Really, you bill for $200/hr?

So, this is a rather short story as it happened close to a year ago, but is probably one of my few examples of someone being banned from calling us.

So, I work in a datacenter. I am not a manager and not in a position where I’d be comfortable saying that I am if one is out of the room, even though I am the most senior in my position and everyone kinda defers to me and my judgement (sometimes before the manager). Customers can call in to report outages but requests must be done electronically and anything regarding their accounts is required to be handled by their local security desk, but their local security desks all tend to hear our name “DC” we will say and tell them to call us (even for desktop issues and application issues in their computer, which is handled by a local desktop support office).

On to the story.

The admin (“ea” for entitled admin) calls in requesting that we reset the password for and unlock her account for logging into our servers. EA is not very polite about it, but I look up the account (so I can refer her to the right people) and let her know “unfortunately, we don’t manage these accounts, you will have to contact xandsuch group.” EA then proceeds to tell me about how she has called in numerous times in the past to have this done and this is a work stoppage for her. I won’t mention every time she cursed/swore at me, but I assure you, it was about every third word starting at the beginning of the call (I have thick skin and swear like a trucker [not to/at customers] so normally I ignore when customers do it because I don’t care, normally.)

I inform the customer that we have never been allowed to do these password resets or unlock the account. EA proceeds to inform me that she bills her customer at $200/hr and this is a waste of her time and their money. It takes every fiber of my being to not ask why, if she is so important and amazing to be making that much money why she can’t remember one simple password, or to find a “secure” way to store/track it.

It was a very busy day and the people that usually ran our datacenter checks were shorthanded and swamped where we had a full team and a fairly light load. So, my manager hits me up in our internal messenger and asks if I can run the check, since I’m the only one in my position trained on it (again goes back to the most senior thing). I tell him I’d trade him, I’ll do the check if he finishes dealing with my phone call. I explain the full situation to him and he knows I could have finished it but also doesn’t know why I hadn’t transferred EA sooner. So I inform the customer that I’m going to have her speak with my manager, give him the call and go do the check.

I get back and ask my manager how the call finished. Told him about some of the things (specifically the $200/hr bit) and apparently she told him the same stuff, and proceeded to also curse/swear at him too.

She was then reported up the chain by my manager all the way to the top of our organization who then spoke with the person at the top of EA’s organization. EA was then specifically debarred from ever contacting is again, which 100% led to her getting fired, I can just shy of guarantee it, because we house all of their servers, and as an admin, if you can’t report issues to us, especially when there are nationwide outages.

It really feels good knowing that I likely contributed to someone like EA probably getting fired.