Imagine working for a company where you are responsible for fixing tech issues for employees. If there were a problem with the ticketing system used to create tickets for the problems, would you come up with a workaround, or would you make the problem big enough that it would get fixed right away?

In this story, the team that’s responsible for fixing the problem claims they need a ticket every time the problem happens. The boss thought that was unreasonable, but one employee knew a way to maliciously comply.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Tickets, Please…

It’s been more than 20 years, I think I can get away with talking about this.

In the late 1990s, I worked for the internal helpdesk of a fortune 500 company.

Employees would call in and enter their employee number into the phone system, and when we answered the call, we had a system that automatically opened a problem ticket with their employee number (which would prefill the rest of the ticket).

Until it didn’t.

The problem got worse and worse.

It started slowly at first– maybe one call out of ten was coming up with the wrong employee’s information. And this was annoying, because first we’d have to close the ticket that was opened in error, then we’d have to open a new ticket.

So my boss went to the team that was responsible for fixing it, and they said “Sure, just have your agents open a ticket for our team everytime there’s a problem.”

And almost nobody did this, because filling out a ticket takes time, and there was a customer on the phone already waiting for us to close out one ticket.

Within a few days, it was every call that was affected, and my boss goes back to the tools team who are sitting their with their feet metaphorically propped on the desk saying “Well, we need a ticket for every call that’s going off, or we can’t do anything about it.”

That was the wrong thing to say.

My boss explodes.

As it stands, the average call time for the desk is up by more than a minute, which is WAY worse than it sounds because we’re talking about several thousand calls a day.

It’s just not reasonable or possible for them to expect–

–and that’s where the tools team made their mistake. They pointed out that there was one agent whose call times were completely unaffected, and who was, in fact generating a ticket for every single call.

OP had a secret.

That agent… was me.

That’s when my boss shows up in my office and asks, “Okay, how the hell are you doing it?”

I shrugged. “Macros.”

Since OP was a Tech, it was really easy to do.

Basically, the system we were using for tickets was on a mainframe, and we accessed it through an advanced kind of terminal program that had macro functionality.

I’d created macros for our most common types of tickets, and when the problem first started, I created a macro that would close the ticket out and open a new one.

When we were told to create a ticket for the tools team, I modified that macro to copy the ticket number before it closed out the ticket, then create a new ticket for the tools team and reference the old ticket number, send it, and open a new ticket.

I was actually kind of astonished to learn that nobody else was doing this, because it was childishly simple.

But since nobody else had done this, it was also easy to share.

And because literally every single affected employee was a tech, all it took to deploy the macro to everyone on the desk was an email with an attached file and instructions how to install it.

A few days later there’s a backlog of over ten thousand tickets and climbing in the tools team’s queue.

The head of the tools team has gotten a call from his manager’s manager because it’s the largest backlog of tickets in the history of the company, and he goes to my boss and asks him to have us stop.

He refused to stop.

“No. You said you needed every single agent to open a ticket for every single affected call, or you couldn’t trace the problem.”

“Well, maybe if you had just one agent–”

“We had that. You told us it was insufficient. That you couldn’t do anything without that kind of information. Well, now you have it. We’ve had this problem for over a week now and you haven’t been able to fix it, I want to make sure you have all the tickets you need to solve this problem.”

It must not have been a very hard problem to solve after all.

The problem was fixed within four hours.

Two day later, the head of the tools team is in my office.

It turns out that he’s got somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand tickets to close, and could I please show him how to use macros?

OP was really smart about that, but I think I’d refuse to teach the head of the tools team how to use macros unless I got some sort of bonus of something.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Here’s the moral of the story…

Yes, charge for the lessons!

Or send him in the wrong direction.

This person has a question.

Your wish is my command!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.