Advice for new Helpdesk Analyst

My morning ritual at work is at follows: I roll into the office, scamper into the IT cave, drop my bag down, turn my computer on and while it boots I make a bee line for the local coffee dispenser. Unfortunately, the closest caffeine distribution device is located in the lunch room area, outside to confines of the technological inner sanctum.

Some of us old timers faintly remember “the golden age” when our jolly brigade of tech nerds was allowed to host a dedicated productivity pot in our poorly lit bunker. An unfortunate accident involving a fresh pot landing liquid first into some relatively new equipment put an end to that glorious era. But that’s a story for another time. I will just say we discovered an interesting double standard that day: when users spill coffee on their laptops the management treats them like little cuddly puppies – they get a light slap on the wrist, a wagging of the finger followed by “Awwwww, you poor thing – you know we can’t stay mad at you. We will get you a brand, spanking new laptop right away”. On the other hand when we accidentally spill coffee onto inessential spare parts that were just gathering dust, we get coffee privileges revoked. There is no justice in the corporate world. No justice at all.

But that was long time ago, and probably not true. All tales spun by seasoned sysadmins and grizzled hackers tend to get embellished over time. How do you know when one of us starts making stuff up? It’s easy – just look for the part when the protagonist does something cool, or says something witty. That part is usually hindsight-driven embellishment. Oh, and the parts where users are being ridiculously stupid, and to unbelievably dumb things? Those tend to be 100% true. The sad part is that you just can’t make up this shit.

Since our dedicated coffee pot was taken away we must tank up in the lunch room along with all the other poor souls damned to toil at our company. As I made my way to our glorious and thrice blessed wake-up machine I completely missed a minor crowd of the NOC dwellers conspiring in the corner. The powers that be have delivered onto us a new “Help Desk Analyst”. A fresh, uncorrupted and optimistic looking application support technician was parked in front of the IT cave, and we were ordered to get him trained, plug him into the phone system and prevent him from jamming sharp objects into his eyeballs after few hours of interaction with our users. My fellow geeks gathered together, desperately trying to avoid the responsibility of babysitting the newb all day.

When I returned, coffee cup in hand, I was greeted by conspiratory grins from the corner of the room. They beckoned me to come closer, and filled me in on the new guy situation. Apparently someone had to train him.

So I did the only thing I could do in that situation. I loudly screeched “NOT IT!” and watched them grin, unfazed.

“Oh, fuck… You guys already did the ‘not-it’ thing, didn’t you?”

They nodded in unison.

“Well, why can’t The Intern do it?” I stabbed my finger in the direction of The Intern who, like me, just finished his pilgrimage to the land of Lunch Room. The sudden movement startled the poor fellow, making him yelp like a frightened animal and splatter some of his freshly brewed coffee on the floor.

“First of, The Intern has a name…” one of my coworkers explained “…though I can’t remember it at this time. Secondly, he is an intern.”

So it was up to me to teach the poor new fellow some of the basics. I will spare you the gory details, but here are some of the tidbits of knowledge I shared with him that day. I figured some of you guys may find these amusing and/or helpful. The new guy sure did.

1. First off, when you are working help desk in a bigger or smaller office you have to remember that your users are going to be white collar, educated professionals. Their computer is their primary work tool. One they use for 8+ hours every single day. Most people who start in this line of business assume that this would make the users at least somewhat proficient at using their tool. This is a mistake. When you pick up this phone, assume the person on the other line is basically Brendan Fraser from the movie Blast from the Past. By that I mean a person who spent the last 35 years in some atomic bunker deep underground, and just emerged from there yesterday. While they know what a computer is in theory, and can probably turn it on and off, and type stuff into it but that’s about the extent of their knowledge.

2. Never assume the user is actually at the computer or that the program they are having problems with is actually open. For all you know, the users just stepped out for a smoke or is standing in line at a local burger joint. Why would they call you when not at their computer? Productivity I guess. Plus they assume you can just fix it over the internet. You know, log into the laptop that is turned off and in the trunk of their car and fix it. This happens more than you think.

3. Most users only know 3 applications: Word, Excel and Outlook. If you are lucky, they might have also heard about Powerpoint. Everything else is a mysterious land of confusion, populated by fox fires and other wild things. Users tame these scary and unfamiliar things by giving them nicknames – usually taken from partial name of the company that made it. So they might call you about the Adobe thing, the Photo thing, the zips, the Microsofts, etc..

