To: Technical Underlings
From: Your Escalation Engineer

1) The proper greeting when I walk in the door at the start of my duty shift is "Hi, Russ" or some similarly generic greeting. It is not "I have an escalation for you" or, despite the evident faith and confidence you place in my abilities, "Man, am I glad to see you." It bodes not well for my day if the first thing I hear is someone begging for help. You can wait at least 10 minutes while my ancient laptop boots up.

2) If I tell you there are four people ahead of you in line to get a piece of my time, it means I think their issues are more urgent than yours. If I deem your problem to be more critical you will be moved to the head of the line, so stop pestering me.

3) Contrary to popular office myth, I have tasks to perform that do not involve you or your problems. Just because I am not working on your problem does not mean I'm not working.

4) No, I will not do your job for you just this one time simply because the problem is so unusual. You have peers who likely have seen the situation before. Ask them first. You might learn something.

5) If you haven't done your basic troubleshooting before bringing a problem to me, I will not help you... unless the reason you are coming to me is that you are on the edge of death at that very moment and therefore cannot help the customer. If, however, you actually want to be on the edge of death, go ahead and bring me your problems all willy-nilly — I'll be happy to oblige.

6) No, I haven't memorized the passwords for every network device we support. That's what the databases are for.

7) If you presume to schedule my time for me, please be sure to tell me in advance of the scheduled time. Otherwise I might get testy.

8) Do not presume to schedule my time for me. Ever.

Clear?

Posted by Russ at 10:08 PM, November 27, 2005 in Geekery & Memoranda