Never let customers define the priority levels. It will end in:
- Normal (never used)
- High (used for small text changes)
- Higher
- OMG fix now
- Highest
- the World is ending if this doesn't get fixed now
- different existential plane of priority
- Priority ∞ + 1

At my last place I worked on the support desk. We had SLAs like time to contact, time between updates etc depending on the severity of the issue.

This wasn’t bad as when I started severity of the issue was determined by us based on the impact of the reported issue ie system down would be a P1 where as a how do I would be a p4.

The business then had the awesome idea of assigning the priority based on what the client told us. Suddenly everything was a P1/2 and the pressure grew and grew and grew. People were missing SLAs for a P1 Minot text change because they were spending hours working on actual P1s.

We had a critical prio coming in right before leaving work.

'WE ENABLED HTTPS AND NOW THE SITE IS DOWN FIX ASAP!!!!!'

ssh server
mv htaccess htaccess.bak

Aaaaaand it works again 😑

@linuxxx So they are still running on HTTP? I it an older application?

Our ticketing system has a Priority field that the ticket sender can set. We almost always ignore the Priority that they set and set our own priorities for each ticket. Because like you said, any minor update to them is CRITICAL MUST BE DONE IMMEDIATELY. "Critical" to us means "Everything is broken and non-functional," not "Minor insignificant update."

Ours are high, highest, asap, critical, top, highest of high.. You're definitely right on this one.. glad I'm not the only one dealing with stuff like this

@M-Arcus Just a website :)

I've found this to be true with any non-engineer creating tickets. If you ask them what tasks are top priority, they'll essentially say that all tasks are top priority, with some being extra top priority. They don't understand that engineering time and resources are finite

@ConnorD they also don't understand (I've tried explaining ) that if everything is the same priority, then there's no priority.

My personal favorite is when, at my previous job, The L1 helpdesk team I was on got to see a user get kicked to the curb for fouling up a ticket priority.

They marked a ticket for a mild computer issue (my computer takes too long to open Outlook oh nooo!) as a priority 1 ticket.

The policy was that the CEO would be notified, along with the entirety of the Tier 3 team, if a P1 ticket was setup as a P1 outage would mean that servers would start tipping like dominoes and the CEO would need to approve some emergency expenditures.

My team saw this ticket when it came in, and assigned to a team in a way that we couldn't pull it and correct the priority. An hour later, the ticket was gone.

We then got a call from the head of HR asking us to terminate the person that set the ticket up.

Turns out that wasting (x)*1000 USD per hour per LOB is NOT a great idea to stay employed. :P

Customer is always wrong, ladies and gentlemen. Always wrong.

They are the sheep, you are the shepherd.
They don't know what's best for them, you do.
Without you they would get lost in the woods with shit sticking to their wooly fur.

@Noob too true. In my experience people don’t know what they want until you give it to them

OMG this is so true! 😬

@Condor wow, nice! It's my first rant

@linuxxx it’s all about the show you put on for them when you fix it. Have a script that executes a bunch of echo “cool stuff” >> bragging.file | cat bra*.file

It’s all about the show. It’s not enough to be smart nowadays, you have to win their hearts.

@Xilats lol "at my previous job" is this your own story?

@coderme Thankfully not! I was laid off a few years afterward. Thankfully got a new one doing chat support instead, which is way, way, waaaaaaaay better than having to take IT calls over the phone.

@Xilats I'm sure having customers yelling in your ear is interesting, to say the least. I get annoyed enough over support emails.

I’ve only ever built things and if making it cooler helps in the time you need to deliver it, bonus points.