“I can assist you no further.” This was an actual sentence uttered. No, not even uttered, typed in a Teams chat by the IT guy working on my computer at work yesterday. This guy is part of the team that is working on the migration of our division’s infrastructure, software, applications and platforms after we were acquired by another company. The full sentence this guy had the audacity to type in a chat message! was “Due to the erratic connection, I can assist you no further. Please call the IT desk” And he proceeded to give me the number. That’s it. This was after 10 maybe 15 minutes of beginning the chat. No attempt to explain what happened, No attempt to put his reasoning into some kind of context. Not even the courtesy to get on the freaking phone and provide a brief human to human explanation. I mean who does IT tech via messaging. What’s this foolishness? What has IT come to? What have we done?

I honestly just sat there stunned for like a whole minute shaking my head in disbelief. Seriously WTAF?? But I politely typed “Thank you for your assistance”. And called the number he’d typed. A few moments later he remembered that he had forgotten to give me the ticket number! So yes, I had to call again and give them that number. Sometimes I really do wish I wasn’t brought up to be so damn polite. Coz while I was politely typing that, I was mentally cursing this dude out!! What a jerk seriously.

Side note: My politeness, courteousness, niceness have always been sources of pride for me. But I’ve realized they don’t always serve me well. So I’m working on amending this. As a fictional character once said “No more Mr. Nice Guy!”

A bit of background and context. When I’m not at the laboratory doing science stuff, I pick up part time temp gigs. Our lab which I love is currently slow due to a decrease in COVID testing so I’ve had a temp PT job since August. And literally two weeks after I started, the division was acquired. Go figure, right? It didn’t matter much to me, I hadn’t been there long enough but to the long term employees, it did and does. Their division was sold off to another company so new everything. New leadership, new benefits, Some lost vacation and sick time, some left etc

I knew that this kind of thing happens all the time with big corporations. I just didn’t think the same thing happens at smaller organizations. What’s this crap? I guess eventually a handful of companies will end up owning pretty much everything. But I digress and I know I’m exaggerating. Back to the IT guy.

His job was to literally facilatate this process. They’ve been planning the whole thing since August or should have been anyway since that was when our department was acquired.

But the week of migration which is his job, this guy gives up after 10 or 15 minutes. He was rude. Didn’t bother to get on the phone. I get it. IT departments are often swamped. I get it, people are stressed out. I get it But what baffles is this is your job. Do it. Don’t tell me you can assist me no further without even trying. Where is the effort? where is rising to the challenge?

Update: Luckily, the next guy who got my ticket was super persistent and got everything migrated. The new Cloud PC set up. We ran into issues, this is expected, but working together, talking on the phone. Making light of the absurdity of the issues we were facing. Like the Cloud PC rejecting my password which was working just fine everywhere else. We did it. It took quite a while and several calls. And this is what good tech support looks like. There is hope after all. Scottie, don’t beam me up..not yet anyway