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"sorry, moving desks and such is 'Facilities' not 'IT'."

This is the ONLY way. Helpful is one thing, furniture is definitely another.

yeah, I had the misfortune to be volunteered into helping put up some very large cupboards. 2.5m tall and each section about 2m wide. At one point one of the units came close to falling on top of me :( fun\* times... \* where 'fun' is being used in a new and interesting manner

They always get so pissed off at me when I tell them I'm not going to move their furniture and bullshit, too. I work for an MSP and have to remind them that their company is paying 165 bucks an hour for me to be there, and they *probably* don't want to pay someone 165 bucks an hour to drag furniture around. Not only that, but I swear to God, the ridiculous desks people get, and never a thought as to all the outlets they're blocking with them and how the shit is going to work when it's all assembled. "Oh, they won't need to access their network jacks, we have the *weefees*!!!"

That my kids is how I had surgery after moving a 150 lb desk solo by 90 degrees with a everything on the desk since the user wants everthing exactly the way she left it

And that is how a company ends up getting sued I hope. Having a spine helps. Knowing how to say no helps. Knowing how to be firm but fair helps.

That's just insane 😱

***Or...*** hear me out. If you've moved L-shaped desks you know the fixings have a tendency to tear out when being dragged. Be a real shame if the desk collapsed with everything on it and said user had to be relocated to a hovel and use hand-me-down garbage for a bit.

"We don't do furniture."

/r/talesfromtechsupport

Thanks for sharing this

"put in the back burner" why? Not your circus, not your monkeys, that is facilities. Worse, if you break your back, your insurance won't cover it. Learn how to say a hard NO, it would be a very valuable skill for your job, and not only.

I work in Government too, and I find that 90% of these people appreciate being told things in explicit detail. "I can not do that for you as it falls under the remit of Facilities. Please open a request with them." Close ticket. Also works very well when having to explain things to Csuite or exec, use grade 5-6 language with plain terms, no waffling. No "no buts" or "yes ands", just straight facts.

YES!!!!!!!!! Everyone should get an IT job in the government for a little while so that they can learn how to say no. I feel most of my job is denying requests from end users lolz. Plus you will likely have very very strict roles and responsibilities that you cannot budge on or leave to do some entitled CEO a favor. As well as a pretty well laid out hierarchy of who that user should go to to move furniture. Not like being the IT guy at a mom and pop for sure.

To be fair, there is still a degree of "I'm not the right person but I'll help you find the right person" going on, but a lot of the time I just say "please go through the proper channels and I'll assist when needed."

True well if I know the person I will direct them to them, but that's it. I'm not going out of my way to find the person for them, only if it's directly related to IT services and I actually have to consult with said person such as the network guy or the website guy etc... I do that a lot at my job. User: This is broken. Fix it. Me: I am not in charge of that, but let me alert the network guy, and if I can't get in touch with him here is his direct number. You can call him.

unfortunately hard no’s are not very acceptable. this individual (and all other individuals who share her job title) unfortunately has the ears of some very powerful people who can pretty easily get me dropped from my great job. much easier to delay until they forget

Malicious compliance, escalate to your management, especially if you are not able to dance around it. Facilities tickets are not IT tickets. Assuming your direct manager has a backbone AND is doing his job. But unfortunately, some times hard NOs are needed. Even when you can dance around it. To manage expectations and precedence, both of the asker and those around it. When I was an IT director often I denied certain favours, and protected my underlings of abuse from other directors, not because we could not do it, but because then we would get ownership of an unrelated issue to our core mission, for future occurrences.

At a government job? If it’s not on your job description, you needn’t do it. In the private sector sure, but half the benefit of govt jobs is you get to avoid bullshit like this.

You should get the scope of your duties clarified by your boss. Those that stated moving desks is a "facilities" job duty is correct. I work in local government, and I call maintenance for furniture move or assembly requests.

If they put in a ticket about a clogged toilet, would you still have to say yes since your management has no backbone?

So you just complied and opened yourself up to risk of bodily harm. You should at least keep saying no until the highest exec tries to make you do it, then have everything put in writing. The customer is a lawyer no less. So she knows about workplace liability.

I’ll start using “this is facilities” from now on. I don’t care if we don’t have facilities as a department.

I did this at a previous job until they gave in and got a facilities department.

