🎃 Horror Stories from the Helpdesk: the big reveal
Tomorrow, it’s Halloween, so it’s time for your stories. Three helpdesk horrors came in, and all three are wonderfully terrifying.
👻 The hacker in the mailbox
A colleague called in a panic: his emails were disappearing seconds after they arrived. A hacker! Niels and his team checked everything: Outlook rules, deleted items, sign-ins, mailbox delegation. Nothing. Then they watched it happen: the inbox was filtered on “Unread”, so every email he opened vanished from view. His reaction: “Oh... so I was the hacker?”
💀 “Nobody can get into TOPdesk”
For months, Arjan’s automation for the onboarding and offboarding process ran flawlessly. Then one night, HR didn’t deliver a file. With no file, the script assumed nobody worked there anymore, so it neatly archived every colleague. Technically, everything worked perfectly, and that was exactly the problem. Arjan’s lesson: check that something has arrived before you throw anything away.
🧙 The Closure Wizard
Bo-John loved clearing out the queue with the Closure Wizard. Once, the option was accidentally set to all instead of selection: 70 tickets gone in a single click. Two hours of puzzling later, they were back. It happened twice more, and after that the feature was off limits. Bo-John even had a T-shirt made about it. Does he still use the wizard in secret? Only the wizard knows.
Thank you, Niels, Arjan and Bo-John, for sharing your stories!
🕯️ One last thing
Three stories, one conclusion: it was never a ghost. It was a filter, an empty file and a wrongly ticked box. If your queue starts haunting you tonight, check your filters first, then call the exorcist. Don’t open suspicious attachments, and treat “select all” with respect. 👻
Still have a ticket that won’t leave you alone? Share it below. Ghosts disappear fastest when you talk about them out loud.