I only have two hands no matter HOW LOUD YOU YELL!

We in IT understand that it’s necessary to fix stuff for you, the user (that’s what you pay us for). But what we don’t understand is how so many users think that we only service them. There are numerous times where I am working on an outage in Asia or the UK (a major multi-site outage) and someone comes over to my desk and says, “I NEED to be able to pull this Unix report right away! And you need to get it done now so that I can make my presentation that I should have prepped for last week but waited till five minutes before it to start.” (Note: I probably modified the second statement.) I’d like to take a moment and break down why this will not be possible no matter HOW LOUD YOU YELL.

1. “I NEED” - We all need. We all need something done for us later, now or yesterday but we can’t always get what we want. We have more than one person to help out and your probably probably isn’t nearly as important as theirs.
2. “to be able to” - This is a very interesting part of the sentence. You probably would have been able to run this report if you had worked on it last week or the week before like you were supposed to. Now you might just have to wait till I get around to fixing the problem (that odds are a user, likely the one who sits next to you, broke).
3. “pull this Unix report” - Interestingly enough, I do not even have a login to most of the Unix systems at my company and I have not been trained in how our business system even runs. On top of this, it’s clearly been explained to you what my job is and still you come to me to fix it.
4. “right away.” - Please see point number 2.

Now I know what you’re thinking — the IT group is a service group and that’s what you have us for. While that may be true, we are also trained to not only prioritize what we work on but also ignore YELLING. That’s right, yelling never solved a situation when you were 2 years old and wanted another pudding and it probably won’t fix your issues today when you’re 45 years old and still want an extra pudding.

So please, understand that an IT person’s job is not to make your job more difficult but it is to make sure that the organization as a whole runs well. This may involved tell you no sometimes or simply making you wait another 15 minutes for your report. And remember, if you send us your IT issues, we might write about them as long as you keep this simple rule in mind — you’re not the only one.