There’s a special kind of frustration that comes from enforcing policy while someone else ignores it and creates a bigger problem.

So what would you do if your entire support process depended on users opening tickets, but you found out someone was bypassing it and handing out a security workaround instead?

Would you let it go? Or would you be upset because it’s going to come back on you?

In the following story, one IT support worker finds himself in this situation and is very frustrated.

Here’s what’s going on.

This is exactly why users do not correct their bad habits!

Ever since I joined the company, the policy has been to ask the user to open tickets. If there’s no ticket, then there’s no service.

But the problem is that they were used to not submitting tickets, and they’d just go to the little IT Cave and be like “Broke, fix it.” (And yeah, most have that attitude.)

That’s exactly why they fired the last local tech: he wouldn’t have tickets, wouldn’t report anything, and would do stuff without any control.

No matter what, there’s always that one person.

It was so common here for people to chat you like, “Hi, how are you?” and not follow up with their issues, which is why I set my chat status to nohello.net, and even then, more than half still do that. So, as per the process, chat is not a support channel, so we ignore them unless they state their issue.

The thing got to a point where we can no longer open tickets for users. They NEED to open them themselves; the system will not allow us to open them in the name of X.

BUT THERE IS ALWAYS THAT GUY. The guy who doesn’t care about P&P and does a bad job, but makes people happy.

The user got help elsewhere.

Anyway, I literally just had a double *** moment. Here’s how it went:

User contacts me, “Hi SOS.”

I ignore the chat, as I am currently remoted into another computer (We are now 100% remote). Ten minutes later, still no issue mentioned, so I told him not to do that, as I was busy, but I could’ve seen his message and started thinking about what to do to help.

He replied, “Oh, no problem, it is just that I wanted to disable the VPN as it slows down my connection. But I contacted X (I hate the person he contacted, with ALL my guts) and he helped me. He gave me a logout code, and now it is all good.”

Now, he’ll have to answer for what happened.

So, to recap. There was no ticket, and he broke security protocol by giving him a logout code instead of troubleshooting the slowness issue.

And who is going to be contacted by the ITSEC agent to ask me to have him enable the VPN?

ME! (I am the only official local support. This dude was only Mac support and hates Windows, but as he ***** **** very well, and he was given charge of Intune, but he is NOT tech support per se)

Sometimes I hate my job, but most times I love it.

Wow! People need to stick to what they know.

Let’s see what the people over at Reddit have to say about this.

This reader would make it simple.

According to this comment, their system may need to be updated.

This person offers advice.

Here’s another person who offers a suggestion.

He needs to report this ASAP.

There’s no reason he should be in trouble, because he actually follows the rules.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.