Help Desk Blogger

Updated September 2026: the original 2019 post described being put on a difficult account full of escalations, and promised the story later. I have rewritten it as a practical guide to handling escalations on a demanding account, which is the part worth sharing.

Late in 2019, just after closing one painful opportunity, I was assigned to another: a demanding account, a stream of escalations, and an onsite delivery lead whose reputation had reached me long before we worked together. It was as difficult as I had been warned.

Looking back, most of the pain on accounts like that comes from a few missing habits. These are the ones worth building.

What causes most escalations on an account like this?

In my experience, very few escalations are about the work being bad. Most are about surprise: a requirement that changed without anyone recording it, a delay that nobody announced, or two people on the same side giving the client different answers. The fix for surprise is not working harder. It is communicating earlier and in writing.

How do you respond when an escalation lands?

• Acknowledge quickly. Reply within the hour, even if the answer is "we are looking into this and will update you by 4 pm". Silence turns an irritated client into an angry one.
• Separate facts from blame. Write down what happened, when and what was agreed before. Leave out who was at fault until you know.
• Offer a next step with a time. "Revised document by tomorrow noon" calms things. "We will fix it" does not.
• Close the loop. When you deliver, say so explicitly and ask whether it resolves the issue.

How do you work with a difficult onsite lead?

Agree on who speaks to the client, about what. A common source of trouble is an onsite lead promising things to the client on calls offshore is not part of, which then arrive as urgent late-evening work. A simple rule, that commitments on dates and scope are confirmed in a shared email before they are given to the client, removes a surprising amount of friction.

Keep your tone neutral in writing even when the other person's is not. Your emails will be forwarded. Write them for the manager who reads them later, not for the person who provoked them.

When should you escalate upwards yourself?

When the same problem happens a third time, or when the workload is no longer sustainable. Go to your manager with a short record: dates, what was asked, what changed, and the hours it cost. A factual summary gets action. A complaint about a person usually does not, however justified it is.

What should you take away from a bad account?

A template. Three documents are worth keeping and reusing: a scope confirmation email, a change log that records every requirement change with who asked for it, and a weekly status note sent whether or not anyone asks. None of them are clever. Together they turn most escalations into a two-line reply that points at something already agreed.

Some accounts are hard, and some of the people on them are hard to work with. What makes them survivable is the paper trail, not patience.

Keep reading

• Keeping a Work Journal in IT: Why and How to Restart
• When Your Only Teammate Leaves: Handover and Workload
• Working Under a Micromanager: A Practical Guide

Updated September 2026: the original 2019 post was a diary entry about my only teammate moving to another team. I have rewritten it into advice for anyone left as the last person on a team, based on what I had to work out myself.

In mid-2019 my only teammate at my location moved to another team for her career. I was happy for her and worried for myself. Within days I was pulled back onto the most difficult opportunity our team had, and I had no one nearby to share it with.

If this has just happened to you, these are the steps that would have saved me a few bad weeks.

What should you do before your teammate's last day?

Get the knowledge out of their head while they are still around. Ask for a written list of everything they own: open requests, recurring reports, contacts on each account, passwords to shared tools that should be rotated, and the unwritten habits of each stakeholder. Schedule a proper handover session rather than relying on a goodbye chat. Most teammates are glad to do this well if you ask early.

How do you stop taking on two people's workload?

Make the gap visible to your manager in numbers. List what your teammate handled each week and how many hours it took. Then ask directly which items should stop, which should wait, and which move to someone else until a replacement joins.

Managers often assume the remaining person will quietly absorb everything. They are far less likely to do that when the list is in front of them. Put the agreed priorities in an email afterwards so there is a record.

What if you are pulled onto a difficult account?

This is what happened to me. The opportunity came back, and the person who had made it painful last time had left the company, which was a relief for a day and then a worry: I did not know who would replace him or what the new expectations were.

Start by finding out who now owns the relationship on the other side and what they need, in writing. Restate the scope in your first email and ask them to confirm it. On a difficult account, the scope email you send in week one is the thing you will point back to in week six.

How do you avoid working in isolation?

Being the only person at a location is lonely, and it quietly hurts your work. Nobody catches your mistakes, and nobody sees your effort. Join the calls of the wider team even when you are not required to. Find one person elsewhere in the organisation doing similar work and agree to review each other's documents. It costs an hour a week and it replaces most of what a teammate gave you.

When should you ask for a replacement?

Immediately, and then again at a fixed interval. A backfill request that is raised once and forgotten tends to disappear into budget discussions. Ask your manager for a date by which a decision will be made, and put it in your calendar. If the answer keeps sliding, that tells you something useful about how long you will be carrying the extra load, and whether it is time to think about your own next move.

My teammate made the right call for her career. Looking back, the two things worth doing in that first week are a proper handover before the last day and a direct conversation about what should stop, rather than quietly absorbing everything.

Keep reading

• Handling Escalations on a Difficult Client Account
• How to Plan Leave in IT and Return to a Clear Desk
• When Your Manager Replaces Your Work at the Last Minute

Updated September 2026: this post used to describe a leave-timing trick that backfired on me in 2019. I have rewritten it as a practical guide to planning leave in an IT job so that you actually get the break, including why that trick is a bad idea.

