From Microsoft Subnet editor Julie Bort: I was chatting with a reader I’ll call “Lance” about a story Network World posted on rude IT behaviors. (Is chatting even the right word? What do you call an e-mail conversation?) The story lists all the ways human beings are rude to one another by focusing more on a techie device than on a live person in front of them. There are those who are forever putting the live person on hold so they can talk on their mobile phone. There are those who sit in a presentation, flip open the PC and start surfing the web or answering e-mail. (If you want to do that, why come to a seminar? You don’t need to demonstrate, with the clatter of your keyboard, that you find the speaker boring.) I find both of those rude behaviors particularly annoying. In any case, Lance said he had a million such stories. Then he added that he also had stories of rude IT people. So he sent me this one:
A user at my former company was having trouble with some proprietary software designed by an outside development company. He wasn’t able to get consistent support from the developer, so I stepped in. For some reason, we were directed to the head programmer instead of a support person. Okay, no problem, I figured I could talk to the head programmer as one IT professional to another and straighten everything out. Right off the bat, the programmer started blaming the problem on our end–our environment obviously wasn’t configured properly, our PCs must not be working right, etc. I tried to explain the history of the issue, and how it pointed to a bug in the software. At that point, he became enraged, yelling at me, aruging that I didn’t know what I was talking about, eventually screaming about us not knowing how to use his software. After a minute or two of listening to his tirade and barely getting in a word, I hung up. A rep at the company later contacted us and apologized profusely for the behavior of his colleague. He told me that normally the head programmer is prevented from talking to customers because of his anti-social personality.
What’s your “rude IT” story?
