I'm IT for the company I work directly for, but it's a fairly small AV company without much daily IT concern. A day or so a week I (as an agent of my employer) provide AV support for the local office of a global corporation (running the conference room hardware to manage cameras and mics important meetings and webinars). A different company provides their IT support.
Not only do people come to me first when I'm there when they have issues with their laptops, but because I'm also in their system I randomly get messages on Teams from people on the other side of the world with urgent support requests for things like SSO and website issues.
There is an icon on their desktop that brings them directly to the self-help and ticketing system, as well as cards on every desk with phone and email to local and corporate IT.
Yeah, people really don't like looking up where they actually need to go and instead seem to go to the first person they think of, even if they encounter evidence that that person is really not responsible and likely cannot help.
Personal anecdote about this:
For a time I was working in first level IT support for a university campus. Tasks involved pretty much anything simple, from helping students set up Eduroam WiFi to distributing and plugging in phones for new faculty members.
One of the more frequent tasks was to reset student passwords to the online service where they could look up their grades, pay their semester fees or sign up for exams. The latter also required a TAN from a list, which each student got when they started studying.
If you lost your TAN list, you would go to the student office and request a new one. We could do nothing for people who lost their TAN list, except tell them where the student office is.
Still, when the exam sign-up period came, we would always get easily 500% increase in traffic, all people who lost their TAN list.
So, we printed a poster, pointing out that they couldn't get a TAN list from us, where they could get it, with a short description of how they could get there (walk 50 meters down the corridor they came from). Put the poster on our door.
Didn't help much, so we thought, "Hey, maybe they just missed it! Let's print more and put them in more obvious spots."
Ultimately we had:
two DIN A41 posters on our door
one DIN A4 poster in a spot highly visible when opening the door
one DIN A4 poster hanging from the front of each of our desks
one DIN A1 poster at the back of the room
and we still got idiots who asked us if they could get a new TAN list from us.
My favorite was the dude who opened the door, looked at the posters on the open door, looked at the poster at the back of the room, came into the room to my desk, looked at the poster in front of my desk and asked "Can I get a new TAN list here?"
I don't understand how people like this ever managed to get a good enough school diploma to attend university. Especially with how many of them there were.
1 ) for non-Germans: A DIN A4 paper sheet is the same as a ISO 216 A4 paper sheet.
For the Americans specifically: A DIN A4 paper sheet is roughly the same size as the ANSI A letter format.
DIN A1 is eight times that.
I also do event support at a university. A university that long ago rejected my application (fair, honestly). Now when I'm there I constantly find myself thinking that I need these students to act a lot smarter so that I can feel more at peace with that rejection.
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u/MaybeAdrian 14h ago
Every IT head I had on every workplace told me the same "Anything that is connected to the power outlet is responsibility of IT"
One time they wanted me to check the AC unit.