"Hey, Stan. Congrats on your promotion," John S. said without terribly much sincerity. Stan was a nice enough co-worker, but a promotion to VP doesn't mean much to a company that hands out promotions like glowsticks at a rave. Stan was now the 4th VP in the 30 person company. It didn't actually mean very much at all.
"Well, thanks John. I'm really excited. I talked to the other VPs, and they're all really enthusiastic about my proposals."
John didn't consider that ominous at the time. It sounded more naïve. Over the next few weeks though, it became apparent that someone was listening to Stan. The tiny company didn't have a dedicated support team, instead customers had direct access to the technical team. "And that's not sustainable," Stan's said. "So we're going to install a service desk."
And where did Stan think they were going to get the money for a service desk? "We can save money by hiring fresh college grads and training them up." Because what customer would be upset at losing their connection to the experienced developer team in exchange for a shiny new and inexperienced service desk?
An endless stream of fresh-faced youth marched into Stan's office and back out again. A week later, two young and aggressively female assets joined the team. "All these college kids were the same," Stan explained, "so I just picked the pair that I thought would be good front-end support. The kind with a well stacked resume. Smart kids, the kind who never had a D- in the classroom anyway."
John rolled his eyes and mostly didn't think about it. John did back-end integration and 90% of customer issues came from the web front end. The fact that the two qualifications used by Stan in hiring had nothing to do with the job the Asset Twins would be doing wasn't his problem. He overheard others struggling to teach the girls what a ticket was, and explaining why they couldn't use an iPad application to enter tickets, and he ignored it.
He ignored it until he started getting tickets about the website. He dialed the service desk. "Why did you assign me these tickets?" he asked.
"Oh, I didn't do that," Asset #1 chirped. She attempted to conference Asset #2 in and failed. She made a second attempt to use the speakerphone and failed again. Finally, she just handed the phone to Asset #2.
John repeated his question.
"Those issues were marked for you," Asset #2 said.
"Marked for me? Marked how?"
"They had your initials in the error message," Asset #2 said.
John looked at the ticket more closely, and to his surprise, Asset #2 was absolutely correct. The errors all had things like "Source File: formvalidator.js", and "Source File: cookiemanager.js".
John had a few options. He could fight the good fight and teach these girls what file extensions were. He could change his name to "Samuel Quentin Lambert". That would mean hiring on a Christopher Sands for web programming, a Carl Stephen Sommers as the designer, and Victor Brandon Sabini for their legacy integration scripts. Or he could try and argue that Stan's hiring policies weren't serving the company very well.
Given those choices, John configured a rule that would automatically forward web tickets to the appropriate team.