Why am I on coffee? I’m in tech support, I’ve been on call for 12 of the last 14 days, and I’ve gotten a max of 4h of uninterrupted sleep for that duration. And about four pages a day, all for production outages at customer sites.
For all of you who wonder why your tech support person is surly? Sleep deprivation is a job requirement for lots of people in the operations and tech support professions. It’s probably also the reason there are very few long term professionals in support.
In those wondrous days of yore, I recall a stint at a startup where I was on call 24x7x365, and received an average of 300 hundred pages a day. Go back and read that slowly; I am not exaggerating. Between the stress, sleep deprivation, bad diet, lots of stimulants, lots of sleep enhancers, and insane responsibility, I was a very unhappy, very emotional, and a barely rational person going from crisis to crisis. And each crisis had better be resolved in less than twenty minutes, because a new one was just about to hit. While that situation was extreme, support professionals are running on scaled-down versions of that everywhere, all the time.
And everyone expects everyone in support to be the face of the company — bright, cheerful, helpful, knowledgable, courteous — you know, the face of the company. Imagine what that sort of dysphoria between person and presentation causes. It’s a wonder the phrase hasn’t ended up as “going full tech support” instead of “going full postal”. I suspect it’s because tech support staff are generally on the helpful end of the spectrum, and are more likely to self-harm than other-harm.
Coffee and Fury 