17 years before recovery, and the other side of the helpdesk is, umm.., as expected

The company I worked for for 17 years (which anyone with a search engine
can probably find) decided to put all of it's energy into securing a
single customer's business[1].

They failed.

As a result, the crater that they are headed for resulted in the
redundancy of a third of the workforce, myself included.

Rather conveniently for me, about 15 years ago, my landlady asked me to
help out in the betting shop on Grand national day (for left-pondians, a
betting shop is a sports betting office in a typical British street,
offering assorted bets on horses, dogs, football(of the round ball
variety), sports (of the assorted-shaped-ball-variety AND the
no-ball-at-all variety), and numbers (various lotteries, and recently
'cartoon racing' (more later)) bets).
I continued to work for the big-company-that-begins-with-L on a
Saturday-only basis while doing that which must be done for the
corporate network.
As of February 27th, I discovered I am to be downsized, along with
pretty much every member of staff that does things that nobody left on
the staff knows how to do. I dread to think how a bunch of jvaqbjf
programmers (which is what the company now does, having previously
wrangled INKra, assorted *ix, and CQC11s) will survive without people
who know how to set up QUPC, Fnzon, Ncnpur, and OVAQ. Let alone the
others they let go, which includes everyone capable of answering the
telephone, or keeping the building fire/security alarm system working.

Actually, I don't care. While one of our lesser-loved customers from
that job is still willing to pay me $lots/day for casual 'IT Support',
this isn't enough to pay the bills, so I am now a full-time betting shop
deputy manager, and will drop in three mornings a month to see what
needs to be done.

With overtime, which consists mainly of Tuesday evenings staring at the
walls due to lack of customers, I actually make the same amount of money
settling bets as I did herding jvaqbjf-users. Very weird.

Because the new job environment mercifully comes with no administrator
access to the machines we use, courtesy of the security department, I
have to contact the helpdesk to do things like log me into the network
in shops I have not been to before.

The helpdesk is, for the most part, efficient. However when I find
bugs, and detail said bugs to sufficient depth for the programmers to
actually fix them, the helpdesk respond as any helpdesk is expected to.

Stage one: Confusion. They suddenly know nothing about the product
that they allegedly support.

Stage two: Denial. They deny that the bug that I have found and can
reproduce exists

Stage three: Accusation. They attempt to suggest that what I am doing
to illustrate this problem is somehow not legal/within-procedure/etc.

Stage four: The reply. Being an 'Investor in people', we have
'processes' in place to handle suggestions/complaints/etc from the
people at the customer-facing parts of the organisation for the benefit
of the organisation as a whole. All of this has to be auditable, which
means a written reply. Usually this involves admitting that the problem
exists, and stating that it will be fixed 'in line with commercial
priorities'. (whatever that means)

Stage five: The fix. Six months later, a new version of the software
with one fixed bug and ten new bugs.


So, I'm out of the game at last. How long for, remains to be seen.

If anyone needs any bets settled, I'm sure you can work out how to find
me. I appologise that this post is lacking in initial-ASR-post vitriol,
but I'm fresh-out of vitriol, courtesy of a bottle of a rather nice red
wine from Tesco.

With the help of the monastery, I hope to work myself up to the level of
loathing expected of an ex IZF admin forced to work in a jvaqbjf world,
however I expect my customers in the betting trade will probably get
there first.

Regards to all
Jim
(likely to be found anywhere near decent real-ale in Portsmouth, UK)

[1]That single customer being the big car company that begins with 'F',
and not the Italian one.
.

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