keyboard 🤔
Phone or walk up to helpdesk, they open one for you.
Screen Keyboard and clicked on the buttons with the mouse
There was a wine company once that hired a new CEO and tied their bonus to how many more litres of wine he could move.
He cut the selling price in half (below cost) and walked away with a big bonus.


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