I get this from time to time where a user will open a helpdesk ticket and assign it to me or my team and it has nothing to do with anything. Apparently it’s rather difficult to get users to understand what a ticketing system is all about.

Let’s take the ticket I got this morning. Here’s the exact wording pasted directly from the ticket itself:

I have a question about SQL.

Typically whenever I get a ticket like this I close the ticket immediately with the response:
OK.

For some reason today though I was feeling more mellow than usual so I wrote the user to inform him what ticketing systems are for and why that wasn’t really an appropriate ticket. Then I asked him what his question was and that if he really felt the need to put something like that in a ticket, to at least print the question with it. Of course I’ve heard nothing back from him. I did close the ticket however.

Like I said above… I get this from time to time at my various gigs and it’s really hard for someone like me to not be a complete smartass about it. I got one at my last gig that said:
I looked up what you were telling me about indexes and you were right.

Now, while I suppose I have no real problem with you creating a ticket to officially document that I was right about something, don’t assign it to me. Assign it to my boss.
I just wanted to officially document that Sean was right about one of the basic principles of indexes that he discussed with me. He should not only get a raise, but should have his pick of your daughters.

So now that I’ve ranted a little, here’s how to correct the situation. And this is to you users out there… tickets are for verbs… stuff you actually want us to do for you. You’re free to come by or send a regular email if you want to praise us for being right, or to ask a question because we’ve always been right in the past. But unless you have something for us to actually do, keep it out of the helpdesk system.