When a new employee joins Yahoo!, they get to choose whether they want a PC laptop or a MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, if you choose a PC and then later decide you want to switch to a MacBook, there’s a huge waiting list (unsurprisingly, there’s no wait to switch from a MacBook to a PC).
Way back in November, my coworker Brett filed an IT request to switch to a MacBook. About a week later I filed one as well. We each got responses letting us know that we’d been added to the queue, that we could expect our MacBooks in Q1 ‘08, and that we’d get a status update in January.
When January rolled around and no status update appeared, I added a comment to my ticket requesting an update, but never got a response. In early February, I again requested an update. Still no response. Yesterday I decided to pull out the big guns. I resolved to post a poem to the ticket once a week until IT responded.
At 11am on Thursday, I posted the following limerick:
I filed an IT request
A response was promised with zest
When layoffs occurred
And Microsoft merged,
My ticket was lost in the mess.
By 11:13 the ticket had been assigned, and this morning I had a shiny new MacBook Pro.
Needless to say, Brett wasn’t too happy, since he’d filed his ticket before mine and should have been earlier in the queue. Luckily I had already written a haiku (having anticipated that the limerick would be ignored), so I suggested he post it to his ticket:
A MacBook request
filed in winter, long ago;
spring is drawing near
He posted it this morning and IT contacted him this afternoon to let him know his MacBook was being set up.
Result!
Comments
Absolutly brilliant.
Bravo! Genius.
I requested parallels a few weeks ago (Y! has a site license). After waiting two weeks I updated the ticket with a simple, “Yo! Hook a brotha up, already.” I had parallels by the end of the day.
I love to see those stats
A look at percentage Mac v. Windows selected by Yahoo employees, and a month over month comparison for the last 24 months or so; those would be some interesting statistics.
Waiting Lists?
Sounds to me like Yahoo! doesn’t actually have “waiting lists.” They just have tickets and they get buried… then when you update them, they come to the top and they suddenly remember that you were on “the list.”
But congrats on the MacBook Pro! I thought I read that you have your own MacBook Pro, though… Either way, two is even better than one! (That and one is for work, one is for play.)
I also have a MacBook Pro, and I love it!
Great idea!
This is a fabulous, funny idea—good to know you got your MBPs. And, I love that limerick!