The People Who Never Called

The employee who fixes a frozen laptop without help never joins the help-desk queue. The employee who has tried three remedies and failed does.

When you treat the people seeking intervention as typical of your species, experience can teach you to underestimate human competence. This is not merely remembering failures more vividly. The successes often never arrive. Need is the admission requirement. A thousand requests can describe what goes wrong without establishing how often things go right.

A technician can become better at diagnosing faults without becoming a better judge of ordinary users. Each repair tests a diagnosis. It does not test an opinion about the people who never called. The mistake is letting confidence earned in one judgment certify the other. The technician may be entirely right about every case and still wrong about how typical those cases are.

Colleagues who settle a disagreement return to their tasks; colleagues who cannot settle it request supervision. A manager hearing mainly escalations may sincerely conclude that adults cannot cooperate without supervision. Nobody has to conceal a successful negotiation. It simply has no appointment.

When that manager writes rules for everyone, extra approvals and narrower permissions can appear justified by years of direct observation. The caseload shows where cooperation failed, not how often it succeeds without supervision.

Experts may have outside evidence that corrects this picture. Unseen successes may also depend on infrastructure they maintain: not calling support is not the same as not benefiting from it. Intervention records alone cannot establish everyone's dependence.

If users learn to solve easy problems themselves, the average remaining ticket becomes harder. A technician who treats ticket difficulty as a measure of general incompetence will read that improvement backward. The problems reaching the desk have become harder on average; the people using the system have become more capable.