Worse Than Failure’s latest article is about technology departments. It had me giggling until the very end, which was a little bit disheartening.

• Trash Talking

Right from the beginning I knew this one was going to be good:

Here’s a secret about your company’s tech department: they hate you.

And then a very good example of a bad tech:

In fact, I worked with a tech support guy who developed a strategy to avoid doing work; he’d pretend he’d identified the problem, give the user a task that takes a minimum of five minutes to complete, and ask that the user call back if the problem wasn’t solved (with a high probability of the call going to one of the other support guys).

I can’t say that I’ve never had a very strong urge to do something like that. Especially on days like today when I was brought in to show a faculty member how to insert a picture into Word. Not a problem. Come to find out, the user is designing a brochure in Word and trying to copy an EPS image out of Acrobat Reader and into Word. There were so many things wrong in that situation that I just wanted to run away screaming.