In 2019 I planned a week off for my daughter's birthday. I had heard the usual advice in IT circles: take leave from Tuesday to the following Monday, work from home or call in sick on the Monday before, and nobody will assign you anything new before you go. It backfired. I spent that Monday working on a request that arrived precisely because I was reachable.

Here is what I would do instead.

Why do people come back from leave to a pile of work?

Because work does not pause when you do. Requests that would have come to you are held for your return, or they go to a colleague who hands them straight back. Mondays after leave are heavy because a week of other people's decisions lands on you at once.

Tricks with sick days do not fix that. They only move the pile, and they cost you credibility if a manager notices the pattern. A planned handover fixes it.

When should you tell your manager?

As early as your team's leave policy allows, and in writing. Two to four weeks is normal for a week off. Early notice lets your manager keep you off new opportunities that will peak while you are away, which is the single biggest thing that protects a holiday. Confirm the dates again one week before.

What should a handover note include?

• Every open item, its status and the next step, in one table or list.
• Who covers each item, agreed with that person beforehand, not assigned by email the night you leave.
• Where the files are, with links, and any access your cover will need.
• Known deadlines that fall during your leave and what "done" looks like for each.
• Whether you can be contacted, and how. "Emergencies only, by phone" is a clear rule. "I'll check mail occasionally" is an invitation.

Send it to your manager and your cover together, so nobody can say later they did not know.

Which days should you take off?

Taking Monday to Friday plus the weekends either side is fine if the handover is good. If your team runs a weekly status meeting, it can help to return the day before it, so that your first day back is spent catching up rather than presenting. What does not help is disappearing on a sick day before leave. It leaves no time for a handover and it looks like exactly what it is.

How do you keep the first day back manageable?

Block the first two hours of your calendar before you leave. Use them to read the handover update from your cover and triage your inbox, oldest items first. Reply to nothing until you know what changed. Then have a ten-minute call with your manager to agree priorities, rather than letting the loudest email decide your week.

The lesson from my 2019 week was not about which day to call in sick. The work that ruined my break arrived because I had left no clear owner for it. A good handover protects your leave far better than any trick with dates.

Keep reading

• Work Arriving Just Before Your Leave: What to Do
• When Your Only Teammate Leaves: Handover and Workload
• Keeping a Work Journal in IT: Why and How to Restart

Updated September 2026: the original 2019 post was a short note about coming back to this blog after a break. I have rewritten it into the practical version of that idea: why a work journal is worth restarting, and how to keep one going this time.

In 2019 I came back to writing after months away. The note I published then said little beyond "I'm back", and promised the details somewhere else. What I actually learned from that gap is more useful than the note was, so this is the version I should have written.

A gap like that has a cost that only shows up later. When appraisal season arrives, it is hard to remember half of what you delivered in the previous year. The work happened. The record did not.

Why keep a work journal at all?

A work journal is a dated, private record of what you worked on, what went wrong and what you did about it. It exists so that your memory is not the only evidence of your year when a review, a job change or a dispute arrives.

In an IT services job this matters more than it sounds. Opportunities, escalations and service requests blur into each other. By December, a proposal you rescued in March has become "some deck". Managers change, and the new one has no idea what you did before they arrived. A three-line entry written on the day beats any reconstruction you attempt later.

It also helps with the unglamorous parts of the job. When a client claims a requirement was never shared, or a manager insists you agreed to a deadline you did not, a dated note of who said what is far more persuasive than your recollection.

What should a daily entry contain?

Keep it short enough that you will actually write it. Five minutes and four parts is plenty:

• What I worked on: the request, account or ticket, in plain words.
• What changed: a decision, a new requirement, a scope shift, and who asked for it.
• What I delivered: the file, fix or document that left my hands.
• What bothered me: one line, honestly. Patterns in this line are the most useful thing the journal produces.

Numbers help when you have them. "Cut the deck from 40 slides to 18 after the onsite review" is worth ten times "worked on deck".

Where should you keep it?

Somewhere you own, not on a company laptop. If you leave or the device is reimaged, a journal on corporate storage goes with it. A notes app synced to your personal account, a private document, or a plain paper notebook all work. Leave out client names, confidential figures and anything covered by your employment agreement. Describe the work, not the client's secrets.

The one tool I would avoid is a public blog. My old posts here were half diary and half teaser, and neither half served a reader. A private journal lets you be blunt; a public post should be written for someone else's problem.

How do you keep going after a break?

Do not try to fill the gap. Start with today. Reconstructing six missing months is the task that makes people give up on the first evening. If a few big items from the gap matter for an upcoming review, write them as a single catch-up entry and move on.

Then tie the habit to something that already happens every day: shutting the laptop, the commute home, the last call. The entry is the last thing you do before you stop work. Missing a day is fine. Missing a week is the signal to shorten the format rather than abandon it.

What do you get back from it?

Three things. Appraisal conversations become specific, because you walk in with a list rather than impressions. Bad patterns become visible: the same manager behaviour, the same kind of late requirement change, the same account causing weekend work. And when you eventually decide to move on, updating your CV takes an hour instead of a weekend.

The lesson from a long gap is simple. The work carries on during those months; only the record stops, and that is the part you cannot get back later.

Keep reading

• Handling Escalations on a Difficult Client Account
• No Work Assigned in IT? How to Use a Quiet Week Well
• When Your Manager Replaces Your Work at the Last Minute