The VP Demanded an Immediate 2 AM Patch—Only to Get Shut Down by Executive Escalation
Shutterstock
Imagine working in tech support. You’d think it would be a day full of resolving tickets about technical issues, right?
Not always!
In this story, a tech support worker shares two stories that are rather unusual. One is about a call that has absolutely nothing to do with tech support, and the other is about someone who was furious they weren’t working hours after their shift was over.
Let’s read all about it.
Egg and cress sandwiches, and not being paid for that kind of overtime.
For context: we work as ICT support in one of the country’s largest R&D firms and work primarily in web support.
First instance was when a call got misrouted to our department (and all 3 people therein) when it was supposed to go to Events and Catering at the convention center we have on site.
I look at the call logged and see we were given an unusually short timeframe to fix it…
I thought oh boy they probably want several pages published and then some all before lunch…until I read the details: they’d run out of egg and cress sandwiches at the convention center and apparently some of the military attendees were making a stink about it (no pun intended).
They only had one option as far as how to handle this mixup.
Now typically this would be a matter handled by our line manager after informing him that the call was out of our scope. Except he was on holiday and neglected to assign a stand-in.
So our only option was to contact the convention center directly and ask them to log a new call as we couldn’t redirect it to the appropriate persons ourselves.
The conversation went a bit like:
“Hello, we received your call about the catering request but it got forwarded to our department instead of Events. Unfortunately we’re going to have to request you cancel this call and log a new one so that it may be routed correctly—“
This is pretty rude.
“I don’t have time for that!”
“I’m sorry but—“
“What kind of Events department doesn’t keep additional food on standby?!”
“Sir, we’re not Events. We’re ICT support.”
Is the person at the convention center even listening?
“…oh…well can’t you make a plan? Throw some sandwiches together and just drive them over?”
“I’m afraid not, we’re lucky if there’s even sugar in the staff kitchens.”
At that point they slammed the phone in my ear, canceled the call and logged another one.
Second incident was shortly after the egg and cress sandwich ordeal.
It seemed like a normal night until the next morning.
It was well past quitting time and we’d stayed late to clear out some of the backlog of calls that had accumulated over the Easter holidays.
It’s around 9pm when my coworker and I finally went home; 5 hours after we’re officially off the clock and the countdowns for existing calls get paused.
When we got to work the following Friday at around 6 (2 hours before they start up again) we both noticed a call had been logged by none other than the company’s Comms herself.
We also noticed we both had no less than 5 missed phone calls on our office phones from the previous night.
This lady sounds awful!
We call her back and are immediately floored by her vulgar language and tone.
Turns out she logged a call at 10pm the previous night and wanted to know why at 6:30am the next morning it still wasn’t resolved. She yelled at us some more and threatened to get us both fired for not providing our services after hours.
The next week our line manager’s back and we all have been CC’d in an email she sent to not only our manager but the CIO herself too. In it she complained about how her call should have been resolved no more than a few minutes after she’d logged it, and how incompetent my coworker and I am.
But the CIO was on their side.
Thankfully the CIO is a generous lady and told her that technically she had no right to complain as it was not only after hours but due to the low priority level of the call, we had a full 5 hours to deal with it.
What was the call?
Never Miss a StorySign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
Correct a typo on the spelling of her name on the Comms intraweb page.
Yikes! Talk about two crazy situations!
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
An IT worker weighs in.
Another person shares a suggested response about working after hours.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a delivery driver who tried warning his boss the truck needed new brakes and tires, only to find his truck sidelined during their busiest season.
This person has a prediction.
You never know what kinds of calls you’re going to get when you work in tech support!
Those were both some pretty crazy calls!
Imagine tech support workers assembling sandwiches for conference center attendees. So funny!
I’m glad the CIO backed them up about not working after hours.
Enjoyed this story?
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
