In my current position, I am on the helpdesk a lot. Since I’m in a small company, and I’m the n00b, and also because I’m surrounded by wonderfully technical people, I am the Level One Technician. I originally took a little offense as this since I felt I had enough experience to be higher than a level one. But in my position, I would be a level three at less competent companies.

What sparked this today was we recently took over a particularly difficult client from another IT company. There are many nuances and the higher up engineers have been super helpful. Since we are going to transition the client to a new email system (office365), the old company is still hosting their exchange server until the transition occurs. I needed to setup something in their email yesterday, so I called their helpdesk and the level of competence was completely different.

This appears to be one of the tech companies that has a plethora of “Level One” technicians answering the phone, who appear to, at best, know how to operate a computer. They then create tickets which are “escalated” to level two and so on. I spent nearly 45 minutes on the phone with the person who answered the helpdesk phone, repeating a minimum of four times what I needed and laying out exactly what they needed to do.

If a client called me with this request, this is all they would need to tell me: “I need a distribution group for group@clientdomain.com, and it should go to person@clientdomain.com and me@mydomain.com”, and five minutes later (not accounting for GAL replication time) it would be complete and tested.

I tried to start with this, but they didn’t understand, and couldn’t keep the two domains straight. At one point, when he repeated it to me, he said he was setting a distibution group up for @mydomain.com, which he doesn’t manage, I do. Finally I stepped him through it as simply and detailed as possible without actually telling him which buttons to click as he obviously (or at least hopefully) wouldn’t be setting this up himself. What I explained was I needed an external contact setup for person@clientdomain.com, after that they could create a distribution group for group@clientdomain.com that goes to the external contact and person@clientdomain.com.

This was in the morning, and then at 4:45 I got a call from the “Level Three Technician”. He explained to me what was in the ticket, and it was completely wrong. It was the original interpretation of what I said, without any proper clarification. I then proceeded to explain the same thing to the level three tech, three times before he understood. Once he understood, he said he was waiting for access to the server (???????) and he would try to get it done that day, but it might be tomorrow morning. I told him: “no rush, tomorrow morning is fine”.

He called me in the early afternoon and was still waiting for access to the server (??????), but seemed to understand what he was doing. I even made an additional request for information that he understood immediately and said he would get it to me. So at this point I was frustrated with their process, but satisfied that they would complete it correctly. I was wrong.

After all of the explaining, I got an email at the end of the day that my ticket was completed and the distribution group was setup. I sent a test email to group@clientdomain.com and person@clientdomain.com received it, but I received an error from me@mydomain.com. The error included: “CN=me@mydomain.com,OU=Client Users,CN=clientdomain,CN=com”, which indicates they set up my email address as user in the client’s active directory instead of an external contact.

I was very tempted to send them an email with step by step directions to adding an external contact, but instead I told them it didn’t work and they needed to set it up as an external contact rather than a user and to contact me with any questions. If they fail again, either they are going to need to give me remote access or I’m just going to have to wait until we transition them to Office365.

Companies like this give us good tech companies and helpdesks a very bad name. I’m all for telling the client you will figure something out, or that you need some time to address it, but to blatantly not understand what you are doing and do it anyway is a absolute failure.