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Incompetent Help-Desks

Posted on 15th May 2018

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Why are help-desks always such rubbish?

I tried a few months ago to connect Outlook on my laptop to my employer‘s email system. I crashed my Outlook, and had to build a new profile.

After a while it became urgent to get Outlook working with the company email, because my mailbox was limited to 50MB, meaning that it filled up every few days, and I had to delete important emails to make space. I spent 90 minutes on a call to the company help-desk, trying to get it working, without success.

Today a colleague told me the trick, which took 2 minutes to explain, and I have it working. The same trick works with Skype For Business (Lync).

Why was the help-desk not able to help me? Do companies have special recruitment programmes to ensure that only the most stupid people work on help-desks?