Dark blue on black is chaotic evil
Also chaotic neutral: prioritizes issues by curiosity.
Oh hey, it’s me!
ADHD, eh?
I dunno about OP, but I am, and I have definitely prioritized tickets based on how interesting they sound.
User setup for a new hire that is already here and waiting? Meh. Weird network problem with no apparent solution which will likely require days of investigation? Sounds good.
I’m definitely guilty of that sometimes.
Lawful good is asking for trouble. Before they know it, they’ll be inundated with e-mails to their personal company address with poorly worded help requests. They’ll spend half their time making and updating tickets on the user’s behalf that would have been mostly automatic if they’d gone the Lawful Neutral route. They need to insist requests are sent to the main support address. I’m assuming that’s tied directly to the ticketing system.
When I was being Lawful slightly-better-than-neutral, I’d create the ticket and then put a paragraph in the reply telling them to please not e-mail me directly in future, because one day I might be unavailable and their e-mail could go unseen for hours or even days.
Repeat offenders would eventually do it at a time when things were busy too, so I’d be concentrating on the tickets and not things to my personal address, so that slight delay often helped it sink in.
Lawful neutral cuz in 6mo when some “controller” punches three buttons to run a report and asks “Hey why’d you do that?” THEN I’ll have documentation. And a job.
Make ticket, receive assistance. Fight me on that and I’ll add you to my email inbox’s ruleset - I am now an LLM, and will gentle-tone you to death via faux misunderstandings
Yep, hard-line lawful neutral. Though I lean chaotic evil when someone high enough on the food chain starts complaining.
I’ve been a chaotic neutral more times than I would like to admit.
Only part I miss from going at the office. It’s not the same when you have to bake your own bribes.
That’s when you update your sig with your address and a link to a local delivery venue
That is brilliant. I hope it works like old Amazon gift links where the sender does not get the recipient’s address. 😀
Blue on black is pretty evil to me.
Can we call this out on terminal text editors too? Some just color lines based on their content, and frequently comments end up being blue on black and it’s impossible to read.
This comment describes the options for the next parameter in this config file, but I have no idea what it says, so I guess I’m fucked?
Chaotic good.
Completing a 10 mins ticket for something you end up fixing in seconds. Fucking chore.
I fucking hate this.
Most days I spend more time accounting for my work than I do actually working.
Chaotic evil is “creates ticket, but intentionally words the problem poorly before logging off, leaving the junior help desk worker to fend for himself and giving you the solution to a different problem that isn’t relevant in your case”
Really, there’s a vast number of ways for IT support to be evil or chaotic. I wonder if there was ever a viral fiction series in the early internet about it…
that would make someone a real bastard…
Sounds like somebody straight from hell
Chaotic evil is “makes you create a ticket, doesn’t work on it, and then blames the ticket for the downtime to the CEO.”
Goddamn I felt this one!
Sometimes I’m neutral good and other times chaotic good. I’m at a relatively small company though, so I’d probably be different at a megacorp.
I went from the sole IT person at a small/medium business for 9+ years to a new role at a big company with divisions and shit. In my previous position, depending on the day, I fell in every category, but usually chaotic good on good days. Now I’m pretty much neutral to lawful good. I’ll dabble in the neutral evil as I see fit, because PEBCAK and ID10t issues have no bounds.
I’m guilty of pushing massive commits with several different changes and just commenting “bump version”
Worked the first six years of my career using no version history tracking or backups at all on one of our main systems. Nobody knew we didn’t have backups and I didn’t know how to use git and figured it wasn’t so important since I was maintaining it alone anyway.
(I don’t do any of those things anymore)
All hail “squash and merge”
But none of these are real, in the real world IT won’t touch your issue unless you create a ticket, then when you do they just never do anything about it anyway
I encountered “lawful evil” once. My answer of “I know what the problem is. I know how to fix it. But because you have no clue about what this company actually does to make money, you took away my ability to do it. So now I’m here, wasting both our time” didn’t seem to go over very well.
Ehh. Depending on the industry and issue, thats wholley justified, not only from a “least privilege” sense, but from a regulatory one.
Step over into cybersecurity and you end up spending all day clamping down on usability because the company has legal requirements to meet to continue to exist. Many of the things we are compelled to do are overeager and overly pedantic, but it’s either “do it, pay up, or shut down.” The execs tend to prefer “do it” in my experience, which makes everyone’s day a bit more tiresome.