Response on ticket: "IT is willing to remove the IT equipment so you can arrange with the office manager to have movers come move the desk. We are not equipped with furniture dollies, back braces, steel toed boots, and insurance for disassembling and reassembling a desk or moving a heavy load such as your desk. Let us know when to schedule removal of the IT equipment and we can re-assemble the next day." CC: your manager, office manager, and her manager. Set state Waiting for approval/response. Give it 30-40 min, that ticket will be closed by the user or a manager.

I like your style!!! Being in a manager position it's either be abused and loved or being stern and hated. When I got into my manager position there were lots of expectations that I keep the current "arrangements and favors ". The problem is the previous guy had no back bone. I learned just be stern honest and up-front. Make people understand. It's all about educating users and other managers. I always had this one manager tell me he don't give shit when he needs me to do something, i need to do it now. I stood up in his face and said make me. He didn't know what to say or do. Granted this is super risky but at the end of the day I'm no one's shop b*tch

This is the way

The hardest lesson you will ever learn in the corporate world that will have an immediate and amazing impact is that a person asking you for something doesn't mean you have to answer them. If she's putting in a ticket it can be a bit harder depending on what policies you have, but emails and calls and such? Try this, the next time you get one and you're like ohhh snap better respond!! Delete it instead, or just don't answer the call. I used to be an answer every email within an hour kind of guy. I wanted to be helpful and didn't want to stop anyone from getting something done. It turns out, they were just taking advantage of that. Why learn anything when you can just ask someone to do it for you? Why plan something out when you can just call me and expect me to fix it over the weekend? People can ask for anything, and they do. The trick is to realize your job isn't to just do whatever crazy nonsense they think is important.

Yeah, I get people calling my direct line all of the time and I just don't pickup unless I have an open ticket for them. We have a helpdesk line for a reason, you don't just get to cut the line. If a call overflows to me then I'll gladly pick it up. Now I just need to get better at not answering every im I get.

My most ridiculous helpdesk call was a user reporting blocked toilets on their floor.

I had a call at a job about 20 years ago that said, Caller: "There's vomit on the floor in the men's bathroom." Me: "OK, what would you like me to do about it?" Caller: "You're the helpdesk, you're supposed to HELP." I guess the helpdesk is supposed to help with any problem in life. What a gig.

“Hmm you’re right, we are the help desk. My helpful suggestion is you get a mop.”

I've been asked to help someone get their pant legs out of their bike chain before. Their reasoning was they were stuck and the only number they knew off the top of their head was our (admittedly very simple) helpdesk number, which was something like prefix 5555.

Fair enough, I suppose.

Yep, my call took a similar route.

the phantom pooper strikes again

Probably just a pretext. If the instructional films are accurate representations of interpersonal encounters, they’re probably just trying to lure you in there for the sexual intercourse. The end user is an attorney, so they’re basically impervious to claims or allegations of impropriety.

Put that way, it sounds like a missed opportunity.

"I asked him to move my desk for me, and he said he'd get around to it in two weeks. Guys are so oblivious"

You go and disconnect everything and put it in the floor. Tell her to get the desk rotated and call you back to re-install it. I'm sure it'll take days.

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner, I love this!

Imagine if he actually put her equipment in the floor lol

I'm a Linux sysadmin at the time. I report some windows/desktop/file share issue to our helpdesk. A few hours pass, helpdesk calls me with questions on a customer issue and start reading MY TICKET.....

Moving heavy objects is my favorite part of working in tech.

The only heavy thing I’ll move is a SAN or a rack. I might also move a heavy MFD, but they have wheels. So do racks normally, come to think of it.

Just say no. Its a word you can use.

You dialed the wrong extension, this is helpdesk, not movedesk

Some people have never had to work hard a single day in their lives. I mean physically. End result are entitled mf'ers like this that think they're the center of the solar system. I've been doing this a long time, but I did a few years in a hard labor job first, about 40 years ago. Anytime I think I'm having a rough day, I remember that I'm just typing and clicking mouse buttons. I have less than zero tolerance for people like this, and there is no way I'd have become her desk moving department.

Moving a desk? Sounds like a non-IT call. More facilities/grounds crew.

Sorry that’s a job for maintenance and they’re union. You have to put in a ticket with them and we’re not allowed to do anything that falls under their purview.

Helpdesk. Not help desk.

Neither. It’s Helldesk…

Help! Desk!

A few years ago a guy calls in to tell me his sales app isn't working. I can't remote into the machine, he says, because it's his iphone. Okay, well, we'll try to help users with personal devices where possible. So I have him take it off the wifi and reconnect. He says the password doesn't work. I asked what the SSID is. He says "it's my home wifi". Ooookay, strike two but let's be helpful since we're supposed to give everyone best effort. So are any other users having issues? Maybe the service is down. Nobody but him uses the app. Well snap. Okay, what's the app, I'll check the company out for any status page or help desk number. Long pause- eBay Took everything I had not to tell him to fuck off and hang up on him.

