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How not to start a conversation

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  • How not to start a conversation

    Part of my job is tier three support, where I'm not part of our local helpdesk but get pushed things that are either too niche for them or which need special privs to do. For the most part, we handle the trouble tickets in email, despite some users *really* wanting to talk. The majority of what we do involves command-line paths, long URLs, needing to see error output, etc.. the sort of things that rather suck to try and spell out on the phone. Background done.

    Today I got a ticket from one of the people who is a real hassle to support. He's in IT himself, same parent group but different sub-department, but is a pain to deal with. Lots of emphasis of words in caps ("this is NOT working"), lots of talking about how things should "obviously" be but aren't, that sort of thing. He reported three issues around a service in our ticketing system. I replied in mail detailing what he needed to do for each, then went to do other work. After a few hours without a reply I put the ticket out of mind, when the phone rang. No caller ID, and I picked up to find him calling. After the fast greeting, he went straight to:

    "I'm calling because I can't really explain myself well in mail. Looking at your response, neither can you."

    Great start to things. He started talking about the first of his reported issues, giving me the full story behind that issue. I broke in when he took a breath to repeat what I said in mail, that he was trying to run things for a non-existent account, no more, no less. He immediately cut that off to claim that issue #1 didn't matter anyway and moved on to talk quickly about issue #3 for a minute. Before I could go to follow-up there, he then shifted to entirely new issue #4, which was the *real* problem to him, which hadn't been in the ticket and which had nothing to do with the other issues other than being for the same service, but which was treated as the obvious result of the other three issues.

    It actually did come to a good close. As it turned out, the issues weren't currently happening and he only wanted to know cause in case it happened again. Very fair request, and I obliged once I got the info I actually needed, but it would be *so* awfully nice to not go through that starting set of accusations and dodging.
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