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Helpdesk Consultant Absences and Tardiness
Reporting for your entire scheduled Helpdesk shift is a significant responsibility. The students, faculty, and staff at Saint Mary's College are depending on you to be available to them, answering their questions and making sure that their computer needs are addressed (this includes walking them through solutions to their technical questions, entering all contacts into the Tracking System, providing hands-on technical support as needed, and referring them to other Information technology staff as necessary).
Note: If you are looking for a substitute because of illness, one request for a substitute is acceptable before contacting the Helpdesk Student Manager and the Helpdesk supervisor. Excused absences for emergencies are reviewed on a case-by-case basis by the Helpdesk supervisor.
Please make sure to post on the HDCs listserv to request a sub or privately e-mail the Helpdesk Student Manager and the Helpdesk supervisor to notify them that you will be having a substitute for your shift. Failure to do so will result in the Helpdesk supervisor assuming that you have skipped a scheduled Helpdesk shift.
Emergencies include sudden illness, deaths in your family, and other College-approved emergencies. Emergencies do not include giving friends a ride to the mall, needing to work on a project, or catching a plane to fly home for break.
"To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late."
This was a favorite quote of my band teacher, and he used it to refer both to attendance and to music. If your shift is scheduled to start on the hour, that means it starts on the hour. It doesn't mean you breeze in a minute or two after the hour, then take off your coat, then log in to the computer, then get ready to work.
Please be at your shift READY TO WORK when you are scheduled to be there (and stay there until your shift has ended). If you don't know what clock we're following, use the one that is on the computer or on the telephone. The computers and telephones are all tied to the same network time server, and the "official" time I use is the one the network time server tells me.
If you have a computer in your room, you can set it to use a network time server to make sure you're on the same time I am. I use Apple's network time server (time.apple.com).
Disciplinary action will taken when consultants are "excessively late" to their shift in the past. If a consultant is more than five minutes late clocking into TimeClock, it will be considered "excessively late."
Being "excessively late" would result in disciplinary action, and will follow the same disciplinary actions as unexcused absences. The first time will result in a warning, the second will result in probation, and the third will result in termination as a cluster consultant.
One of my responsibilities as your supervisor is to prepare you with skills to work in the "real world." I feel that one of the most important parts of that is to instill a sense of personal responsibility and accountability into each of you. When you leave Saint Mary's, you'll be expected to handle a lot of responsibilities you haven't yet encountered. For education majors, you'll have a classroom full of little students that will look up to you and be dependant on you; for nursing majors, you'll have sick people depending on you to help make them well, and in some cases they'll be putting their life in your hands; for business majors, you may face a situation where millions of dollars are at stake; for other majors, a variety of other situations will take place where you'll be expected to take charge and help resolve the situation to the best of your ability.
Being on time to your shift is a small step towards those responsibilities, but students, faculty, and staff are already depending on you to be available to help them with their computer problems, and you need to be there for them now just as you'll be there for others in the future.
Last modified: August 13, 2007