The Support Joke
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Great story, Grant - thanks!
The scary thing is that I just mailed your post to a colleague, and we can both completely see that happening at our current company. I've just spent three and a half days battling a problem in our current development project because us developers have only been given restricted rights on the network and test machines... and the app I'm developing needed to do replication between two database servers running SQL 2k5 and interface over the network with a third server, on which the app actually sits. Kinda hard to do when you can't set anything up with Administrator privileges...
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C8H10N4O2
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Not as funny, but maybe some of your Support Desk readers could identify with this.
Unlike yourself, my associations with support desks have always been at the other end – the user. I generally feel like a failure when I turn to the Support Desk for help but over the years there have been a number of occasions when I have found it necessary to program the support desk phone number into my autodial keys. One such occasion followed the purchase of a new suite of CAD software for which I was the self appointed administrator. After spending the best part of a week trying to install the system (most of which was performed while trying to hold the telephone receiver under my chin), I attend the much needed one week Administrator Training course at the suppliers business centre. I know this is the wrong way around but I was too enthusiastic/impatient to leave the equipment in the box until I had completed the training. Now to the point of this story if you haven’t already gone to sleep – during one of the numerous breaks from the training, I thought it would be a good idea to meet the very patient support desk staff in person since they where in the same building. During this meeting, we browsed through my open support calls with a view to closing some down. My eye was drawn to a particular field in their customer support database placed next to the Customer name field labelled as “WF#” in which I appeared to have a value of “3”. Asking what this referred to, I was only told it was for internal use and he would elaborate no further
. It was many weeks later after establishing a close working relationship with one of the support engineers that I was privileged to be let into the inner circle of those that know that the “WF#” field referred to “Wally Factor” 
and used by the Support Engineers to determine what level to pitch the support at. I was much relieved to find that a value of “1” was “Expert User” while a “9” would be used for someone still looking for the On/Off switch. I hope I progressed to a “WF#1”!!!As a side note, I should add that this was in the UK and many years before the data protection act. Probably now replaced with something like “Expertise Level” which is far less interesting.
Regards, Malcolm
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