Wednesday 14 August 2013

The Day the Help Desk went into an Existential Loop

You may be aware, Dear Readers, that I am the manager of the Beaker Help Desk.In fact, I am the Beaker Help Desk. One day, when we have sufficient Beaker People with enough computing equipment to make it worth while, I hope to have people in the Help Desk working for me, and others to go out and fix networks, laptops, tablets etc. But for now, it is just me, fixing the POS in the Beaker Bazaar, sorting out the WiFi, rebooting things - and taking all the calls.

Having a 24-hour helpline number has always been wearing - especially when Young Keith used to phone up in the small hours, then just say "would you believe it - it's just started working again!" And then cackle down the phone. That was quite annoying. But I would enter the call into the Incident Logging system, in accord with ITIL best practice, and then close it immediately.  It's the old rule - no incident log, no problem.

But as it happens, the Help Desk has, as of now, ceased to function. It has entered an existential loop - and there is, by definition, nothing I can do about it. From here on in, there is no more help. Ever. I can explain the issue best by the use of this flowchart:

The irony is, I had to phone myself to report it in the first place. I was left on "hold" for 20 minutes until I realised I was waiting for myself to get off the phone.

1 comment :

  1. Can't log a bug due to the bug in the bug logging system, oh well, time to hit the pub..!

    ReplyDelete

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