the mellow tigger's musings

Why is this job so unusual, so stressful? It's different from any tech job I've had before. People call a phone number, expecting to get the experts in whatever topic they selected. Instead, they get me. Questions that I might have to answer at a moment's notice:

• "I'm a customs officer at airport [x]. Please connect me (not during regular work hours) to the Designated School Official who can provide I-20 confirmation. No, I can't wait for a callback. I need to stay on the line to maintain the authentic connection. If I can't confirm, then I'll send the student back to their country of origin." (I wrote documentation for my coworkers on this rare but high-stress phone call.)
• "How do I install and/or purchase software title [x] on this computer?" (The answer is different for every software title and every department or computer, resulting in permutation explosion on not-well-documented processes.)
• "Someone has been sending me email, but I don't see them. What's wrong? No, I don't know if I'm using new Outlook, classic Outlook, or web Outlook. I just click this button. How do I tell which browser I'm using?"
• "Hi, I'm UPS delivery. Where should I drop off this package (after regular work hours) for person [x]?"
• "Please connect me to the coach of the sports team [x]. I don't know why you can't do that. What's so hard to find their number?"
• "Why is TicketMaster not getting me my football tickets?" (Usually, this problem results from somebody requesting tickets before they were even assigned their university email, so TicketMaster has wrong email information.)
• "I'm not computer literate, can you help me fix my multifactor authentication?"
• "I can't get into building [x]. Who can let me in (after regular work hours on a weekend)?"
• "Why is the Microsoft portal insisting that I install Copilot right now and not letting me just view my email?"
• "I submitted my course assignment in Canvas, but now I'm getting a zero because my work is not there! What happened to it?" (We're the support team for a product that we never use unless we get a ticket for it.)
• "I got a new phone, and now I can't login for class, I can't get into my dorm room, and I can't pay for food on campus. Help!"
• "My Adobe Acrobat interface is messed up, not looking like it should. How do I get the old interface back?" (We're the support team for a product that we don't even have licenses to run.)
• "I uploaded an image to Copilot, to make it generate accessibility captions, but the image shows up as black so I get no text from it. What's wrong?" (We're the support team, I think?, for a product that nobody knows how to use.)
• "How do I export my list of subscribers from Listserv?" (We're the support team for a decades-old product that we don't use unless we get a ticket for it.)
• It's always interesting getting stuck between an overbearing parent and a child who doesn't want the parent to access their information, while the parent demands we help them access the student information. Paying bills and seeing grades are different systems with different permissions, and either way there's not a lot I can do to help (but sometimes yes), even though people call us first.
• While answering the phone line, I might simultaneously get a webpage chat wanting immediate attention, and I need to at least click a button to acknowledge incoming emailed tickets too. Fast-paced context-switching destroys productivity, you say? Surely not! ;)

Basically, we're the 311 information line for a city (over 100,000 students, faculty, and staff). At some point, we get every question... including wrong calls meant for a similarly-named university or a related-to-the-university healthcare system. We get calls meant for other departments but come to us first. We get calls for areas with VIP lists who want different treatment. It's permutation explosion for everything, no perfect documentation for it, and callers reached me expecting to find the expert on whatever topic is at hand, so they get frustrated when I hesitate.