Watch your mouth and have a positive attitude

Mike McBride over at Out of the Frying Pan, and into the Cube points out the importance of watching your mouth and having a good attitude when working in IT.

Lots of ideas floating around this weekend in the podcasts I was listening to surrounding the idea of what you say about the users you support. It all started with Douglas Welch's podcast "Don't Say It" where he talks about the possible consequences of getting not only getting caught "user bashing" but also the negative attitude about doing support that results from spending so much of your time complaining about the users.

It's really good advice, but as Kevin and George talked about in the latest In The Trenches, this idea of respect is a two-way street. It's all well and good for tech support folks to do everything they can to respect end users, but at the same time those end users need to respect the tech support folks.

BTW Mike's blog used to be called One Man IT Dept., but he recently changed it because of a change of jobs.