Dean Pemberton wrote:
One thing that used to REALLY piss admins off was.....
People posting on mailing lists BEFORE logging a helpdesk ticket. Now I know that sometimes there is a long wait on the phone (smaller the more money you pay). But you NEEED to log that ticket.
This is a really good point and it has wider implications. I've lost track of the number of times that I (or colleagues in central IT here at the University) have had people say "when are you going to fix X? it been broken for ages". And you respond "did you report this to the service desk?" and the answer is invariably "no". :( Some times they told Joe when they saw them in the cafe and he forgot about it but more often they have done nothing. All responsible shops do monitoring of services but these are far from full proof and one should never assume that a provider is actually aware of the problem. I once did a personal development course where we were asked (for one week) to complain to people only about things that they could personally do something about. It was quite a revealing exercise! Russell.