Current Events > what am i supposed to do. i do IT for a school and a teacher went OFF on me

(+) Yeah! (+)

so we have a program that blocks content on the chromebooks. sometimes, it blocks things teachers want to use in class. not a problem, just fill out this form on our help desk and i'll get it, make sure its not something like porn or anything, and add an exception. except this one teacherslikes to just email us links, without even checking if its blocked. so my boss said yeah no, everyone gotta use the form. so when she emailed, we just responded here's the form kthx.

so im in my office when she comes in, absolutely LIVID. shes going off about how the hell is she supposed to remember to use the link (that we emailed her, and linked to twice) and that its so hard for her to do things because shes busy and we're such shit at our jobs because kids play games all day while all the important stuff she wants to do is blocked. i told her she can send us the links to the games and we ca--- no i didn't say anything because she snapped back HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET THAT. i dunno, ask the principal? she said no.

she demanded it be easier. so i said its on our website, under the QUICK LINKS SECTION. not quick enough i guess, cuz she said she wanted to see it on my computer. i told her i have a different version because im an administrator and she demanded to login using my computer. now had she not been yelling at me, i might have obliged, but nah i said no youre not touching my computer and made her use a chromebook.

so once i showed her how to FUCKING CLICK A LINK she calmed down. she was very sorry. oh no im so sorry. so sad. shut the fuck up

and its not like, im a cashier and shes at wendys mad because we're out of hamburgers. we work for the same company. im not contracted or anything. i work for head office.

i dunno. do i tell my boss? do i tell her boss?

funny thing is she put in a tickt for me to replace the audio cable in her room. looks like her ticket is on indefinite hold

@CableZL i need your sage IT wisdom

wow I read that it wasnt too long

Cry

Tell both your and her boss

tell her you need to recompile the cache data and reset cookies, it might take a few days for the defragmentation to complete.
that's the type of stuff i would do when i worked IT a few years ago.

Tbh I have no sympathy for IT people and their stupid tickets. Dudes will be standing right there, you ask them to fix something that would take a minute or two. "Sorry you need to go fill out a separate ticket."

Nah man the next ticket will be for a broken window and computer outside in a million pieces.

Turtlemayor333 posted...

Tbh I have no sympathy for IT people and their stupid tickets. Dudes will be standing right there, you ask them to fix something that would take a minute or two. "Sorry you need to go fill out a separate ticket."

Nah man the next ticket will be for a broken window and computer outside in a million pieces.

honestly, if she just had emailed me the links i might have just unblocked them.

but no, every day she emails us saying "can you unblock this link? netflix.com" and its like, huh???

Have you tried turning the teacher off and back on again?

Turtlemayor333 posted...

Nah man the next ticket will be for a broken window and computer outside in a million pieces.

you'll need to send that ticket to the maintenance staff. IT only fixes one kind of window :)
but the whole ticket thing is mostly so IT workers can actually log what they do all day. lots of places will assume that an employee isn't working, and then cut their hours, if they end up helping a bunch of people but it doesn't get documented.

CactusCat posted...

you'll need to send that ticket to the maintenance staff. IT only fixes one kind of window :)
but the whole ticket thing is mostly so IT workers can actually log what they do all day. lots of places will assume that an employee isn't working, and then cut their hours, if they end up helping a bunch of people but it doesn't get documented.

my old job was like that. my boss presured us to create tickets for every interaction. even when its like, you answer the phone and they say sorry wrong number. thats a ticket. shed call my office and be like "phone record say 10 calls came in yet i only see 7 tickets. what's going on"

this job? its more so we have everything logged. if i block a site for the entire organization and theres no record of it, everyone's left in the dark about why its blocked. sometimes ill get messages saying a website is blocked and see that yeah, someone added it to the block list. why? for what school? no one knows.

forms creates a ticket that keeps that record.

Complete_Idi0t posted...

Have you tried turning the teacher off and back on again?

pretty sure that's called sexual harassment.

MixedRaceBaby posted...

except this one teacherslikes to just email us links, without even checking if its blocked. so my boss said yeah no, everyone gotta use the form. so when she emailed, we just responded here's the form kthx.

100% correct way to handle it

MixedRaceBaby posted...

so im in my office when she comes in, absolutely LIVID. shes going off about how the hell is she supposed to remember to use the link (that we emailed her, and linked to twice)

So... with people like this, I get kinda petty. Technically, she doesn't need to remember to use the link. She just needs to understand that her request won't be acted upon unless she uses the link. As long as you guys are fine with emailing her the link every time, I don't see an issue.

MixedRaceBaby posted...

its so hard for her to do things because shes busy

She wasn't too busy to to storm into your office and go on this rant. It would have taken less time, energy, stress, effort, etc. to just fill out the form again.

