Real help often comes from an expert, not only from the “help desk.”

This man was a dedicated IT developer who designed a system for tracking architectural drawings.

When users struggled with the new program, he gladly helped, but management ordered him to stop.

He decided to follow their rule to the letter, and the results spoke for themselves.

Read the full story below for all the details.

Okay then, I won’t help

I’m retired now, after a long IT career.

Like most folks, I worked as a software developer for part of this time earlier in my career.

For a time, I worked for an engineering firm.

The company produced a lot of architectural drawings and blueprints as part of the design process.

This man was the development lead for a new system.

I was the development lead and primary designer for a new system.

I tracked drawings as they moved through the development and review process.

To get to the point, the new system was launched to mostly good success and heavy usage.

As with all new systems, people had a learning curve.

He would often be asked for questions about the new system.

As it was not a huge company, most of the user community knew me.

We also had a “help desk” whose job theoretically included providing user support for this new tracking system.

However, the company had ignored my repeated requests to let them spend meaningful time with me to learn the system well.

The user community quickly realized the help desk was useless, so they would call me directly.

But he suddenly received an instruction to direct all inquiries to the help desk.

I was fine with this.

I always found helping the user community my favorite part of my job.

Word came down to me that I was to direct all such calls to the help desk.

Frankly, I ignored this at first, but after a while, it was made clear I could not.

So, I complied.

But users rarely got help, so he was asked to help with questions again.

That did not go well for the users.

They basically got no help.

Took only about 3 days for word to come back that I could help people again.

And time was set aside for me to properly train the help desk folks.

Let’s read the responses of other people to this story.

This user shares their personal thoughts.

They just needed to prove it, says this one.

Here’s an honest opinion.

Finally, this person can relate to the story.

Sometimes, you have to let things fall apart before people realize the best solution.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.