MystikIncarnate

Yep. I'm in the midst of that. We're in a "busy" season for my clients (mostly finance/accounting people), and I've reduced my output hours per day to a lower amount because I want to be more available for more time so that I can jump on critical issues as they arise. For the most part, you want to jump on critical things regardless of the situation, but right now it's more critical because of the busy season, so minor gripes get sidelined, all of my maintenance and other duties, like projects, scripting, etc, are all on hold, favoring time to resolution over almost everything else. So if I can be free more than normal so that I have the bandwidth to take care of things when they arise, so much the better. I don't want to be distracted writing a script when a critical ticket drops and I miss it by a few hours while the customers are unable to work because I was debugging a PowerShell function.

So my logged hours are down because I refuse to pick up dormant unimportant tasks while I'm idle. I use the time to review all tickets and just patrol the service tickets for critical issues. I have absolutely no reservations about doing it.

I agree, the goal should always be to play doom. Not because you ignore your work, but because there's nothing to do since everything works. IT support isn't here to justify their existence by staying busy. We're here so that when you need help, we can help. If there's nothing to do, then we're standing ready, and if we play doom, or Halo, or literally any other game/distraction/whatever, while we wait, as long as it doesn't impact our ability to respond when needed, then that's fine. That's what everyone should want. If the hardware is so unreliable that you're constantly having to work on it to keep it running, then, as IT, you fucked up.

I'll also mention that there's a paradox in IT: we're expected to do so much and if you just do all the work by hand, you'll be busy all the time. If you leverage scripts and scheduled tasks, you can significantly cut down on your workload. The paradox is that when you don't have those scripts and scheduled tasks, and you're doing everything by hand, you don't have enough time to create the scripts to reduce your workload.

I'll give an example. At a previous workplace, the bossman was very much in favor of doing things by hand, the original business model was T&M. He later moved to a more MSP model, where people are paying regardless of how much time was spent, so my focus shifted to automate everything and drop the ticket load as much as possible. In one such case, we kept getting issues related to a service failing. I don't recall what the issue was, nor what problem it created, but I remember that simply restarting the service fixed the problem. So instead of fielding dozens of tickets a year to restart the stupid service, I added a scheduled task to run a script that would restart the service automatically every week at (some godawful hour) AM, on a Sunday or something. Once that script was scheduled for weekly runs, we stopped getting those tickets.

I have dozens of other examples along the same lines. One of my most proud moments was a script to fix a service where, if another service was running before it, the service wouldn't load properly. The program service just wouldn't start if a system service was running. It was a non-critical system service, but both had to be running after boot time. I had already tried every combination of delayed start, and every time, the program service would fall because the system service ended up running too quickly. So I made a script to shut down the system service, start the program service, and then restart the system service, and scheduled it to run 15 minutes after boot, anytime the system restarted (usually overnight for patching). Once that was in place, complaints of (program) not working after patch day, went away.

I hate repeating process because nobody thought to actually fix the problem, they just patched it back together manually. When faced with a reoccurring problem, I look at how I can stop it from happening; of course I fix it in the short term but as soon as I'm done I'm working on a script that can do it for me, then figuring out the best way to trigger the script so that I don't have to be involved.

No matter how busy you are, finding a way to get rid of problems like that, by any means necessary, is essential; otherwise, you'll be drowning in tasks to fix stuff that shouldn't be broken.

My advice: fib.

Not really, but yes. Fib. Lie. Put down what you think is appropriate. Don't exaggerate, don't over bill, just adjust for what fits.

For me, I refuse to track my time down to the minute. I realized that if I put in 5 minutes for sending an email, I would get credit for 0.08 of an hour, but, 5 minutes is actually 0.083333... of an hour. So I started putting in 6 minutes instead (0.10 of an hour). Rather than be irrationally docked the 20 seconds or so, I'm getting a whole ass extra 0.02h (or rather 0.1666.... of an hour).

I'll do 6 minutes, or anything in 15 minute increments. If it took 7 minutes, that's 15m. If it took 20, that's 30m on the record. If I'm looking for a ticket, or closing a ticket (after my time is entered), or even if I go to take a shit while working on a ticket, that goes in the time entry. I might be in the bathroom, but my brain is working on the problem. I'm not exactly taking a break from working the issue, I'm just trying to brain storm while I'm away from my keyboard.

Every second from the time I start looking for a ticket to work, to the time I've closed it, should be on the books. I didn't work from 9:35 to 9:56 on anything, I spent 9:30 to 9:35 finding, and opening the ticket prior to my time entry being started. I spent 9:56 to 10:00 closing the ticket and mentally preparing myself for the next task. Minute by minute tracking is unreasonable, and bluntly, you shouldn't do it. You'll lose more time from what I call "grey time" (doing all the things you need to do in order to account for your time), than you account for actually doing your job. Reading email, looking at documents and keeping up to date on technology issues.... All of that is grey time.

I've put in time for internal meetings, "ticket review"s, even "reading email". None of which has every been questioned. You need that time to simply keep yourself organized. Don't hesitate to mark it down and bill it to your own employer. I know they don't want you to do that, it "artificially inflates" your worked time, but bluntly, if they're going to require that you account for so much of your day that you can't have grey time anywhere in there, you're doing yourself a disservice by not adding some kind of entry to account for it.

