u/NeezDuts900

I am a senior systems administrator / projects guy and the other guy is help desk. We support a large machine shop that has some PNCs, CNC machines, various other OT equipment, and about 200 on-site end users in an office building on the other side of the property. The rest are remote users.

Last month HR informed my manager that we were just awarded an absolute metric shit ton of business and we are going to need to scale quickly. Right now, my coworker and I are pretty much maxed out in terms of daily bandwidth. 15 tickets a day on a slow day, as high as 25 or 30 on a chaotic day. Currently sitting at 71 tickets in the queue. I'm currently solo implementing three large-scale projects that is slow going because I have to dedicate at least 2 or 3 hours a day to just about doing tickets in order to help out the help desk guy keep the ticket level at a manageable number.

We've already hired about 10 people in the last month and we are being stretched even further. I came to my manager and told him my concerns and he was bluntly dismissive and told me that before they hired me, he was doing all of his managerial duties as well as laptop deployments and help desk tickets.

Am I the one who's off base here or are we on our way to being completely fucked once those additional hundred people get hired in?

I need to get part of my roof redone, and I had three different contractors come out. One of them quoted me $7,500, and then the other two quoted me around $4,500 each.

I eliminated the $7,500 quote from contention and focus on the other two that were about the same price. Of those two, I called the contractor who quoted me a little higher first and told him I have a quote from a different company, if I send it to you would you be interested in seeing if you can beat it?

They agreed and undercut the other contractor by $500. I did the same thing with the second contractors and sent him the updated quote and not only did they match that price, they also threw in a free chimney repair as well as gutter cleaning.

The vast majority of contractors would rather pocket a little bit less money but still get your business rather than lose your business entirely if you give them the opportunity to do so.

I'm sure that this could work in other contracting situations but this was my experience and it saved me a lot of money between the discount as well as the freebies that they threw in.