So its entirely possible that was out of their hands.
In this case, none of that applies. I do industrial programming. 99% of the ethernet networks I have to connect to don’t have a router, and nothing is running DHCP. They locked out my ability to manually change my IP address.
That shit is why I bailed on the cybersecurity industry completely, with no thought of ever returning. I’m an engineer (software aside, I also have an aero engineering background). I wanna build cool shit!
Not to mention, how frequently the “I can fix it on my own” guy ends up making things worse.
Like my coworker who insisted he knew how to install a monitor and then couldn’t figure out why the display port wouldn’t work with a usb-a adapter. It had a normal DisplayPort plug and didn’t have a thunderbolt adapter (it’s a desktop.)
Rather than update the ticket that got him the monitor, he created a new ticket.
I can’t complain too much. IT guy likes me so he took the extra monitor and gave me a third one.
In my experience I create a ticket, then after 3 days of not hearing anything they manually close it as resolved while having done nothing
Working the neutral way currently. There’re so many tickets, all of them more important than the other, I can just as well take from the stack.
Oh you actually use the stack? I’m surprised you don’t just put all the tickets in a heap. I can give you some pointers on how to do that if you’d like.
Sure let me know in a ticket, I’ll get to it eventually!
Files ticket, and references ticket in email to supervisor for visibility
I find that when a user continually makes a stink to get their ticket dealt with first, I gently try to correct them, and when that inevitably doesn’t sink in, and they call during a critical issue, I tell them quite firmly that things are down and nobody at x site can work, so your printer will have to wait. Log a ticket and I’ll address it when I’m done Brenda.
… They usually back off when you make it clear to them that they’re not the most important thing you’re dealing with at any given moment.
Chaotic neutral: If you complain a lot and keep saying your ticket has high priority, you’ll automatically have lower priority than the guy that doesn’t really care when I do something
I’m pretty sure I’ve done most of these at some point or another.
It really depends whether I like you or not.
Liking my users is entirely dependent on how much work you make me do, and how difficult that work becomes because of your personality.
I’ve gotten tickets that were literally “$thing is broken”, or “help! Call me!” With no information given, not even a callback number. I’ve also gotten a rambling voicemail, in which a user describes an issue with a piece of software and doesn’t identify themselves, not provide any callback information. The CID on the voicemail wasn’t available either, and since I work with several companies doing support, I couldn’t even identify the client, nevermind the specific user.
There’s also the needy users that create tickets for every prompt, dialog, message, delay… Pretty much anything that could happen at all ever, whether it affects their ability to do their work or not.
There’s also the unavailable users, they are not available ever, at any time, for any reason. I have literally gotten critical tickets which require me to access the users workstation to fix, while it is logged in as the user, and I could call less than 5 minutes after they create the ticket, and they’re busy. Email them and they have an out of the office message, or reply with something about them being in a meeting (with no information about when they will be free), or simply don’t reply at all. After a few weeks of trying to contact them to connect and resolve their very simple (but “critical”) issue and getting nowhere, close the ticket, only to be met with a flurry of emails from them about how the problem isn’t solved. Immediately call or reply and you get voicemail and silence.
Most of my users do fine, and it’s usually a minority that are troublemakers, and I want to make that clear… But the troublemakers are the driving force for me to find ways to fix pretty much every problem without ever opening their system though remote control. I can do all kinds of things from registry edits and hacks, to writing and scheduling PowerShell scripts to fix their shit every time they log in, and deploy that by a remote PowerShell command prompt, and nothing more.
Yeah William, you might be the c-whatever bullshit, but if the issue is sooo fucking critical, make five goddamned minutes for me to fix your shit or it’s not getting fixed. I don’t care if you own the goddamned planet, I can’t fix your shit without access.
There’s also the needy users that create tickets for every prompt, dialog, message, delay… Pretty much anything that could happen at all ever, whether it affects their ability to do their work or not.‘’
This could be weaponized incompetence. “Oh I keep having issues with my computer that interfere with my work, so I can’t work and IT is incompetent and can’t help me, look at all these tickets and how long IT takes. I just can’t get any work done!”
Oh yeah, I’ve seen that. People hit the most minor roadblock and just stop working until someone else fixes their shit.
It’s an attitude of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas!”
I don’t like those people either.
I tend to lean towards neutral good it seems
