Ignorance

I take my job seriously. I've worked this tech support job for almost four years now and I've worked very hard at helping my colleagues out with their problems.

In that time I've been responsible for some initiatives to try to organize some knowledge we have in our department. We don't have a true knowledge base, per se (too expensive), but we do have an internal email archive, a customer facing web message board, a laboratory environment where people can go to test customer configurations, and lots of documentation on an internal site. I've been responsible for either setting up or maintaining on a day-to-day basis all of these.

Sadly, the only thing that gets used frequently is the laboratory and the customer-facing messageboard. The documentation I've written, or the emails archived hardly ever get looked at. It's just easier to ask people for information rather than do a quick search in the archive. This frustrates me to no end.

I've put a lot of work into all of those initiatives and instead of them being used, people complain about them. Now, not everybody complains, just certain people. But these are the same people who constantly ask me questions instead of taking some initiative and checking the database first. These are the people that would rather bitch about procedures and tools we have to use instead of working with the tool designers to fix them.

So today, after one of the whiners got thru cracking a couple jokes about the email archive, and proceeded to ask me for help with something, I told them I didn't know and referred them to the email archive.

Well, guess what. I probably did know the answer to the question, but I was too pissed off to help them. And I still am.

Update: I'm not pissed off anymore. I explained the situation with my co-worker and we're cool now.