Righteous Indignation - Update at end!

Before I go off, I'd like to give a nice howdy do to a new commenter, dutifully linked on the blogroll, The Gooch. Thanks for coming by. Love your blog.

Now, on to the meat of the post. This is the last time I'm going to go over this story, then I'm going to let it go.

Today was one of those days from Hell. It began with a struggle with Maverick to get him dressed in some semblance of a reasonable amount of time, without him whining. Of course, he spent more time whining about getting dressed than actually getting dressed. Bottom line I arrived at work in a not so friendly mood.

The first thing I hear (at 7:30 am) is my lead tech saying he needs to talk to me. Ok, I take a couple of minutes to get settled, and see what's up. It turns out that a visiting legal type person from our sister office in Schenectady was in town yesterday and today. Last night, right around 5 pm, he decided that the level of service we were giving (which users in our office constantly tell me is first rate) was insufficient for his needs. And he proceeded to harass, badger, threaten, and otherwise try to bully my personnel into getting him whatever it was he thought he needed. In speaking to my personnel, I felt that they had done everything they could and gone above and beyond the call of duty, even staying late, to assist said user.

I just about lost it right there. I'm aware that my counterparts in Schenectady in the tech support department do not enjoy as good a reputation with their users as we do. However, that is no reason for someone to think they can come into my office and start pushing my people around. The bottom line for me is that while this guy may think he's some kind of hot-shot, and that he can roll over people in his office, Homey don't play that. There was no way I was going to let this guy roll over me or my staff. Fuck that.

So I played it cool at first. I was going to see our top legal person and ask her to speak with said Primadonna and basically tell him that it is unacceptable to treat my staff in this manner. If that talk was not sufficient, I was ready to go up the chain of command. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to speak to her before I had to go to a series of meetings. While in one of these meetings, a very important one concerning integration of our two networks, I get a text message from our admin that this user needs assistance. I was going to hold off until the meeting was done, as we were planning on wrapping up soon. A minute later, I get another text message stating I must come immediately as this user refused to be assisted by my lead tech. AND that he's going to my boss' boss as well as the VP in charge of our entire site. Mind you, my lead tech has a much mellower disposition than I and knows WAY more that I do about our systems (which is as it should be).

Now I'm really pissed. So I break out of the meeting, determined to TRY and be pleasant with this jerk. I go find out where he's sitting. When I get there, the bastard left to go to HIS MEETING! He couldn't even bother to wait for assistance. Now I'm totally torqued. I find my pal in legal (our person that is) and just totally go off. "You need to talk to this *&^% guy before I kill him, rawr, rawr, rawr!!!!" I was livid. Of course, she then tells me that he's above her on the food chain and she can't really say anything to him.

So my next stop is HR. Cause now I just want to kill the guy and I need advise on how to do it without getting fired. Unfortunately, HR's advice was to first calm down, then talk to the loser professionally. And call him on his bluff to see senior management if I don't seem to be getting anywhere. Which I would have LOVED to do, seeing as the VP running our office is totally cool and knows how well my guys support everyone. That would have ruled.

Once I've left HR and am back on my way to my office, I find out that Loser Legal Guy has become totally frustrated, packed his bags, and gone home. Literally. He was supposed to do some sort of conference call thing with both sites at 10 am. He was out of the building and headed back to Schenectady by then. Good riddance. I've been told he probably won't need to come back. Which is good. He annoyed the piss out of everyone he had to deal with while he was here.

The only positive side of this mess is that after all this was done, I got a call from one of the department managers wanting to vent their frustration that a couple of their users were still having PC issues that had not been resolved in a couple of weeks. I realized that I had been neglecting some of my customer service skills with the key people in the organization to keep them happy, due to all the craziness lately. So I decided to drop in on the users and see what was going on. I got two out of three issues resolved in 30 minutes, had happy users, and had the manager stop by and profusely thank me for helping out, and totally understand that we've been trying everything we could to fix the issues. I even came out and said we should have fixed this stuff sooner, and she said they were just happy it was fixed and thanks so much for helping out.

Damn I love the people I work with. A little appreciation goes a long way.

As a coda to this whole saga, I had to stop by to assist Legal Gal near the end of the day on an issue with her laptop. She tells me to close the door, and says she was in a meeting with our VP earlier, and did a "BTW, I heard a rumor" type of thing and explained what she knew about what was going on with Loser Legal Guy. And how our support guys seemed to be going out of their way to help but she didn't know what the deal was. Our VP's reaction? Too bad for him. She agreed that it was unacceptable for him to be treating personnel here in that manner.

Like I said, the people I work with rock. Of course, it helps that I spent the last three years building relationships with these people and making sure they got great support from my staff. But there's the payoff. The Big Guy (Gal in this case) has got my back. More specifically, got my guy's backs. Cause that's what good managers do. Take care of their people and keep them from getting screwed by assholes with an inflated sense of self importance.

(big breath out) There. All gone.

Update: I just got a call from our VP of Operations here (basically our CEO type person). She asked me what had happened and I played it all off. She told me if I have problems like that in the future feel free to get her involved as that type of behavior is uncalled for. She was very supportive. As I've said before, the people I work with rock.

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