You Must Be Joking

Our support division is divided into a bunch of "functional teams" which handle problems in various areas. Some do configuration, others installation, others server and OS problems, etc. Each team has some Duty Monkey (DM) who's responsible for checking all the incoming tickets to make sure they're assigned to the right team and with the correct importance. The members of a team take turns being the Monkey for 5-6 hours at a go, at which point some other poor schlub in another center takes over the position so that we have someone doing this for each team around the clock.

We also have two or three Functional Team Managers (FTMs) who oversee the entire team for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), APac (Asia Pacific) and Americas teams on a full-time basis. When they're out of the office, someone gets to be the temporary FTM. There isn't that much to do besides sending out mail to the team begging to get someone to take a ticket approaching its commit time or joining in an argument over which team a ticket should be handled by.

And lo, it came to pass that this Dog was made temporary FTM on a day when he was also the DM. And there did come a great number of tickets that day. And other teams were pummelled with tickets, for we had sinned in the eyes of our customers. And all the Monkeys tried to pass as many tickets off on each other as humanly possible.

And it came to pass that this Dog did receive a request for a team change from another Duty Monkey afar. Acting as the Server Team Duty Monkey, he refused on numerous grounds, not the least of which being that the ticket dealt with data customisations. The furrin DM replied and insisted that this Dog accept the ticket on the grounds of a sentence in the customer's description. He immediately received a replying and yea, it was proven he was a twit. And he was shown the error of his thoughts, that the particular sentence was a red herring and had nothing to do with the problem.

Case closed?

Half an hour later, I had another mail, addressed to the FTM -- me again. It was a request anew for the same ticket to be moved into our team's queue. It included the same stupidity, poor explanations an ignorance. But lo! It contained more. This Dog's professionalism was called into question. There was also an accusation of "lack of helpfullness [sic]".

LookOut fills in the To: field automagically but FucknutsUK hadn't bothered to look at it before hitting send. If he ad, he would've seen to whom such false allegations were to be routed.

Begging and pleading, even bitching and moaning are one thing, backstabbing and lying quite another.

My reply:

While disingenuous claims are altogether too common when trying to rid oneself of a stinky ticket, outright lying about a cow-orker and trying to damage his reputation are quite another. You really should pay more attention to whom you send mail and more importantly, what you say about your colleagues. The ticket is your team's, for reasons I've already explained. I've sent a copy of this mail chain to your team's FM as well. Maybe he can set you straight about your team functions. As far as your unfounded complaints about me, I'll deal with them separately.

Both mail threads zipped and sent to his and my managers. If he wants another job so badly why doesn't he just quit? He clearly doesn't want to stay here.