It was a Monday morning and the department was extremely low on staff for various reasons. Ofcourse when you are short of man power, as Murphy's Law states "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."
With only a few people to solve the IT mysteries of the workplace, several crisises hit at once with not enough people to cover them all. It ended with only one person in the office dealing with the telephone complaints and the queue of requests coming through the door.
Just as my colleague was wishing he had never turned up for work that morning, things got a whole lot worse. It started with a phone call.
As he was dealing with the person on the phone, the door opened and a woman marched in.
"Why is nobody answering the phone?" She demanded as my colleague continued with the caller.
The woman was made to wait 5 minutes before he finally hung up. This did nothing improve her mood.
"I'm sorry but I was on the phone."
"You weren't earlier, it just rang and rang." She accused him.
"I was dealing with someone else. We haven't got many people in today, and I can't answer the phone, and deal with everyone that comes through the door at the same time." He explained.
"That not good enough" she cried. "When I call you, I expect you to answer."
My colleague bit his tongue and waited for the tirade to finish.
"What can I do for you?" He asked politely.
"No one in my office can get their email." She told him.
My colleague then explain that the exchange server, along with a multitude of other servers were not functioning correctly, and that the few staff that were in were battling to get things up and running again.
The woman then demanded that someone immediately go down to her office and fix her and her colleagues email.
"But the problem is on the server, the server team is working on the problem now."
"Then why wasn't an email sent out to tell us that?"
My colleague stared at the woman in disbelief, stunned at the woman's stupidity.
Before he could saything, she continued "anyway, I want someone down in my office now."
By this time there is a queue of people standing behind her and the phone had been ringing off the hook for several minutes.
"There is no-one available to send down" my colleague told her. "They are busy fixing the problems."
The woman huffed and puffed for another minute before turning and storming out, presumably back to her office.
My colleague took a deep breath and turned to deal with the next person.
"How can I help you?" He asked.
"Oh, hi, I have a problem with my email..."
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