The day I changed sides and joined a support team, I learnt not to trust users like me

A senior IT support manager at one of my previous clients’ workplaces – a national daily morning newspaper – memorably confessed to the rest of us on his team that he had experienced what it was like “on the other side”.

This was a startling confession given that it was only 8.30am.

We were crammed as usual into the tiny project room for our daily breakfast pow-wow and had only just begun to settle down after jostling each other trying to find the best place where one could enjoy a sly microsleep.

Finding the ideal place in that box-room wasn’t as simple as hiding behind a taller colleague. You needed to find something sturdy to steady yourself against.

We had heard that a few months earlier, some guy tried to catch a few Zs during a stand-up meeting in that room while leaning casually on the wall. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten that it wasn’t really a wall but partition board that was about as sturdy as Japanese shōji. Two minutes into his snooze, the partition board gradually buckled under his weight until it opened up completely and allowed him to tumble through. He woke up perplexed to find himself unexpectedly outside the meeting room, lying on carpet tiles, staring at ceiling tiles.

I’m told that everyone else just let him fall through the wall, in slow motion. Nobody tried to stop him, they just watched him go. That’s the great thing about IT teams: you can always count on your co-workers.

Anyway, I digress. Startled awake by the IT support manager’s announcement about his experience “on the other side”, we were agog to hear what it was like beyond the veil.

He meant, of course, that he had experienced what it was like to be an ordinary user at the company, forced to rely upon the vagaries of IT support to get things working.

Temporarily relocated to another floor while Buildings Management tore apart and rebuilt his cosy office – necessitated following an anonymous tip to HR that all the offices’ partitions walls were unsafe – this IT support manager quickly discovered that it could take days rather than hours to get a PC properly connected to the network in that part of the building for the first time. He was unable to say how long it took to get new shares set up on the NAS because he was still waiting for this to be done. As for getting a landline phone installed at his new desk, he has given up on this entirely.

There was a time when I would use this anecdote to criticise IT support… or whatever they call it now: 'customer services'? ‘special operations’?

Not any more. Not since I changed sides in the opposite direction. That was about 12 years ago.

Since then, I frequently bail and switch between the two sides – user versus abuser – without thinking. This became a natural extension of my software training work, by which classroom training would sometimes need to be followed up with on-site training support, especially on large sites such as newspapers.

Initially I thought it would be fun. Once I grew up, I realised that accepting a support role should be done with trepidation. Putting oneself forward as someone offering 'support' makes you a marked man. It twists the minds of otherwise sensible users and brings out the stupid in them because they know they can use you as their safety net.

It's a bit like when my Dad would switch on the satnav in his car: he’d immediately cease looking at what's happening on the other side of the windscreen and put his trust in what the satnav told him to do. The satnav says 'turn left' and my dad would obediently swing hard on the steering wheel and shoot up someone's front drive without bothering to wait for the junction ahead.

Picture me on my first day on the other side a dozen years ago, gaily frolicking (uh-huh) in an open-plan field of fresh users, publicly outed as the day's 'training support' man, besuited and brandishing two mobile phones like some kind of middle-class urban rioter. Got a question about content management, metadata, InDesign or Photoshop? I'm the dude.

The first question rolls in: “What's my login?”

My answer reeks of professionalism: “I'm not really IT support but perhaps I can try and find out for you.” And I do. What a pro.

The second question of the day is… “What's my login?”

OK, I'll do my best. The third question of the day is the same, as indeed is the fourth, and so on. By the 20th occasion, all civility is lost and my reply has been modified to: “I don't know, moron, it's YOUR login, the one you've been using for the last five fucking years. Type it in properly, shitforbrains.”

I want to scream: “I'm a highly qualified, certified instructor! Stop asking me IT stuff I don't know the answers to!” Trainers are highly strung, don’t you know. Or they ought to be.

By the afternoon, I find myself simply staring in stony silence at one user who has forgotten how to scroll from the top half of a document to the bottom half (he claims that his computer at home doesn't need to do such a thing), and when someone asks me to plug the power cable into the back of his display because it has just fallen out, I sense myself close to committing an act of physical violence.

Pretty quickly, I began to suspect that I might not be cut out for IT support. Big respect to those of you who do it for a living. I feel shame for all the daft things I've probably said to you at all the companies I have ever worked for. Whatever you earn, it's not enough.

But the dickhead of the day award went to a user who complained that “the system” (ref: tools, bad workmen) was producing problematic documents. He was making pages for the newspaper and the printers kept phoning him up to say his pages contained errors. Obviously, “the system” was at fault. What else could it be?

As per standard practice, I asked him to repeat the steps that led to the problem, while I watched over his shoulder. All seemed to go well, even when he triggered the export script to generate the newspaper page as a press-ready PDF. Then he chucked the PDF into a hot folder that sent it down to the printers.

“No, hang on,” I said. “Let's have a look at it first.”

“No,” he replied curtly.

Er, wot?

“I don't have time to look at the pages. I'm too busy.”

Well, hang on, I wasn’t asking him to proofread the 2.5pt small print at the bottom of a vasectomy waiver. I just thought it might be sensible to take a few seconds to give a one-page document a quick once-over to check for the kind of error that could cost the company tens of thousands of pounds to correct later on. How could he casually send it off without even a cursory peek?

“The computer is supposed to do that.”

AI isn’t quite there yet, and it certainly wasn’t 12 years ago.

Ever the professional, I suggested a solution. I recommended that he keep his eyes closed while typing. It would only waste his valuable time to use his eyes, and the computer really ought to get his keystrokes right anyway.

He didn’t seem keen on that idea, so I went for plan B. I unplugged his computer display so that he would no longer have to waste time and trouble looking at it. I was halfway across the open-plan floor with it tucked under my arm before he worked out that this might cause him a problem.

And at that moment, all around the country, thousands of kittens were massacred and dads swerved into random people’s front drives.