MixedRaceBaby posted...

she demanded it be easier. so i said its on our website, under the QUICK LINKS SECTION. not quick enough i guess, cuz she said she wanted to see it on my computer. i told her i have a different version because im an administrator and she demanded to login using my computer. now had she not been yelling at me, i might have obliged, but nah i said no youre not touching my computer and made her use a chromebook.

Best thing that can be done, imo, is creating a bookmark on her Chromebook. You can only dumb stuff down so much before you hit a steep decline in time spent vs value you'd get out of continuing to dumb it down.

MixedRaceBaby posted...

i dunno. do i tell my boss? do i tell her boss?

The correct thing to do if you feel she is being abusive (and from the sound of it, she definitely is) is to tell your boss. your boss should then handle it according to whatever procedure is in place from there. I wouldn't go directly to her boss about it.

thank you based CableZL

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/5/9/AAZvZqAADKCn.jpg

Yeah I was going to say the same thing Cable did. Just tell your boss and then he can do whatever he wants with the situation. This seems more like it was just an annoyance so I wouldn't make a big deal about it outside your department. Just say to your boss "hey you remember that teacher that emailed us links?" Then tell him what happened and leave it at that. Unless this isn't the first time she has come in yelling at you. That would change things.

Gamerguymass posted...

Unless this isn't the first time she has come in yelling at you. That would change things.

shes responded to some emails in a pretty heated way. but those i could ignore since you know. im at my house.

CableZL posted...

The correct thing to do if you feel she is being abusive (and from the sound of it, she definitely is) is to tell your boss. your boss should then handle it according to whatever procedure is in place from there. I wouldn't go directly to her boss about it.

This. Let your boss discuss it with hers. The main purpose(imo) of an IT manager is to shield their employees from dumb shit like this. There is a process already in place that this end user is having a difficult time following. Have your boss raise the issue to her manager so they can work it out.

man im in a similar situation. so we have a program that blocks content on the chromebooks. sometimes, it blocks things teachers want to use in class. not a problem, just fill out this form on our help desk and i'll get it, make sure its not something like porn or anything, and add an exception. except this one teacherslikes to just email us links, without even checking if its blocked. so my boss said yeah no, everyone gotta use the form. so when she emailed, we just responded here's the form kthx.

so im in my office when she comes in, absolutely LIVID. shes going off about how the hell is she supposed to remember to use the link (that we emailed her, and linked to twice) and that its so hard for her to do things because shes busy and we're such shit at our jobs because kids play games all day while all the important stuff she wants to do is blocked. i told her she can send us the links to the games and we ca--- no i didn't say anything because she snapped back HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET THAT. i dunno, ask the principal? she said no.

she demanded it be easier. so i said its on our website, under the QUICK LINKS SECTION. not quick enough i guess, cuz she said she wanted to see it on my computer. i told her i have a different version because im an administrator and she demanded to login using my computer. now had she not been yelling at me, i might have obliged, but nah i said no youre not touching my computer and made her use a chromebook.

so once i showed her how to FUCKING CLICK A LINK she calmed down. she was very sorry. oh no im so sorry. so sad. shut the fuck up

and its not like, im a cashier and shes at wendys mad because we're out of hamburgers. we work for the same company. im not contracted or anything. i work for head office.

i dunno. do i tell my boss? do i tell her boss?

funny thing is she put in a tickt for me to replace the audio cable in her room. looks like her ticket is on indefinite hold

thanks all.

i guess her manager would be the principal.

WHO, FUN FACT, LOST THEIR COMPUTER 6 MONTHS AGO AND IS JUST NOW TELLING ME

now they're asking for a new one

i already told my manager about that one. they said nah

Stuff like this is one of the big reasons I wanted to get away from supporting end users. For better or for worse, a router/switch/firewall does what you tell it to do 100% of the time. You run into weird bugs here and there, but that's pretty rare.

CableZL posted...

Stuff like this is one of the big reasons I wanted to get away from supporting end users. For better or for worse, a router/switch/firewall does what you tell it to do 100% of the time. You run into weird bugs here and there, but that's pretty rare.

for the most part, helping users at this role hasn't been so bad. when i was doing IT for my university it was much worse. it was all professors who were full of themselves and shit. but the users here are mostly new teachers who are pretty chill about things. if i say it can't be done, they're like ok thanks anyway.
except her. and a principal a while back. but she quit so good.

though, a lot of them keep asking me to unblocked obviously pirated material lol. i had to stop one from suggesting it be added to the official curriculum lol.

MixedRaceBaby posted...

for the most part, helping users at this role hasn't been so bad. when i was doing IT for my university it was much worse. it was all professors who were full of themselves and shit. but the users here are mostly new teachers who are pretty chill about things. if i say it can't be done, they're like ok thanks anyway.
except her. and a principal a while back. but she quit so good.

