There’s one particular job where I had to do this bullshit (just a typical NGO hellhole) but there some people who were on the level where could drop all the pretense and be very terse with without worrying about causing offence. Obviously any of the IT team would get that kind of bare bones no-nonsense style of emails out of me because I know what they’re like and what they need - and it sure ain’t some fucking flowery essay.
It was all “Problem -> Attempted solutions in bullet points -> My hunch about the cause -> What I need from them and a deadline if I’m working to one”.
Anyway, whatever I was doing made enough of an impression that the IT team started calling the office I was based at specifically to talk to me about IT problems at my site and to get me to do any physical stuff they couldn’t do remotely like identifying a status light, hitting a button, or plugging something in, even when it wasn’t my personal IT problem and all of this stuff was completely outside the purview of my job.
Before I figured out what was going on this would cause me to panic because I’d get a call from the national office number or someone would inform me that there’s an IT team member that’s trying to find me and I’d be wondering wtf I was about to get in trouble over.
Turns out that they just needed someone who was capable of following instructions and who was able to communicate things using specific language and they managed to find their guy on the inside. I mean, I get it - I’ve done tech support for family and friends where it feels like you’re pulling teeth but it was weird knowing that there was this whole IT team that knew me by name and would use me exclusively as their human interface for that site when I had never met any of them in my life and often I’d be away from that office for days on end.
Part of me was like “Goddamn, you’d prefer to wait 3 days just to get me to do some 2 minute job for you?” and another part of me was like “Of course the IT office has an informal list of all the site names, each with particular staff members that they have identified as being above the ‘typing the word Google into the Google search bar to bring up Google’ level of tech literacy that they share amongst the team.”
Turns out that they just needed someone who was capable of following instructions and who was able to communicate things using specific language and they managed to find their guy on the inside.
This is any office job where you have to communicate with different teams honestly, not just IT. Getting things done is just building a list of competent people you can call to bypass all the various filters. One of the most common conversations at work is just “who was your guy at X who got Y done?”.
It’s extremely funny when you get blowhards who think the way to get shit done is to talk to the boss though. The small business tyrant clients we have just jump to the “I’ll just call the boss then” the moment there is the slightest bit of friction or delay and it always makes me laugh. My boss is actually a pretty standup guy and really good at what he does, but if you’re not important enough he will literally wait months to action something and these guys never are.
Y’know what’s funny?
There’s one particular job where I had to do this bullshit (just a typical NGO hellhole) but there some people who were on the level where could drop all the pretense and be very terse with without worrying about causing offence. Obviously any of the IT team would get that kind of bare bones no-nonsense style of emails out of me because I know what they’re like and what they need - and it sure ain’t some fucking flowery essay.
It was all “Problem -> Attempted solutions in bullet points -> My hunch about the cause -> What I need from them and a deadline if I’m working to one”.
Anyway, whatever I was doing made enough of an impression that the IT team started calling the office I was based at specifically to talk to me about IT problems at my site and to get me to do any physical stuff they couldn’t do remotely like identifying a status light, hitting a button, or plugging something in, even when it wasn’t my personal IT problem and all of this stuff was completely outside the purview of my job.
Before I figured out what was going on this would cause me to panic because I’d get a call from the national office number or someone would inform me that there’s an IT team member that’s trying to find me and I’d be wondering wtf I was about to get in trouble over.
Turns out that they just needed someone who was capable of following instructions and who was able to communicate things using specific language and they managed to find their guy on the inside. I mean, I get it - I’ve done tech support for family and friends where it feels like you’re pulling teeth but it was weird knowing that there was this whole IT team that knew me by name and would use me exclusively as their human interface for that site when I had never met any of them in my life and often I’d be away from that office for days on end.
Part of me was like “Goddamn, you’d prefer to wait 3 days just to get me to do some 2 minute job for you?” and another part of me was like “Of course the IT office has an informal list of all the site names, each with particular staff members that they have identified as being above the ‘typing the word Google into the Google search bar to bring up Google’ level of tech literacy that they share amongst the team.”
This is any office job where you have to communicate with different teams honestly, not just IT. Getting things done is just building a list of competent people you can call to bypass all the various filters. One of the most common conversations at work is just “who was your guy at X who got Y done?”.
It’s extremely funny when you get blowhards who think the way to get shit done is to talk to the boss though. The small business tyrant clients we have just jump to the “I’ll just call the boss then” the moment there is the slightest bit of friction or delay and it always makes me laugh. My boss is actually a pretty standup guy and really good at what he does, but if you’re not important enough he will literally wait months to action something and these guys never are.