Don’t take your company’s IT department for granted!

Imagine working in IT and knowing that your job isn’t appreciated. You’re even blamed for issues that are not your fault.

That’s what happens to the IT intern in this story when an employee literally yells at him about an issue that she should’ve been able to solve herself.

Check out the full story.

Once upon a time, when old lady blocked a whole production line and blamed it on IT.

So, to give you some context – I was a student back then and during summer I’ve managed to get internship as IT Admin.

The work was quite nice, I was doing helpdesk stuff but also things with servers and was involved in SAP deployment.

Anyway – support of users was one my tasks.

Company was from automotive sector – airbags/seatbelts etc. and I was working in production plant connected with offices so I had to support both facilities.

This is where it gets bad!

One time I get a call – that was unusual, as we always reminded users to write tickets, which were responded in real-time so it took max. 10 minutes before I contacted incident submitter.

Call was more or less like:

“For pete’s sake what are you doing with the scanners, whole line has stopped and we are completely blocked now, we can’t do anything without them, they’re not working and showing errors, ”

The line was about 10 min. walk from my office so I stayed on the phone while I was walking there.

UH OH…

“Ok, tell me what is going on, calm down.”

“YOU ARE MESSING WITH THE SYSTEMS AGAIN, YOU SHOULD ALL BE FIRED GOD DAMMIT, I AM WRITING TO YOUR MANAGER AS SOON AS IT WILL BE FIXED”

“Please calm down, we were not doing anything with this since January (it was August).”

“YEAH SURE, YOU NEVER ADMIT TO A MESS-UP”

OP had a hard time keeping his cool.

At this point I was already thinking about different ways of hurting her, but still played it cool.

I finally arrive at the line and ask her to hand me a scanner.

All people from production line were standing there with crossed shoulders and looked at me like “Here you go, you messed up so fix it huh” and the leader said something like “Oh here you are, now make it work after you messed up”.

It wasn’t high tech.

Basically, the scanner was just something like a Windows PDA with scanning module. Nothing fancy.

All she had to do was to power it up, type username/password and it was ready to go, it was all about scanning the bar codes of airbag parts.

So I take the scanner and look at the screen. Back at her. Back at the screen.

“Were you asked to change password recently?”

She was being so silly!

“YES, WHAT KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT, WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR SUCH BS”

“Because the screen says that you have typed wrong password 5 times and you are always reminded that after this the scanner blocks for 20 minutes. And by the way you have 3 backup scanners so why you didn’t use them? You messed up, not me. And it’s not ok to talk like that to any employee of the company, so I will surely report it to YOUR manager – we have call recording enabled on our mobiles (we didn’t, but she could never know).”

“Ugh… ummm, emmm.”

“Yea, bye.”

Here’s how the manager reacted.

I told the story to her manager, she apologized officially the whole IT team, brought some cheapest cookies from the store and basically pretended to be sorry.

Still IT was the most hated group in the company – but I guess that’s the way things are.

YIKES! That sounds annoying!

It was clearly user error.

This user knows why IT is often hated.

This person feels like they’re back at work.

This user knows how important IT is!

This user absolutely loves their IT helpdesk.

This user knows there are reasons why people don’t like IT.

User error is not IT’s fault.

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.