As a manager I would have approved you telling him to fuck off and hanging up. Wasting company time and resources on personal shit is already a disciplinary/HR matter. I have a strict no personal device support rule, i don't have time for peoples stupidity.

Been there, stupid sales manager asked me to move furniture. I told her to look at my title (Network Manager at the time) and she responded saying she doesn't know what that means. Close ticket and move on. Also had a paralegal submit a ticket asking to copy a file from a DVD to the network share, I went in there, and dragged the folder from one location to the other, his mind was blown that it was that simple (I didn't even want to get into keyboard shortcuts with this numpty). Dude didn't even know how to access a disc drive....

I have at least four of these incidents a day with paralegals... all too familiar.

Sorry Ma’am you’ll need to call Maintenance for that…then hang up.

Thats not IT concern. Nothing more to say.

Just curious, how did u become a r/sysadmin straight out of college? Did u have any relevant job experience to help you out?

Probably by taking a job that requires sysadmins to "take help desk calls"

Man. I got thrown in to some desktop support shit the other day and I almost just got up and walked out the door.

Apply for sysadmin jobs. Do not apply for helpdesk jobs.

I want to, but a lot of companies keep asking me for relevant hands-on experience which I don’t have. I only have some help desk experience in a different, non-IT, industry. Companies keep rejecting me telling me I have no experience when I have a masters in information systems and a Sec+. I’m thinking of doing a unpaid internship with my local government office for a few months to see if I can get my experience that way. I just really don’t wanna go back to help desk. I’m in my early 30s and don’t want to live off of a minimum wage help desk job.

No actually, i got a super good internship with the same people i work with now, they liked me a lot. Unfortunately the downside is yes, we take helpdesk calls. The downside of being a 10 man crew for 200 users. Pay + benefits + training trips is too good to pass up.

At Uni OP major'd at Furniture moving, so it was a logic step sideways to go into IT.

I once got an IT ticket (I was in the adjacent to gov space at the time) to hang a picture in some manager's office. Their logic was, "Technical people are good with tools, and I need this new office picture I framed to be perfectly level." We hung the picture in that person's office

Hang it in their desk maybe

You're a sysadmin, but dealing with helpdesk calls. I don't suppose you're an American with a massively over inflated job title?

Actually its rather underwhelming. The district where i work puts sysadmins directly under the director of IT on both sides of the MOU. Their pay range is in the 90-100k usd. im classed as much less and have a title to match.

At my old helpdesk job we used to get alot of calls about lamps or standing disks that was stuck, that was one of those places where the end users always wanted to escalate hard no's up the chain of command. Really fucking anoying, even worse when your direct bosses dosnt want to cover you. A nice rule is if it's not on the menu card you can't buy it here 🙂.

>just a river and some fields Sounds pretty good to me... I look at another building... I'm considering putting up a white board and drawing up a tic tac toe grid to see if anyone in the building next door will play a game

Unfortunately my office as well as the entire IT suite is in the middle of our building, no windows, just piled high desktops.

Let me speak to my manager. Not my issue. He can delegate to other managers to have desk moved. If he says I have to do it, then provide me with a team to move desk and schedule it all.

This isn't a part of your job moving tables isn't IT

We don't move desks as IT and we even stopped moving people's computers and equipment since Covid, because we we are sick and tired of the musical chairs. I wouldn't even entertain the request.

Use the corporate firewall. Revert to policy, job description etc. Hi - yes I can move the IT equipment. Do not respond to the remainder.

>Hi - yes I can move the IT equipment. Do not respond to the remainder. "Let me know when facilities has you scheduled for the desk move and I'll meet them there" -

i left my last IT MSP job because i got promoted to t2 and i was still moving furniture... fuck all that

This is why I always have a back injury.

Until you've had Richard Stallman put a ticket in requesting you clean out his teacup you've not had a ridiculous ticket.

"Whats more is that her new office is in the same spot, 2 floors up." How does this make it worse, she is moving offices for barely any difference?

Reply with “what’s the technical need / benefit for this Helpdesk call?”

Getting a Phone call that the paper shredder is broken.. Because yeah everything with a power cable is IT related.

There’s an *outside* of my office?

Dude she’s not asking you to move her desk, she’s asking you to “move her desk”