Behind the bullshit process....

... is often a few good people.

Now that the firm has stopped my VPN access, and I had a fairly (very!) quiet working day yesterday, today was the day of the company laptop fix.  At least, that was the plan.  My gaffer raised a trouble ticket on my behalf, yesterday, to give the desktop support team(s) a chance to get themselves ready for a one-day-fix today.
The ticket (raised at 11am) was serviced at 4pm, by someone in the Belfast, who had assigned the ticket to.... someone else in Belfast; whilst that's progress, it's not great for me, heading towards a random hotdesk in Canary Wharf, London.
By 11am today, the ticket was still waiting for an update, and after intervention of various people who really shouldn't need to be involved, and being told we were supposed to raise a different ticket on a different system (<sigh>) the ticket was assigned to the London desktop team by... 1pm!  It only took 26 hours to get assigned correctly! w00t!

However, things took a turn for the better when the desktop support guy that had been assigned to my ticket, arrived at my desk at 2pm.  After various attempts, several patches, and around 10 reboots (it's a Windows box, in case you hadn't guessed), he conceded defeat and said he'd rebuild the system from scratch.  Furthermore, after another couple of hours, he was very apologetic that the rebuild wasn't fixed, and due to the utter shiteness of Pointsec, it was-nae gonna be finished by 5.30pm.  He then took time to try and come up with an alternative solution to keep me working (not his job, but admirable nonetheless).  Finally, and considering I work remotely most of the time, he offered to have the laptop delivered to me by courier when it was finally finished.

So, despite the shouldn't-be-required effort to get the ticket looked at, being told (too late) to use ticket system B instead of A, once a real live person was actually ready to do the work, his level of service and expertise was truly superb. 
Isn't it a tragedy that such good people are hidden (buried?) behind such a huge quantity of process and procedure?

Management people, Powerpoint Warriors, VP of paperclips; remember, it's only the people at the sharp end that know where the gold is buried.