The only thing I strictly do not do, is mark down my time for lunch and breaks. That's not acceptable to me. Everything else, sure. But I'm going to pad it to account for my grey time. When I spend too much time doing stuff that I consider grey time, I'll put in an internal entry for it, and bill my employer. I try to keep these to a minimum, but it's an easy entry when you get called into a meeting or something.

Once you start seeing all the losses from grey time adding up, you'll be able to account for 6-7 hours of your day easily. Plus 30 minutes for lunch, and 2x15 minute breaks, and you're missing an hour of your day at most.

Grey time. Log it.

Literally every boss I've had has been like this. I don't think there's a whole lot of IT jobs that aren't at this point. I've worked several and if they're not call centers (a few have been - where call time is factored in), this has been the primary time system, required by all employees.

This is exactly why I'm opposed to bringing kids into the world.... I mean, have you looked at the world? It sucks. Why would I want to condemn another individual, whom I'm sure I will love wholeheartedly, to suffer through all of this for their entire life?

I didn't have any say in being born and if I had even an impression of what I was in for, I probably would have said no thanks.

The only thing I'm thankful for from my parents is that they took care of me for so long. I'm not thankful that I'm alive and I'm not thankful for being born. That said, I'm also doing my damnedest to be a force for good in the world. I'm not making a significant impact, because I'm just one guy working a menial job, but I'm going my best. If I must continue to be alive, I might as well try to make everything suck a little less.

The IT cycle of violence.

This just puts a huge spotlight on the thing I hate the most about my line of work. I'm sure it's not just my line of work with this problem, but there's plenty of examples of workplaces that do not have this problem.

My career is in IT support. Whether doing systems administration or networking or something else related, it's my lifeblood.

Almost every job I've ever had in this field works on the basis of tickets. A concept which, isn't in and of itself a problem, nor is it unusual. Similar systems exist in many careers; they're similar to a chit in the restaurant industry, which contains an order, which is passed to the kitchen for the cooks/chefs to complete. Same thing. And there's examples of this same idea across many careers, called all kinds of things from a requisition, to a work order, they're all variations on the same idea.

The trouble begins with how tickets are worked and completed. In other industries, you pick up a task, whether a chit or work order, you finish the task, and you mark it as complete, but in IT, it's very different in one key way. We have to not only justify and report everything we do, but also mark down exactly how long it took. It's this last point that's the problem. I am under continual scrutiny, every minute of every day to justify what I've done, and when I did it. In every job I've had, my ability to fill every second of my day with records of what I've done and how long it took to do is praised, or the lack of that ability can create some significant issues with maintaining my employment status.

There are good reasons to keep these records, to have a record of changes, and coordinate with coworkers, in the event they need to continue work I've started, or vice versa, and to note when something changed so that if issues arise, those actions can be examined as a potential cause. But this requirement has become weaponized by every employer to keep a stranglehold on productivity. If you take too long on a task that they think should have taken less time, you're suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient. If you excel and you're able to complete your tasks quickly, that faster pace becomes the new standard, and anyone who isn't capable of keeping up gets reprimanded for dragging their heels and wasting time.

The goal posts continually move. I can't so much as take an extended shit without someone taking notice.

Meanwhile, so many jobs are simply focused on being present and looking busy. Before I went into IT, I worked at a grocery store, and short of clearly and obviously standing around doing literally nothing, no manager even took notice of you. If you were doing something, literally anything that looks even remotely productive, you were left alone. Which isn't to mention all the down time, when there isn't anything to do, and you just go and adjust the products on the shelf needlessly because it made you look busy. That same concept can be applied to a lot of different jobs, but with IT, it's not sufficient to simply look busy. Your time must be put into a ticket.

It's oppressive and the way of things in IT.

My only argument is in the idea of finding which device has a particular IP address.

Guess you're running laps around the campus staring at pegs for a while to figure out which one it is.

Same.

Did it ever serve it's purpose?

And I'll do it again.

I like Frakes.

That said, in also like pretty much all Trek. I'm not a big fan of some of the series, but I don't hate them, nor am I going to go around saying they're "not trek" because reasons.

I'm looking forward to seeing more from the franchise, and I feel a bit alone in my universal enjoyment of Trek. There's so many people hating on disco or Picard or whatever... I enjoy all of it.

I also enjoy Star wars and Orville, and Stargate, and pretty much most sci-fi.... The only stuff, that's popular, that I have no opinion on is Babylon 5, mainly because I have not watched any of it. Between that, the og BSG and some of the star wars properties (like the animated shows), I've watched almost all of the mainstream sci-fi, and honestly, it's all pretty damn good.

I really liked how they forced the issue about time travel in disco, where the time machine suit thing wouldn't go unless she went back to all the points she needed to in order to bring this circumstance to happen. I thought that was spot on. I try to ignore the multitude of time paradoxes in voy, and there are many, but it's probably my least favorite part of that specific show, too much time shit, and it's all done very poorly.

Technically the were no trek shows between TOS and TNG, so technically the last trek show without Frakes would be when TOS ended.

It's technically correct as long as reruns don't count, and you exclude movies, etc.... Hence "show".

It's all riding a line of being technically correct.