A stranger wants to stuff a role up my user entry

It’s hierarchical thing: the feudal system persists

Photo © 2023 Leslie Lopez Holder | https://unsplash.com/@leslielopezholder

“Who are you, again?”

Well, that’s just great. I’ve been talking to this fellow on phone for barely two minutes and already he’s forgotten my name.

I am a user.

The number I called used to be for tech support but an internal rebranding meant he now works in Customer Delight Services. When he answered the phone, I thought I had called a porn chatline in error. Damn you, speed dial.

To be honest, I can hardly blame him for forgetting who I am, given my own inability to memorise names instantly. Tell me your name and within 10 seconds I will have forgotten it. Someone – I forget who – told me that I should write names down as soon as someone tells them to me so as not to forget them, Of course, I forget to do this.

Patiently, I remind the gentleman at the other end of the internal call what my name is.

“No, no, I mean who are you?”

Surely there are politer ways of asking this. Perhaps this is what I sound like whenever I forget who I’m talking to – which is always. I find the best way to memorise the name of someone I have just met is to photograph them immediately on my smartphone (for revision later at home) and stare at their face for while, repeating their name over and over again in my head.

People often find this disconcerting. I imagine it’s bad enough having your photo taken by a stranger to whom you have just been introduced, especially if the flash is on, but the intense stare you’re subjected to afterwards is enough to unsettle anyone. This is especially the case if I inadvertently murmur their name instead of doing it silently in my head.

There they are: they’ve just met me and have begun talking about something, while I lean in, eyes wide, mumbling: “Philip Wilkinson. Philip Wilkinson. Philip Wilkinson. Philip Wilkinson. Philip Wilkinson.”

I thought people liked to hear their own name being spoken out aloud but apparently not under these circumstances. You’d think they didn’t want me to learn their names.

“Yes, who are you on the system?” prompts my tech supp er, I mean Customer Delight Services Agent.

I provide my username. Unfortunately, this is not what is wanted.

“No, I mean what’s your role?”

That sounds like the name for a 1960s TV panel quiz show. What is this idiot jabbering on about? I tell him my role is to be a defining figure in the department: a friend to colleagues, a rock of reliability to managers, an unattainable personification of heroic glory to interns, an object of mild curiosity to the people who empty the office bins, and a subject for further inquiry to the police.

“No, your role – as in your level of user permissions. Are you a ‘CEO’, ’senior manager’, ‘junior manager’, ‘departmental executive’, ‘middle minion’ or ‘serf’?”

I tell him I’m none of those things: I am a freelance contractor, which makes me nobody’s boss and nobody’s servant. I roam the corporate savanna without a care, without commitment and without an employee pension, as the wild dust sifts between my toes and the wind flows through what remains of my brittle greying hair.

Unimpressed, he states rather flatly that I must have a role and that I should ask whoever hired me to tell me what it is.

Luckily, that very person is sitting next to me. I lean over and ask her who I am. She doesn’t know. Worse, it turns out she doesn’t know who she is, either.

A spark of inspiration: I ask the man on the phone who he is.

“My role is ‘tech supp ...’ er, I mean ‘customer delight services’.”

Perhaps I am ‘customer delight services’ too?

“No.”

The problem, as no doubt you have guessed, is that I do not fit any existing permissions profile. When the system was conceived and tested, it was generally accepted that every single person using it would fall into the predetermined corporate hierarchy of feudal roles, somewhere between lord and peasant.

To question this wisdom would be to question the managerial understanding of business processes. To ask for additional cross-policy logins “just in case” would be treated by the security team as an admission to being a member of Anonymous.

And in time-honoured fashion, user acceptability testing on this hierarchical structre of permissions would have been signed off by someone due to leave the company the following week. Training would have been delivered while half the staff were on holiday. The original developers have moved on to more interesting projects. Now there’s no-one left to get cross at.

On every – and I do mean EVERY – project that involves rolling out new network applications, user permission levels are the thing that goes tits up right from the start.

