this is my status message. usually I don’t have it showing by default, but when somebody does this I toggle it lol
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The solution to this is to not reply to them.
They will either give you the information you need (and potentially learn their lesson for next time), or they’ll get tired of waiting and ask someone else.
100% this. I got this dude who always messages me “hi” when he needs something but doesn’t bother to include what the fuck he needs. I told him, politely, once you can just include everything up front at once and I’ll answer as soon as I can. I just won’t respond to just “hi”. Like fucking hi yourself.
I do love being in IT sometimes. No ticket? Then the problem doesn’t exist
Works every time
So passive aggressive
Just reply hi
How often does it really happen
At least you can just ignore “Hi”.
I have a co-worker “Ed” who’s working 1st level support.
He’ll take a call (but only if the caller hasn’t given up after letting it ring for 20 seconds), then write in Teams:
“Joe Smith called. He has a problem in Outlook.” (We have a ticket system, but Ed doesn’t use it)
Now, Joe Smith expects IT to help him. So I can’t just ignore it.If I reply “what kind of issue?”, Ed will ignore my question, because he doesn’t react to Teams notifications.
If I physically walk over to his desk and ask him, he’ll reply “Sorry, Joe didn’t say”.
Literally the quickest way to get this shit off my desk is to call the user back and fix their Outlook issue myself.
And that’s exactly why Ed does this.Of course, Ed isn’t the problem.
The problem is that he wasn’t fired years ago because he knows certain things about the owner of the company and the CEO.There’s an “office politics” solution here. Sounds like Ed needs a promotion to another department.
Ed got “promoted” to IT from another department.
He used to train new hires.
There’s a reason he’s been with the company for decades and works first level support.
Everyone’s just waiting for him to retire.Okay, so you see what works to fix the problem, you could have a conversation with him about how his skills are wasted in HelpDesk and that he should be making more money by doing job X in department Y. If he has enough dirt on the CEO, he can get his promotion.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t want a promotion.
He wants to sit on his ass and watch Youtube for another 5 years.
Then he can fuck off with one of the good old retirement packages that people joining 20 years ago got.
And that’s what the CEO wants, too. At this post, Ed can’t cause any damage, except to my nerves.He wants to sit on his ass and watch Youtube for another 5 years.
Set up a bandwidth restriction policy against his devices. Choke it down to 100kps for video sites so that watchability is garbage with low resolution and constant buffering.
That’s actually not a bad idea.
Or I’ll go all out and redirect Youtube to lemonparty.cc for his account.Or I’ll go all out and redirect Youtube to lemonparty.cc for his account.
I wouldn’t go that far. The goal is to cause him to complain to other employees/managers that Youtube is too slow. You want the question forming in other people’s heads “Why is he watching so much Youtube here at work that this is a problem?”
Even better is if he is using the company internet/equipment to consume content that isn’t safe and appropriate for work. If it can be shown his behavior is legal liability then the company may decide he’s more trouble than he’s worth.
I’d start by replying “Please get that fixed for him and create a ticket and escalate if you can’t fix it”. When that didn’t work, I’d probably just hit him with the thumbs up react, or literally nothing. A coworker not doing their job even after guiding them through the process shouldn’t be your problem.
I’ve toyed with this a few ways, and my favorite response is waiting 4 hours and replying “hi!” That might mean the next day. Then when they ask the question, wait a couple more hours at least to reply. They’ve set the pace for the conversation this way, and it’s going to be glacial. (Folks who have no urgency get no urgency)
If they ask the right way, I am pretty quick. (Polite people get polite responses)
If it’s something that can wait 20 minutes, I typically wait 20 minutes. (I am a busy person) (Protip: this makes bosses and coworkers think you’re not just fucking around all day, and they respect you more)
Train people using rules, even if they are unspoken, be consistent and it’ll work.
I don’t answer “Hi” anymore.
If they need help they’ll ask what they need.
I have some people that my entire message history is “Hi” and no answer. Because they eventually realize they should ask in our QA channel instead of dm’ing our team members.
Just reply “hi” then set your status to away and go grab a coffee!
Someone sending just “hi” in a work IM is equivalent to no message being sent at all.
I will respond when I actually receive a message
These are your coworkers’ best friends, who send you an email and then immediately run to your desk to tell you that they sent you an email. And if you’re busy, they stare at you until you turn to them and they get what they want, no matter what you were doing.
Coworker: Hi
Me: [Waits for more info, nothing comes.]
Me: Hello
Coworker: So
[Several seconds pass]
Coworker: What’s up with that file from yesterday?
Me: [Waits for more info, nothing comes.]
Me: Which file
[No response for literally 10 minutes]
Coworker: The one we sent to client B
Me: [Rather than keep trying to extract information, search through history and find file which was sent to client B yesterday, find nothing obviously wrong with it, and it was nothing to do with me anyway]
Me: [Sends link to file] You mean this one?
[5 minutes pass]
Coworker: NM I figured it out. Thanks!
My other favourite is the coworker who does the same thing but instead of saying hey types “Pssst” and if you don’t respond within about 5 seconds they start sending GIFS of people knocking on doors and stuff.
If anyone says hi to me I literally just ignore them until they say something actionable.
It’s great because if they ever complain about it I can just say, oh I was busy so didn’t immediately follow up and they never ever specified what they wanted.
I’ve thankfully never experienced that last one, but that is heinous. I would actually engage to tell them not to do that.
Don’t do that.
It generally takes me about a year to train people on stuff like this.
Can I ask you a question?
Apparently.
Calls you immediately despite your status being “in call”
I get this from colleagues in a specific areZA of the world.
You get one a day, try again tomorrow
Reply with:
“Teamsbot-AI v1.3 says: ‘Hi! I see you’re looking for user $User. They haven’t seen your message yet. Go ahead and send the rest of the message about your need or what you want to talk about and I’ll send it onto them to respond.’”
You don’t need a bot or software, just literally copy and paste this response in to them. They’d never know the difference.
I just ignore it.
Me too, but some fraction of the total damage still comes through.