Regardless. Once you get to that level where you are no longer supporting end users, it's a night and day difference. No end user support means you generally aren't chained to your desk for a set 8 hours everyday. Time is more flexible and your workload is better planned unless there's some big outage you have to deal with. It's nice.

Turtlemayor333 posted...

Tbh I have no sympathy for IT people and their stupid tickets. Dudes will be standing right there, you ask them to fix something that would take a minute or two. "Sorry you need to go fill out a separate ticket."

Nah man the next ticket will be for a broken window and computer outside in a million pieces.

Because there's a fucking process to follow and asking IT staff directly for shit isn't following said process. Why is it so god damn hard for certain users to submit a ticket?

MixedRaceBaby posted...

this job? its more so we have everything logged. if i block a site for the entire organization and theres no record of it, everyone's left in the dark about why its blocked. sometimes ill get messages saying a website is blocked and see that yeah, someone added it to the block list. why? for what school? no one knows.

forms creates a ticket that keeps that record.

Yeah, in addition to that I work software support and every once in a while something will break and I won't know how to fix it. However, I can go back through our previous tickets and go 'oh, this has happened however many months/years ago, and this is how it was fixed'.

Turtlemayor333 posted...

Tbh I have no sympathy for IT people and their stupid tickets. Dudes will be standing right there, you ask them to fix something that would take a minute or two. "Sorry you need to go fill out a separate ticket."

Nah man the next ticket will be for a broken window and computer outside in a million pieces.

This right here then when they finally get to it they have to escalate it to someone else cause they don't know what the fuck to do

Lol IT

MixedRaceBaby posted...

for the most part, helping users at this role hasn't been so bad. when i was doing IT for my university it was much worse. it was all professors who were full of themselves and shit. but the users here are mostly new teachers who are pretty chill about things. if i say it can't be done, they're like ok thanks anyway.
except her. and a principal a while back. but she quit so good.

though, a lot of them keep asking me to unblocked obviously pirated material lol. i had to stop one from suggesting it be added to the official curriculum lol.

Ah. My experience with supporting end users:

1. ISP tech support (about 4.25 years)
2. Remote desktop tech support (1.5 years)

Most of the people I talk to just had problems and needed help, but there were waaaaaayyyyy too many nightmare calls.

• (ISP) Dude complaining about not being able to hear me for half the phone call... He was holding the phone upside down. He didn't realize this until he asked his wife to bring him another phone. She walked into the room and told him.
• (ISP) A dude with an MCSE certification blaming Frontier for the error he was getting sending email. Tried using his certification as a reason to not have to listen to anything I said. After spending 45 minutes arguing with him, he finally let me connect to his computer remotely. Within 30 seconds, I found out that he set the firewall level in his ISP-provided modem to high (default is low). He then tried to act like he (Mr. MCSE cert) didn't know who made that change. He owned up to it a few minutes later, but then tried to act indignant about not being able to send email while the firewall was set to high. "I CAN'T BELEIVE YOUR SERVICE DOESN'T WORK WITH THE FIREWALL ON HIGH!!!" I explained that it works, but putting the firewall on high causes it to block TCP 25, which is what SMTP uses. If he wanted to send email AND have the firewall on high, he'd have to do port forwarding. He said he didn't want to do that either.
• (ISP) Countless business DSL users blaming us for dumb shit. This one IT guy called in because he couldn't access their router using a static IP that they hadn't connected with in several months. I had no idea what caused their static IP to change, but there were notes on the account about someone calling in to get their new static IP set up many months prior to this call. The notes explicitly stated that they got it working with the new static IP. We also had access to connection logs that showed the IP address they had when their modem authenticated along with timestamps for each authentication session. They clearly hadn't used the static IP in a long ass time AND WERE CLEARLY CONNECTING ON THE NEW ONE. He demanded that I escalate the issue to a manager. There was literally nothing to escalate. Dude had his boss and some non-technical user on the phone and they were trying to intimidate me. I got fed up and just asked if they could see if it works with the new IP address. He tried it. It worked. SURPRISE, SURPRISE. I hated that guy so much.
• (ISP) Back when the 2008 crash happened, a business customer called in because they were using her personal residential ISP email to receive emails for their business. The business had applied for bailout money using her personal ISP email address. She couldn't find the email from the government. The problem? She had THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of emails because she never actually maintained her email account properly. She didn't know what email address it would be coming from, any of the words that may be in the title or message body, or when the email may have been sent. We basically told her she was shit out of luck and would have to search on her own, and possibly along with other employees of the business if she was willing to give them her password. We were absolutely not doing this shit.
• (Desktop) A dude had a virus, but wanted to pay $50 for a PC tune up service to see if that would help. I tried to explain that a PC tune up wouldn't remove the virus and that he would need to pay for a virus removal. The virus removal service was $200 and included a PC tune up any way. I told him that it would be a bad idea to waste $50 on a service that won't help and then end up having to pay $200 later on that would include the service he's trying to pay for now. He argued with me and demanded that I just do the PC tune up. I didn't want to because I didn't want him to just throw away $50. THIS SOMEHOW TURNED INTO A HUGE ARGUMENT.
• (Desktop) A guy had a printer at his job where you could just put in a stack of papers, hit one button, and then it would scan every page one by one. He wanted to be able to do this from home. So what did he do? He went to Best Buy and bought the most expensive printer they had on the shelf at that store. He claims someone at the store told him that was the printer he needed. The printer he got didn't do that. At all. So what did he do? He spent 3 FUCKING MONTHS CALLING GEEK SQUAD TECH SUPPORT AND HP SUPPORT REPEATEDLY TO TRY TO GET SOMEONE TO MAKE THE PRINTER DO WHAT HIS PRINTER AT WORK DOES. Just over 3 months later, he got connected to me. I was the only one who told him flat out that his printer just can't do that. And by that time, he was past the return window, so he was stuck with the printer.
• (ISP) When Frontier bought lines from Verizon in a bunch of states, one of those states was West Virginia. I talked to so many people in West Virginia who could barely read. One guy called in because he couldn't remember his password. His security question: "What is your favorite book?" His answer: "HELL IF I KNOW! I DON'T READ BOOKS!" I then asked him to hold on while I "checked for another way" and just put him on hold and double facepalmed for about 10 minutes.
• (Desktop) A woman went to Best Buy and bought a wireless printer. She called in for help setting it up. She took it out of the box, plugged it into power, connected it to wifi (we went into her router and got the password). She did everything correctly the first try the whole call. Then it was time to do a test print to verify the printer was working. SHE. COULDN'T. PUT. PAPER. IN. THE. PRINTER. PROPERLY. SHE. SPENT. 45. MINUTES. TRYING. TO. DO. THIS. She finally got the printer to take one piece of paper, BUT IT FUCKING JAMMED. I FUCKING SNAPPED. I put the call on mute and yelled "YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME" so loud that the whole call center could hear. Fortunately there were only about 3 of us in our particular office at the time and no supervisors.

