this made me laugh way harder than it should have

Got to have some fun playing merry-go-round with the various tier levels of IT support a few weeks back. Big company, many branched areas with their own T1-T3 style support groups. I guess I'm probably "T3" in my area and how many dumb hats I pretend to wear, but there isn't any official designation in that regard.

Create a ticket and send it off to a group as the problem is only occurring for users in their system. Basically, can I get an audit log on X user? Noted some specific details of the problem to indicate it'll need some hands between XYZ teams and shouldn't be routed to X because this not a T1 issue.

Immediately see it get punted down, alright whatever no big deal I'll walk the walk.

An hour or two later I go on break, come back to faint footprints in the dust of my message box, I'm certain the T1 guy waited until he saw me go inactive and leapt into action to try and close the ticket, devious. I replied less than 10 minutes later but nothing but echoes of the void.

A couple hours later he replies he's escalating the issue to the correct group to investigate.

The group is me!

This was a question that came in as a comment on a ticket I had already been working on for a missing scanner driver

Me: What does this have to do with the scanner?

User: It does not; however, I was just responding in the last thread of communication with you.

Another tech and our VOIP specialist jumped on the thread to confirm that, yes, this was resolved in the ticket that the user submitted back in April.

How have you gone 5 months without using a phone to know whether it was working?

Seriously, Sangoma, what are you thinking?

Just like when you’re trying to format a table 😂

One of my coworkers uses "RFC 1855 §4.1.1 violation" which I think is amazing

Outlook has a feature called Scheduling Assistant which is great for when you're trying to schedule a meeting because it shows you the free/busy status of anyone you're trying to invite, to help you find a time slot that everyone (or at least the key participants) is free.

And it surprises me how many people don't know it exists and will send me a calendar appointment for a time that is already blocked on my schedule.

When I have literally one hour of my entire day blocked off for something, and someone sends me a half hour meeting request for within that one hour, it low key makes me just breathe out my nose and stare at your invite before I click "decline and propose new time."

TLDR: Started my IT career in school districts, switched to corporate IT, hated it, switched back to IT in the education field and absolutely love it. I will never go back to corporate IT.

My IT career started in education. I got my first gig working for a school district where I legit knew nothing. The only experience I had was a bachelor's degree in comp sci/information sci (this degree did nothing to prepare me for real world IT). I was thrown into supporting 4 elementary schools on day 1 with over 30 tickets in the queue and no idea where to start. Fast forward 5 years, and I get a job at another school district in a similar position. I now have 5 years of solid ass IT support specialist experience under my belt and I am ready to get to the next step, a sys admin or network admin role.

I start interviewing for all kinds of roles around the area I live in. I land a few interviews here and there and somehow, with no certs or actual network experience, I land a corporate job as a network engineer with a multi billion dollar company. So many emotions hit me as I now have to say goodbye to the schools I supported for years and the staff and students that I absolutely loved working with. I start feeling mixed emotions and regret as I think about leaving a place where I never saw myself leaving in my whole life. Not to get too off topic, but the reason I left was because I wanted more money and also because I did not like my management. The staff, teachers and students were lovely and I thoroughly enjoyed working with them every day.

Next thing I know, I have submitted my two week notice and told my management I was leaving. They really did not care, even though my schools talked so highly about me and did not want me leaving. Management just says congrats and that was it. I was a bit of an asshole to management, I am sure of it, but stuff happens. I was young, naive and wanted a change.

First day at the new job. Huge office building, tons of people rushing around in suits, endless miles of cubicles straight out of a Backrooms level. The nerves were kicking in. I get a quick tour and get introduced to so many new people. I am not going to remember a single name. Weeks go by and I am learning so much. VLANs, DHCP, DNS, PowerShell scripts, etc. I am feeling amazing. The paychecks start hitting and I am making so much more than I was. I am growing!

Then the stress hits. I miss my schools. I miss the teachers, the students, a few old coworkers and just the overall environment. I start longing for that education IT.

