Job Security

As I've mentioned I work in a Help Desk. This is a Help Desk for a major U.S. company and my role is greatly expanded over that of your typical support analyst. I work on literally everything electronic that any of our over 2500 branches might have issues with. There are some things that we don't support but the standard rule is "best effort" which means even if we technically don't support it we should try to help.

I take about 35-45 calls a day and my average talk time per call is usually 15-25 minutes. Most of my calls are genuine issues the the end user wouldn't know how to fix. But about 4 to 6 of my calls everyday are things that anyone should be able to fix. Anyone. Very simple things that can be reasoned out by simple logic.

I am told that these callers are job security. As in, as long as they are calling I'll have a job.

Well that's all fine and good and I can easily see the sense in that but to me that's the wrong angle to look at it from. I would rather work myself out of a job and know that my company is being staffed by responsible people then continue to work with lazy assholes.

I have no formal college education and everything I know I have learned through experience. There is no reason that a Branch Manager can't figure out how to put his Outlook back online after it goes Offline. Click the button that says Offline and uncheck that option. Just screwing around will show you that. Many, many issues can be resolved by simply trying. Then you don't have to wait on hold for 10 minutes so I can fix your issue in 3. I worry that they are looking at other problems at the branch in a similar fashion. I worry that they see an issue, any issue, and think "Hmmm, I don't really know how to approach this so I'll just wait until someone else comes along and fixes it." This may be unreasonable but the company I work for is very fragile right now and is one of the U.S.'s largest companies. If we were to go under it would seriously fuck several markets for a while. And I can't help but wonder about things like that.

Also, at my office we are supposed to tip toe threw the tulips with these people and take any level of disrespect in favor of better customer service.

I call bullshit.

If you call me for help and I am the subject matter expert why are you telling me how to do my job? Why are you insisting that I don't know what I'm doing and why are you refusing to follow simple instruction?

I know that not every IT Help Desk person knows what they are doing but if you call them for help you have to be prepared to at least give them the chance to try.

Really what all this amounts to is that this isn't the industry for me. I couldn't be happy working this job in ten years like many of my co-workers are.

Oh well, the search for meaning and fulfillment in life continues. I worry that I may have fucked myself by getting out of the military. I wasn't happy but at least I had purpose. I guess I just need to find something that is...... more. And of course it will be very easy to do so.