The User Guide

I’ve spent the last 30 or so years in the IT world, much of that time has been spent trying to work out what set of rules the users use when interacting with the people that administer their systems. While looking for information on that subject I came across the following documentation, just looking at the title was enough to convince me that these were obviously the official guidelines on interacting with a systems admin. There is obviously a separate guide for each gender (although I think I may be missing one), these guides detail how to interact with your administrators. Now as any administrator will tell you, the principal goal is a nice easy life. Not running around like a headless chicken trying to put out the biggest fire (which is what tends to happen), well much of the time or so it seems. In order to satisfy the requirements of the users one has to make an effort, this starts with the first contact – here is where the objectives are set. A great pointer here is that you should never indicate that you’ll be able to resolve the problem, even if you are 100% certain you never say “Oh It’ll just take a few minutes”. Because after just a few minutes you’ll realise that it wasn’t actually the correct thing to say, of course at this point the user will arrive and pop that question “Is it fixed then”?

This as many a systems administrator will tell you, is the point at which you have to restrain yourself from choking the living shit out of the user. As I’ve said previously in this blog, the corporate culture that we all work in doesn’t look too kindly on the death of an employee. So restraint really is the order of the day here, although imagining the offending user turning Puce with your hands round his or her neck does give a certain amount of satisfaction. There is still a great deal of resistance from the users when it comes to change, the interminable cycles of end to end testing, the long over lunch meetings filled with a monotone whine from the users as it’s all too difficult for them. Just for once it would be nice to find just one of the users enthused about some of the changes and enhancements being made to the systems, I’m sure that you know what I mean a kind of Muppet Banzai for want of a better expression.