   Sometimes users get attached to certain name, and refused to let go of it even when you change the underlying system. For example, back in the ancient times our company used a custom made time and expense tracking system made by some company called Velocity Systems. It got replaced by a completely different web based system years ago. Old users never stopped referring to that system as “Velocity”, and new ones pick it up and repeat it without realizing why.

   If you ever talk to someone who is not confused about applications they are running, and can communicate the problem directly without using some made up of half remembered buzzwords and brands then you are talking to a power user. Enjoy it, because they don’t call often.

4. Users newer write down error messages. When they write them down, they usually completely fixate on some random detail that looks cryptic and mysterious to them, but leave out the important things like the actual exception/error number, and the plain text message that was associated with it. If you ask a user for an error message expect an incomplete stack trace instead of a clear message.

5. Never assume the user knows common keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting. Make them use the context menus if available. If an application does not have a context menu for copy/paste you will have to explain in detail where the Ctrl button is located, and that it needs to be held down why pressing C and V.

6. About once a week you will get a call from a user claiming their internet is upside down or sideways. Don’t get confused. They just have a laptop that lets them flip the screen orientation. Ctrl+Alt+Arrow keys will flip it back. Make sure they write this key combination down, because otherwise they will be calling back in about a week.

7. When helping laptop users, try to find some high resolution pictures of the supported models. You will need them in order to explain where to find keys like PrtScn or to help them find the hardware WiFi switch. If you don’t point out the exact location or if you are unable to describe it’s icon/shape they probably won’t find it.

8. Assume the user cannot handle multitasking. Always frame your instructions in such a way that could be handled while running one app at a time in full screen mode.

9. Dragging and dropping is for power users only. Anything that requires a user to have more than single maximized window on the screen at the time will be profoundly difficult to explain on the phone.

10. Don’t assume the user actually understands the concept of a file system. Do not assume they store their work under “My Documents”. It is entirely more likely that they use Outlook as a file system proxy, saving all their documents as attachments. When a user asks you to help recovering a deleted file, check the “Deleted Emails” folder in Outlook before the system Recycle Bin.

11. Users will commonly “lose” files by accidentally saving them under “My Documents” or straight into the %TEMP% folder. Be prepared to recover them for them from these locations via remote desktop.

12. Never assume the users understand what a zip archive is. To them it is just a funky looking folder. Most users will always edit zipped files in place without extracting them. This usually works except some particular situations when it does not.

13. Keep in mind that most people you will be dealing with think that words: UPLOAD, DOWNLOAD, INSTALL, UPGRADE and UPDATE are synonyms of each other. If you are aiming for clarity try to avoid using these words. For example you will be “putting programs on their computer”, “pulling files from the website and onto the computer”, “bringing the application up to date”, “putting documents onto the website” and etc…

14. Similarly, most of your users assume that terms such as WEB BROWSER, THE WEB, SEARCH ENGINE, SEARCH BAR and THE INTERNET are basically different words for that blue E icon on their desktop. It is usually a good idea to say “go to the internet” when you want them to open a web browser, and “Go to Google” if you want them to make a search.

15. Most users will be unable to locate the “address bar” on their browser. If you give them a web address they will type it into the search box on their home page. For example, if you will tell a user to go to google.com they will type “www.google.com” into the bing search box, and then click the first result. If your are directing them to an internal, non-indexed site it is just easier to email them a link.

16. Users will always put “www” in front of web addresses. No exceptions. Make sure you keep this in mind when you send them to a site hosted on a non www subdomain.

17. TLD’s that are not .com, .net, .org, .edu and .gov do not exist. If you need a user to visit a .me, .co.uk, .tv or perhaps .ly site make it very, very clear not to type .com after it. Because they will do it.

18. Do not assume users know which web browser they have open. In fact, do not assume they always use the same browser. For example, if Firefox was ever set up as a default browser it will automatically open when they click on links, but they will likely still habitually access the web by clicking the blue E on the desktop. They probably won’t know the difference. Use server side browser detection scripts to work around that.

19. Get used to hearing “Fox Fire” a lot. Correcting them is pretty much a waste of time at this point.

20. When sending out a mass email always use BCC. Never actually put emails or mailing list addresses in the TO or CC fields. Users will always Reply To All on company wide memos and announcements. No exceptions.

Can you add anything to this list? What are your tips on dealing with users? Let’s continue this in the comments.