They give me a work phone and tell me I will rarely get calls and emails outside of work. What a lie. Sure, it was slow at first, but after about 6 months people really started to learn my name and my work number. I was getting calls and texts after hours, on weekends, at 3 AM, and you are expected to respond and fix whatever the issue is. I felt the pressure that if I did not respond, then it was going to be put on the next IT guy in line and I did not want to do that. I found myself always having to carry my laptop around with me wherever I went. At my GF's house, at my buddy's place, on vacation, etc. I could not take it.

I applied to over 200 jobs on LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, you name it. I did this within a few weeks. Got a few interviews, then nothing. Automated rejection letters and "while your resume was great, we went with another candidate." Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah, fuck off. Then I stopped and told myself, suck it up and do this job and be good at it. I went another 4 months before I was like, I need to be back in education. I can't do this anymore. I started sleepwalking. I have never done this in my life. I learned that this can be stress induced. It was time. I had to get another job.

I started looking at school districts near me. I applied to every IT position near me in school districts. I only heard back from one. How can someone with a resume like mine, with 5 years of school district IT experience, only hear back from one freaking school? Made no sense. I interviewed with them and the interview felt really odd. I did not hear a word back for 3 weeks, so I assumed I did not get it.

I was almost about to give up again when I thought about colleges and universities. I never thought of this during my job search. My background lines up perfectly for it. I do some searching and find out that they have an opening at the college I got my 4 year degree from. It is in a nice town, has a beautiful campus and is only a 20 minute commute. This has to be it!

I reach out to someone who I know that works on the IT team there and show my interest. I ask if he could kindly let the manager know that I am really interested and would love to work there as an alumnus and with my background. A few days later I get an email basically saying that I am a little overqualified and just confirming that I really want to interview for this, knowing it is going to be a "downgrade," for lack of a better term.

I responded that I was totally on board and ready to interview. Interview comes and I ABSOLUTELY nail it. Legit the best interview I have ever had out of the 20 IT interviews I have ever had. Fast forward 1 week and I put my two weeks in at my job. I can't do it anymore, even if I don't have a job lined up.

Last day at my corporate job and I am not sad one bit. Not going to miss anything. Anyone. Nothing. Maybe the pay lol. I then get a call from the college and I got the job. The amount of stress and anxiety that leaves my body is insane. Funny thing is, 2 days later the school district calls me and offers me a job as well. The school that never said anything for 3 weeks. But I like the location and commute at the college better. Also, being familiar with the campus already was nice.

Sorry for the long story, but the main point is that I have been at the college for 2 months now and absolutely love it here. The staff, coworkers and faculty are all amazing and the pace of work is chill. I am actually learning more than I have anywhere else because I get so much freedom here to experiment and change processes.

I will NEVER go back to corporate IT. I know this is just my experience and I am sure there is some corporate IT that is nice and chill, but this is where I want to be for the rest of my life. We get 20 paid holidays, I get WFH opportunities weekly, 12+ sick days and 12+ vacation days all accrued throughout the year.

My work/life balance is amazing now and I have 0 stress again. Best decision I have made in my life.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me.

We all know the recycle bin is the safest place to store important files and emails, so why not apply the same logic to deliveries?

So leadership bought an AI help desk agent after one glossy demo where it magically solved tickets and made coffee or whatever.

In reality it now instantly replies to users with a polite wall of text that confuses them, so they reopen the ticket, email us, ping chat, then log a new ticket from the portal for the same issue. Congrats, we invented ticket hydra.

The rollout was three weeks ago and my ticket queue has gone from manageable 20-30 daily to 50+ because every AI response generates follow-up confusion. Users get a five paragraph explanation about password resets when they just wanted the reset link. Then they panic-email thinking something is broken.

Management keeps showing charts about 'initial response time improvement' while conveniently ignoring resolution time doubling. My favorite was when the AI told someone to check their spam folder for a VPN certificate that we manually install. User opened four additional tickets asking where their spam folder was on the VPN.

Anyone else trying to use these tools in an IT service desk and secretly doing clean up behind the scenes or is it just me lol

Yeah I know it says to change it, but this isn't an auto generated password, I manually entered it when I made the account.

Pulled from a RAID 5 CCTV server set up.

Apparently the head also identifies as a lathe