After that call with the lady's printer, I had mentally had enough with doing tech support in general. I started blasting out resumes to a bunch of different companies... Two weeks later, I just happened to get a call from a managed services network operations center that was hiring... At that point, I didn't even remember applying, but that was exactly along the lines of what I wanted to do next in my career. I was so happy to not do tech support any more.

It's not even worth it.

What I would do is tell her to write it on a piece of paper and then give it to you.

I did the same job @MixedRaceBaby . Schools are massively unprofessional places. Get out when you can. Too many teachers have such a stick up their ass and treat IT like shit.

CableZL posted...

lota words

Dude I can't imagine working for an ISP and doing end user support. My best friend did that for years and he would just text me nightmares on a daily basis. Closest I ever got was working the tech desk at Staples as a side job at night after my actual IT job. Only real tech issues we had were people bringing their computers in for the tune ups or virus cleaning.

I do support for an ISP with union benefits but thinking of doing network administration/support in the future

Honestly? I would go straight to your manager and CC the superintendent (not principal, you want somebody who's outside of the politics of the individual school) and let them know that teachers have been screaming in your face over things that are beyond your control and it's creating a "hostile work environment" (those exact words). If possible, provide as many specific details around as many specific incidences as you can record in order to show a pattern of behavior. Let them know that if they can't keep their teachers from acting like responsible adults that you might be forced to open up a lawsuit against the school district.

They're going to keep abusing you until you make it clear to the administration that their behavior won't be tolerated. However, one of the conditions towards proving a hostile work environment is the belief that tolerating that behavior is a condition for employment. So you need a paper trail showing that you raised these concerns and were either rebuffed or, more directly, told that you have to put up with it.

https://www.justia.com/employment/employment-discrimination/hostile-work-environment/

Turtlemayor333 posted...

Tbh I have no sympathy for IT people and their stupid tickets. Dudes will be standing right there, you ask them to fix something that would take a minute or two. "Sorry you need to go fill out a separate ticket."

Nah man the next ticket will be for a broken window and computer outside in a million pieces.

Don't get mad at us because we have a process to follow.

Now, granted, I do personally do some stuff "off-the-record" if I'm asked while already onsite (or I'm called directly by one of the VIPs) and it's something very quick, but other places may not be nearly as flexible.

My advice: suck it up. People overreact all the time. She apologized. What more do you want? People make mistakes

UPDATE:

so i told my boss. they weren't happy either. basically, they told me i shouldn't have to put up with that and are talking to HR for me. we will probably tell the principal at some point. they said i dont have to deal with her requests if i dont want to and if she tries to start shit again, i can basically tell her to fuck off.

but, that teacher is leaving at the end of the year so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT90D0GKZRM