Slashdot Mirror
Dealing With an IT Bully
jammag writes "'"You are an idiot." That was how I was greeted on an already gloomy, rainy Monday morning.' Eric Spiegel offer his a first-hand account of dealing with a tech world geek-gone-bad and presents some ideas for coping. 'These bullies are quick to aggressively divert blame for any problem back to someone else, because they couldn't possibly be responsible. Some are passive aggressive, where they will subtly lay blame behind your back. Others enjoy getting in your face and being as confrontational as possible.'" What experiences have others had that defied all logic and possibly made you want to start looking for rifles and bell towers?
Me: My Cable is Out. ... Pause as I assume this is the point where I'll get a scheduled service call...
Broadstripe: Sure enough it looks like there are several places in Seattle experiencing some outages. Crews are out. Is there anything else I can help you with.
Me: Yes. My Cable is out and I'm pretty sure that it's mostly unrelated to those outages. It's been out for a month. It was out yesterday. It was out the week before that. A cable guy came out to turn on my neighbor's cable... and the same day when I got home from work my internet was down.
Broadstripe: If the cable is out across parts of Seattle how can you conclude that your problem is unrelated.
Me: Because I assume that most of Seattle hasn't been without cable for a MONTH.
Broadstripe: We can send someone out between 9am and 6pm on Monday.
(Yeah sure I'll just take a day off from work to wait for the cable guy. Thanks but no thanks.)
A War on Stupidity will be as effective as the War on Drugs. You can't combat something that grows naturally.
I like to settle these things professionally...by challenging them to a fist fight. I even let them choose the fighting ground.
If that doesn't work, you could always try the "Daddy's got your nose" game. That gets 'em every time.
I do not typically use "You are an idiot" as a greeting. I prefer to use that phrase as a goodbye.
Frankly, when I see a ticket come into the helpdesk system (which I used to run before I started doing interesting things) which says, "My email is broken" and all tickets are submitted to our helpdesk via email, then yes - the user IS an idiot.
When we get tickets that say, "There are arrows in the porter" when the person (a manager, no less!) is trying to say "There are errors in portal" then yes, the user IS an idiot.
Rather than complaining that overworked and beleaguered helpdesk folks are rude, why don't you try not being a fucking moron for once?
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
You, sir, are an idiot.
;)
Can't let the people down, now can we.
moron... obviously, you are just a shill for [republicans|democrats], completely dedicated to [closed source|open source] software to the exclusion of all facts, maniacally intolerant because of your blind devotion to [environmentalism|christianity], unable to see that your ridiculous faith in [capitalism|socialism] is the ruin of all humanity, therefor making you a [jack booted fascist nazi|klan member|islamofascist traitor].
This is my sig.
Best solution for the "your an idiot" wielding jerk.
Go to any open terminal and try to log in as him 4 times. do this throughout the day randomly. you'll keep locking out his account and giving him utter hell trying to get anything done.
I'm the master Domain admin so I'll simply reduce privileges, accidently set the expire on the account to 15 minutes before lunch or a meeting, or I'll simply slightly unplug their cube's patch cable in the network closet on that floor. But if you dont have admin rights to the domain, simply trying to log in as them a few times will lock it nice and easy. also unplugging their keyboard slightly when you walk by their empty cube is a great thing to do as well.
the best thing I have EVER seen done was that someone packing taped a slice of bologna under his chair. in 3 days he stunk to high hell and could not find the source of the smell.
Dont get mad, get even. Nothing is sweeter than annoying them silently.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
My favorite: a couple co-workers wrote a dos background program that prevented a user from typing the word "go". Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but the targeted coworker had written a complex batch script that compiled the source and loaded it on his dev machine named -- go.bat. It was pretty funny to watch. The g key works, the o key works but typing g then o was impossible. they also wrote a program that caused icons to flee from the mouse. That was just as fun, but easier to figure out the cause.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.