Bzzt. Are you sure you want to be that stupid?

Ever wonder what happens at intersection of stupidity and far too much spare time?

People always ask me why I named the product Shockey Monkey. To some the title is downright offensive! Truth is, over the course of the workday people forget to read and need to be shocked back into the correct behavior. When I decided to write Shockey Monkey I didn’t just need a tool to streamline operations, I needed a system that fixed stupid with every fiber of its being.

I have a dream.. brothers and sisters.. that one day my staff will read the screen and not need me to sit around and manage them. Until that day, bzzzzt.

So what’s the general problem we have when working on tickets in an unmanaged scenario? We often ask who is working on the ticket. During the day as requests are coming in fast and furious and people are running back and forth across multiple offices/shifts it’s hard for one person to manage the entire operation. In my mind, the support team should work as a “team” and tag the requests as they go along.

That way, you know who is working on what and you don’t double up the effort.

So, welcome the Tag feature to Shockey Monkey. Right on the update ticket header you will see a new Checkbox, AJAX enabled and all. Just hit it if you want to tag the support request or start typing in the box below and it will automatically do it for you!

Here is what it looks like after the support request gets tagged.

Now, let’s say you’re opening a support request, how do you know if anyone is working on it? Well, if the Tag checkbox is there, you’re the first one with the right to take a crack at it. If it’s tagged by someone else you will see the warning, in this case red Alert: Tagged by Vlad Mazek.

This is where the bzzt shock really comes into Shockey Monkey. Let’s say you aren’t reading the screen. The moment you click on the textarea to try and update the support request the giant hand of Vlad reaches down from the sky with a tazer in one hand and shocks you into reading the screen.

Bzzt! You’ve been shocked!

I had even thought of adding a disable string to the action chain but decided against it in case the tag was made by someone who just left for the day or had something far more urgent come up.

Now you may ask…

But Vlad, why not just take away the ability to update the ticket if someone else tagged it?

You don’t work with people, do you?

Here is what happens when you take people’s ability to do something: They keep on clicking on it, refreshing the page, checking the battery in their keyboard, adjusting the wireless keyboard sensor.. everything but reading the damn screen. They might even open up Communicator or email/call and ask about it and then I’d have to rip their f’n head off and beat them to the point that they can only move their hand around enough to read braile encoding that says why don’t you read the f’n screen you idiot politely explain to them how the “tag” feature works.

So Karl, yes you can hire the right people. Yes, you can develop the standard for your people to follow. But if you don’t have a taser to enforce the standards and practices in realtime and fall back to personally standing over their shoulder or obsessively beating down monkeys only after they have made a mistake, buddy, you’re going to run out of people.

Karl’s process and Vlad’s adaptive learning… the new era in IT monkey accountability. Tag it before you work it. Read or be shocked.