Don’t blame the developers, support or project managers: it is invariably the fault of senior departmental managers who are tasked with supplying the names for the login lists in the first place.

These are, after all, people who make a career out of not really knowing what their staff do or how things actually get done. Their own job description insists they should know fuck all about anything beyond cars and golf.

The first time I experienced this was while working on a corporate content management system. The shop floor, as it were, was populated by a mix of permanent, contract and casual staff. So when we saw the list of logins, naturally a couple of us asked what provision was being made for contractors and casuals such as ourselves.

All contractors and casuals were already on the list, we were told, including ourselves. So we should stop worrying our silly little heads about it and let the Big Boys In Charge get on with their business. Besides, adding generic logins would be a security risk and we should know better than to ask for such a thing.

With crushing inevitability, on the first day that the system went live, scores of temporary staff were forced to make frantic calls to tech support customer delight services, asking how to gain access to the system since they hadn’t been issued with any logins.

The Big Boys In Charge solved this little problem by issuing a hurried edict to permanent staff telling them to share their login credentials with the casual staff until something could be sorted out.

No security risk there, then.

This was just a temporary measure, of course. The permanent solution was to set up half a dozen generic logins and make several dozen temporary staff share them with each other. Cue weeks of clueless but blameless casuals inadvertently logging each other out, shouting at each other and inadvertently logging each other out again. Hilarious stuff.

Anyway, back to the present. I have a login for the latest system thingy I’ve been presented with, but I’m not seeing all the shares and folders I had expected. My assumption is that I have been set up with the wrong permissions. Hence my call to the nice man on tech support customer delight services, who now wants to know what my job title is, even though I haven’t had such a thing since 1993.

“It doesn’t matter,” he assures me. “You will have been assigned to one of the existing roles. I just need to know which one it is.”

I haven’t the faintest idea. How do I find out? What button do I press?

“Sorry, the software does not show users what role they have been assigned.”

Ah, that’ll explain why I don’t know what role I have been assigned.

“Yes, but ... there may be a way ... ”

After a very long enigmatic pause – during which I falsely assumed he had put me on hold and so I was about to tell my colleagues around me what a twat this bloke on the phone was – he began detailing at length a sequence of actions I should undertake within the software.

After completing every step – I think there were 39 – he told me to right-click on a picture I was viewing and choose the View command (which is redundantly idiotic but that’s software design for you).

A dialog window of alphanumerics opened. I was asked to read out the top line.

“Ah, there you go, you’re a ‘middle minion’!”

Isn’t there an easier way to find out what permissions or user group I’ve been given? I mean, someone must have put me into that group to start with. Can’t you ask him? Or look my name up on a list?

Apparently not. The only way to find out whether I have been given read-only or admin access to the system is to climb the 39 steps. It’s a bit like being asked to prove that you have a valid driving licence by sawing a banana in two.

“Oh no, that’s not the only way,” I am told. “You can also look for the icon that looks like a bucket and spade.”

What? Where? I can’t see any stupid icon that looks like a bucket and spade!

“That’s correct. If you can’t see it, that means you’re a ‘middle minion’. If you couldn’t see the icon that looks like Kim Kardashian’s arse and a keyring, you’d be ‘departmental executive’.”

So what you’re saying is that I should look for missing icons? My user role on the system is clearly displayed as a row of icons that aren’t there? I should keep my eyes peeled for icons that cannot be seen?

“Er ... right. Tell you what, I’ll make you ‘CEO’ then you can see all the icons.”

I thank the man profusely for his assistance and apologise for nearly calling him a twat – a courtesy which he doesn’t seem to appreciate.

I log back in and my screen is full of weird and wonderful icons. Finally, I am master of this domain. So this is what it’s like to be the ultimate boss.

With a bit of luck, there’s a self-destruct countdown initiator in there somewhere. If I find it, I’ll let you know.

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Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. User: Why can’t I access the shares for my department? Liam Gallagher: It’s probably due to your user group permissions. User: What has that go to do with it? Liam Gallagher: You gotta role with it.