Programmer Humor

I'm pretty sure I've done most of these at some point or another.

It really depends whether I like you or not.

Liking my users is entirely dependent on how much work you make me do, and how difficult that work becomes because of your personality.

I've gotten tickets that were literally "$thing is broken", or "help! Call me!" With no information given, not even a callback number. I've also gotten a rambling voicemail, in which a user describes an issue with a piece of software and doesn't identify themselves, not provide any callback information. The CID on the voicemail wasn't available either, and since I work with several companies doing support, I couldn't even identify the client, nevermind the specific user.

There's also the needy users that create tickets for every prompt, dialog, message, delay.... Pretty much anything that could happen at all ever, whether it affects their ability to do their work or not.

There's also the unavailable users, they are not available ever, at any time, for any reason. I have literally gotten critical tickets which require me to access the users workstation to fix, while it is logged in as the user, and I could call less than 5 minutes after they create the ticket, and they're busy. Email them and they have an out of the office message, or reply with something about them being in a meeting (with no information about when they will be free), or simply don't reply at all. After a few weeks of trying to contact them to connect and resolve their very simple (but "critical") issue and getting nowhere, close the ticket, only to be met with a flurry of emails from them about how the problem isn't solved. Immediately call or reply and you get voicemail and silence.

Most of my users do fine, and it's usually a minority that are troublemakers, and I want to make that clear.... But the troublemakers are the driving force for me to find ways to fix pretty much every problem without ever opening their system though remote control. I can do all kinds of things from registry edits and hacks, to writing and scheduling PowerShell scripts to fix their shit every time they log in, and deploy that by a remote PowerShell command prompt, and nothing more.

Yeah William, you might be the c-whatever bullshit, but if the issue is sooo fucking critical, make five goddamned minutes for me to fix your shit or it's not getting fixed. I don't care if you own the goddamned planet, I can't fix your shit without access.

Apparently I'm Neutral Evil. But I consider myself to be Chaotic Neutral.

I'll fix the problem only when it's actually a computer problem and when you can explain what the problem properly. I don't care if it's a ticket or an email. Though I might not get to the email today and tomorrow I might forget about it, so you might want to put a ticket in that'll stay the until it's closed. But the ticket system sucks, so I might not log into it and see your ticket for a few days. If you send an email, I might do it right away, but you might have to remind me about it in a few days because I might've forgotten about it.

I don't care about your job title. If you VP of whatever the fuck and think you're important or if you were hired yesterday to an entry level position, you're all users to me. But the issues aren't fixed based on the order they come in, it's based on how much effort you put into describing the problem. If you think you're too important to describe the issue properly, you're low priority. If you want a meeting to describe the issue verbally, oh you better believe you're low priority, I'm not your fucking secretary that's going to take down your dictation. You got a keyboard in front of you, use it. I might eventually get around to asking you for more details about the problem, but only after I've fixed all of the problems reported by people that made an effort. Your priority is based on your effort.

Ok so maybe I'm Lawful Evil? But everyone thinks I'm Chaotic Evil because they don't understand why some people get stuff done right away while they have to wait.

Blue on black is pretty evil to me.

Chaotic neutral: If you complain a lot and keep saying your ticket has high priority, you'll automatically have lower priority than the guy that doesn't really care when I do something

Chaotic evil is "creates ticket, but intentionally words the problem poorly before logging off, leaving the junior help desk worker to fend for himself and giving you the solution to a different problem that isn't relevant in your case"

Working the neutral way currently. There're so many tickets, all of them more important than the other, I can just as well take from the stack.

Lawful evil should be: asks you to make a ticket, closes it immediately and tells you it's not an issue, it's working as designed.

Chaotic good.

Completing a 10 mins ticket for something you end up fixing in seconds. Fucking chore.

Lawful good is asking for trouble. Before they know it, they'll be inundated with e-mails to their personal company address with poorly worded help requests. They'll spend half their time making and updating tickets on the user's behalf that would have been mostly automatic if they'd gone the Lawful Neutral route. They need to insist requests are sent to the main support address. I'm assuming that's tied directly to the ticketing system.

When I was being Lawful slightly-better-than-neutral, I'd create the ticket and then put a paragraph in the reply telling them to please not e-mail me directly in future, because one day I might be unavailable and their e-mail could go unseen for hours or even days.

Repeat offenders would eventually do it at a time when things were busy too, so I'd be concentrating on the tickets and not things to my personal address, so that slight delay often helped it sink in.

I thought I was neutral all my life but now I know I'm mostly evil.

But none of these are real, in the real world IT won't touch your issue unless you create a ticket, then when you do they just never do anything about it anyway

Lawful neutral cuz in 6mo when some “controller” punches three buttons to run a report and asks “Hey why’d you do that?” THEN I’ll have documentation. And a job.

Make ticket, receive assistance. Fight me on that and I’ll add you to my email inbox’s ruleset - I am now an LLM, and will gentle-tone you to death via faux misunderstandings

Sometimes I'm neutral good and other times chaotic good. I'm at a relatively small company though, so I'd probably be different at a megacorp.

I tend to lean towards neutral good it seems