I’m a project lead for a program used by four different clients, each which has thousands of users. We have a help desk for handling user issues, but my phone number is available to the “leads” for each client so they can contact me with requests and other major issues. They are NOT supposed to send help desk calls to me as that inhibits my ability to do my job, hence the reason we have a help desk.

So today I get a call from one of my IT contacts, mind you a professional who is in charge of a large IT department. He informs me that he has a user on the line who is experiencing issues and wants to “work through it”, never mind that I was heavily engaged in doing something else at the time. Right off the bat I’m upset because he should have contacted the help desk instead of me. Still, I speak calmly and listen to the problem, which has to do with installing a new version over and older version of the software. The user was receiving the error message “unable to find .msi file” or some such thing,

Now because I don’t work the help disk I’m not as familiar with what typical issues are or I probably would have figured out the problem immediately. Unfortunately it took a great deal of talking and repeating the error message before I had an inkling of what was going on. After about fifteen minuets of having nothing to tell this user because I was completely stumped, the IT guy finally decides to tell me that this isn’t the first time this new version has been installed on her PC. In fact, he had her uninstall it “cleanly” (as he put it), reinstalled the old version, and then put the new one back on. I immediately became suspicious of this whole process and started asking the user what this IT guy had told her to do for a “clean” install. I couldn’t believe it: he told her to go to “Program Files” and delete the folder there because doing it through the control panel “doesn’t get everything.” He chimed in to explain to me that this was the preferred method of uninstalling an app.

I was completely floored, and more than a little angry that his incompetence cost me a half an hour of mucking around for something that shouldn’t have ever happened. I instructed the user to cleanly uninstall the app, which she did, and now it works fine. I suppose I should have realized when the computer was looking for an msi file that somehow installed files had gotten deleted without the mis engine being notified, but I just had faith in the IT guy that he new better than that. Apparently not.

So probably this isn’t any different than the stuff you admin guys out there deal with on a daily basis, but I like it here in my dark hole where I don’t have to talk to people who are less than informed about computers. Well, not usually anyway.

I know it's hard to do, but you should probably just have said ``Let me transfer you to someone who's better equipped for troubleshooting.''

I can't believe that this dipwad was actually so rude as to cold-call you with a customer on the line! Wow.

On the other hand, I'm in the same boat you usually are, and I've got the equivalent to your IT managers telling me how to do my job. Stuff like ``well, is that configured as a RAID 1?'' and ``are you using SCSI or fibre channel?'', and then explaining, incorrectly, why I'm doing it wrong. Very annoying. I just ignore him, though.

I can't believe that this IT professional is getting paid.

If I were his boss and discovered that he thought that removing the folder from Program Files was a clean de-installation, I'd be verifying his resume with a fine toothcomb to see whether he was hired based on deliberately false information. Many 12 year old kids know more about windows than he obviously does. Even the most stalwart die-hard non-windows-using IT professional *has* to know that.

I can sympathize with this, since my day job involves writing installers and uninstallers. Some of the uninstallers can get quite complicated, and I know how hairy things can get when folks don't use them.

Someone needs to thwap that tech with a clue brick.