RE: Angry (at) breakfast

That's one hell of a situation. I can relate since I work for an I.T. department and my wife used to be a consultant for a firm that had to win State contracts in the United States. She's gone off on her own tangents about her firms I.T. department. I won't defend what your I.T. department did to you but hopefully I can give you some perspective. I.T. sucks. I hate working in that industry. I.T. departments are embattled because companies are trying to downsize them while simoltaneosly increasing their workload. If you want longevity in I.T. you have to be constantly proving that you can do more with less. You're literally trying to automate yourself out of a job. The key to survival for them is to take on tasks they can succeed at. Your issue probably had more complexity than they were prepared to deal with and it got buried under less important, but simpler problems that were in their face. Like the guy literally standing in their cube asking them to fix the Interweb. My question for you is, did you create a ticket? Email is a black hole. You have to create a ticket because tickets equal accountability. Customers think we're blowing them off when we say make a ticket. But what were really saying is, if you want to get your problem solved, make a ticket because we got a thousand other issues, plus this guy standing in my cube, that we're dealing with, and you're just talking to the intern, not the guy who's qualified to fix any of them. Tickets have tracking numbers just like FedEx, and you can set it to URGENT. When you set it to URGENT you're going to get the hotshot tech who wants the big problems because they're trying to promote. Also, if two weeks go by without a response you have a name attached to the ticket and a tracking number. Email is no guarantee that things are going to get done. People always make the mistake of emailing I.T. to get shit done faster. Look at the CC line of your emails. If they're are a ton of people cc'd on them that just means no single person is taking ownership of your issue. When you go to Susie she'll say Joe was supposed to do it, when you go to Joe, he'll say Bob was working on it. Here's my best advice for dealing with I.T. Get to know the people, and identify the most ambitious technician. Here's a secret, it's not the senior analyst, and it's definitely not the manager. Find the guy or girl whose trying to climb out of Tier 1 hell and wants interesting problems. Be their pal, take care of them, and they'll start do everything they can to please you.