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.

I’ll be honest. I get bored in a job, and that is a killer for me. As soon as I get bored, I start giving less to a job, and start looking for another.

Yes, it is important that I like the people I work with. But for me, there is one thing that a job must have to keep me on my toes. I call it my moment of panic. Now for someone who struggles with anxiety, panic is normally something I like to avoid. But in this case, it is an indication that my job is not boring, and is actually challenging me.

My moment of panic is usually “Shit, I have no idea what I just did/what to do/what the hell is going on.” This moment of panic makes me question if I am good enough for the position I am in. Usually this is followed by furious googling, and trying to look like I know what I’m doing so others don’t realize I just broke something.

This used to scare me, I used to be afraid that these moments of panic meant I wasn’t good enough for my job, and if anyone found out I would be fired. Then the more I thought about it, these were my challenges, the times I got to learn something new, or prove to myself that I was capable of handling things on my own.

At the time that I learned this, I worked as an IT Supervisor at a large theme park. The job title was a little misleading, as I barely had any type of training or experience, and little to no power to do things. We had corporate offices that held the power, and were our first line of defense, should there be something we didn’t know. When I first started, I would immediately call them if I didn’t have the answer to a question, or something went down. After awhile, I realized that the answers they were giving me, I could probably have come up with or searched out on my own (thanks google!). So I took to the large whiteboard in my office and wrote in big letters on the top…

DO NOT PANIC! IF YOU FEEL THE URGE TO CALL CORPORATE, TAKE A BREATH AND WAIT 10 MINUTES

I figured that, barring an entire park network outage, 10 minutes was an acceptable amount of time to give myself on an issue before crying out for help. It turned out that taking a breath and giving myself a chance to figure it out myself not only challenged me, but gave me this awesome sense of accomplishment for figuring it out. I also got recognized by our corporate offices for my growing abilites.

I wanted to write this post as an intro to a new series I want to start that I will be tagging “My mMoments of Panic”. I believe this will be useful for me to feel good about what I learned, share new things I’ve learned, and remind myself of how far I have come.

Stay Tuned…First Moment of Panic coming to a blog near you soon!