P.H.B.
My boss Ted* can never be wrong. Whenever backed into a corner, realizing that he is wrong, Ted poses a bogus question that can only be answered one way, and which, when answered, at first thought seems to bolster his position, but which is totally irrelevant. Example? Sure:
Ted is the manager of the IT division at our public organization whose responsibility includes the IT Help Desk. My job is to schedule the Help Desk work that comes in so that everything is fixed in a timely manner, and efficiently. We don’t want to send three technicians to work on three different problems at the same off-site location; we’ll send one tech to take care of all three, prioritizing as appropriate. This is an extremely simplified description, and I have many other responsibilities, but this gives you an idea of one of my primary duties.
I have a meeting every morning with all the field technicians, local technicians, and phone support technicians, where we go over all outstanding work and brainstorm on difficult problems, and I reassign things as necessary. At a recent meeting, Ted tried to make a point about our opinion of a problem vs. the customers’ opinion of the problem. He used a recent trouble call from a conference room as an example. While we may have interpreted the problem as dead batteries in a wireless keyboard, or maybe the frequency of this keyboard being changed inadvertently by the user, the customer’s real problem is that he cannot control his PowerPoint presentation. I completely agree with this part of his argument.
I used as an example a recent problem I was troubleshooting where, on a customer’s primary PC, large .TIF images were taking up to two seconds to open from a document server on the network. When the same images were opened on a dedicated research PC (identically configured), they opened in about 1/2 second. I explained to the group that, at first, two seconds seemed plenty quick to me. Before I was able to add the fact that I am still troubleshooting, since 1 1/2 seconds is truly a big difference when you open thousands of images a day as this customer does, I was cut off. Ted said that not only did he think that my opinion was completely irrelevant, but that he was stunned that I would share that opinion with the rest of the group. After all, it didn’t matter at all what I thought, as along as we met the needs of the customer. I (mostly) agreed with him on that point, but explained that I completely disagreed with him about having an opinion and sharing it with the rest of the group in this informal pow-wow we have each morning.
I brought up how we, including Ted himself, routinely make fun of a certain customer who calls the Help Desk often, for mostly simple problems that have been solved many times before. We joke about her to each other, never to anyone else, and we are always nothing but professional when dealing with her time and again. We obviously ALL have an opinion of her, and we share that opinion with the others in our group, but we never let it compromise the service we provide. I had, in effect, shown him that he does the very thing for which he was currently berating me.
His response was to bring up an article he read recently about how many organizations are outsourcing their Help Desk. How it would probably save the organization money to farm it out, at the expense of customer service. If we are going to start second guessing the customer’s real problems, and inserting our own interpretations of what the problem is, and having a different opinion than the customer, then we might as well let some call center in India answer the phones and troubleshoot the problems that come in. Is that what we really want? Will that be the best thing for the organization, service-wise? He actually asked these two questions of us.
How can you answer loaded questions like those? Obviously, the answer to both questions is no. Someone walking into the meeting when these questions were asked would think that we had been suggesting the opposite until Ted showed us the light. Of course his questions had no bearing on the previous example I was sharing, but because we were “forced” into answering his questions in the way he wanted them answered, it made it seem as if we were acknowledging that he was completely right about the whole thing from the beginning.
Some people just piss me off.
Not his real name of course.
Add comment June 24th, 2003