I approached the IT office delicately, knowing that I was in violation of process, procedure, protocol, and a few other pro- words.

“Um,” I said. Sysadmin heads swiveled my direction. “I need to manually report a trouble ticket.”

“You need to file tickets with the online helpdesk,” said Senior Sysadmin.

“Um, yeah…” I replied. “My ticket is that the helpdesk is down.”

“No it’s not,” said Junior Sysadmin, without looking at his computer.

I pondered for a moment how to counter this logic. Finally I settled on, “Yes it is.”

My debating skills having proven too much for them, they both turned to their computers. The helpdesk came up immediately.

“No it’s not,” repeated Junior Sysadmin, with just a hint of smugness.

“I wish to amend my ticket,” I said after a moment of thought. “The helpdesk is not reachable from my computer.”

Junior Sysadmin knowingly told me to use https, because everybody forgets it. I said I had checked that.

Senior Sysadmin asked if I knew how to spell “helpdesk”. All traces of intimidation gone, I gave him a stare. He turned back to his machine and typed some more. Finally he shrugged and said, “It works on my machine.”

“Do you see that your machine is not my machine?” I asked sweetly.

“I’ll go check it out,” said Junior Sysadmin.

NOTE: This is a true story that happened to me yesterday; in our Sysadmins’ defense all of this was done in a spirit of teasing, not of mean-spiritedness. The problem actually turned out to be IT’s fault, by the way–they had configured my machine to use the wrong DNS server.