Our help desk fucking sucks. Everyone does whatever they want to do. If you want to only pick up the easy password tickets? That’s cool. If you want to leave a ticket sit dormant for days or weeks, that’s cool too…until a user complains too much, then we need to scramble and do something about it. But that’s usually just an automatic escalation out of help desk and then leads to the user getting mad that the escalated team took too long to respond to the ticket. Surveys show positive for help desk because they’re picking up easy tickets and letting the difficult ones sit and then escalate at the last minute.

We just set up a “round robin” system for my team, so they could do it for their team but haven’t for some reason. That, alone, would solve a ton of problems. But no one will implement it. I kept asking for it for my team because everything came to me and I handed them out among myself and my team but that left me with tons of tickets when I’d be absent and having to play catch up as well as users not having their tickets responded since I was out and no one would go through my tickets to get them while I was out. Really helped with that now when I take a day off and just to free up my time so I’m not constantly monitoring our escalations and doling out tickets.

And escalations…help desk does whatever they want to do. I just had a help desk tech ask me if a ticket should be escalated despite the user sharing the error saying that their laptop is not enrolled into Intune (help desk handles Intune installations/new workstation/laptop deployments). A friend of mine had an issue with Intune and I sent a ticket from their account to the help desk to work on it and help desk said “that issue should go away in a day or two. We’ll get you another workstation” without ever actually getting with the user to investigate or even knowing the remote user’s address to send the equipment to. I am constantly being given tickets that have ZERO indication why it’s being escalated or what has been tried. I swear a lot of these tickets are just escalated because they don’t want to do the work or learn the process. And some aren’t even escalated correctly. A ticket for database issues? That shouldn’t go to the database team, that should go to the sysadmin team because all escalations go there by default.

I’ve written dozens of documentation for “how to” processes and still am asked or have tickets escalated to me that are documented with clear steps on what needs to happen. Or there are past tickets that have the resolutions written out as to what was done.

Some of the end users have developed a system to Karen their tickets by putting FOR SYSADMIN despite them not even knowing whether the ticket needs to be escalated to sysadmin or development or even escalated at all. Users can’t even tell you what sysadmin does or what the difference is between sysadmin and dev, but hey, put it in the subject because it’ll get your ticket escalated to a team that actually resolves tickets! It gets a quick escalation. Help desk does whatever the user requests and escalates “because they asked us to!” Users get frustrated that tickets are sitting with help desk and not being responded to and so they Karen it and demand the help desk manager escalate and he complies and just escalates rather than addressing the issue with his team and having them follow any actual policies for escalation or SLA. SLAs are constantly being violated and no one cares. Tickets get closed with “complete” as the resolution by some technicians because they’re too lazy to put something there that explains what they did to complete the ticket. Really fun when the problem returns a year later and I have zero idea what was done, and even more fun when that tech isn’t here anymore. I have a ticket escalated to me from last week about a slowness issue on a printer. Help desk is onsite and didn’t do jack shit on it. They are physically there beside the printer to actually do some checks on network performance or check the application, and didn’t do anything. Help desk assigned me the ticket and said “I was told you’re working on this”. Literally did nothing at all. Just let the ticket sit for hours and only escalated once the user complained. The users submit tickets and then notify my team that a ticket was submitted but that’s help desk’s job to check and do due diligence and then escalate if necessary.

I’m beyond frustrated with it all. I’ve tried bringing it up to my boss and the help desk manager and no one listens or does anything. I was promoted from help desk a few years ago so I know the situation firsthand but I excelled despite not having no policies to follow since I developed my own. I tried to do something on every ticket I came across and give notes as to what I tried and/or what the issue seemed to be based on my time troubleshooting so the escalation team knew why I was escalating and what I expected of them that I couldn’t do either to permissions or just not knowing. I ignored “flags” users would use like URGENT in the subject because it doesn’t mean anything because we have an internal priority that actually means something. Users would submit a ticket about an icon missing and seriously expect us to drop everything and go to them. I didn’t ignore the ticket, but I didn’t do whatever a user asked just because they asked it to be done. I tried to work difficult tickets and learn the process (hence why I was promoted). At the very least, I tried to let the users know I received their ticket but would have a delay while I worked on something more time consuming so they wouldn’t feel like the ticket was neglected…

I have some users reaching out to me personally on tickets but I tell them that help desk needs to work the ticket. I’m frustrated with some users who don’t understand I work with multiple companies our parent company bought, and their little issue is not my sole responsibility. Yes I was hired at this office, but I have tons of responsibilities outside of that office. I have trained help desk to work on most of this because they can and it’s not my sole obligation. Some of my projects have taken a hit since this happens and that frustrates me because that is what I want to do, not focus on shit help desk should be doing. And in some cases, my team can work on some of this but these are being escalated to me and only me despite me telling help desk to not do that and to instead let the “round robin” take care of those tickets so I don’t get bogged down with tickets again.

I have sent back tickets and said this needs notes or doesn’t need escalation, you can do it and should. I send back tickets that don’t belong to my team and tell help desk such “not for sysadmin”. I’ve tried being nice and politely pointing to the knowledge base where documentation is, but I’m getting reallyyyy tired of doing that since they keep doing it and don’t seem to even check. Now I just ignore if the question was asked before and I answered or if the answer is in the knowledge base. But that often results in them escalating the ticket and saying “I reached out to you on this but got no response” and then I’m back to having to go find the knowledge base to share with them and tell them to check it for the millionth fucking time. I’m at a point where I want to start throwing help desk under the bus and tell a user “sorry this ticket went unresolved for weeks, it was sitting with help desk and they only escalated when you complained” but I feel that’s unprofessional and will just lead to more Karen-like behaviors from users demanding escalation, including times where it’s not needed and the idiots on help desk will just comply.

This isn’t exactly the time that I can jump ship with how shitty the job market is, so staying here seems like my only option now. And largely, I like my job and what I do and the team I do work with as well as other teams, my issue is with an unmanaged help desk.

Does anyone have any advice for how to deal with this?