I feel like I should write a book. It’d be epic like Moby Dick but would start with, “Call me Yossarian.” This is going to sound confusing and comedic, straight out of Catch-22, but I assure you it’s entirely true. It is happening to me right now.

We write a lot of documentation to a wiki at work. I’ve got permissions on it to add pages, rename pages, move pages… but not delete pages. If I want to delete a page, I have to find someone who has delete rights and ask them to do that, which doesn’t make sense because I’m a pretty heavy contributor to the wiki.

I decided to seek out delete permissions for myself.

The wiki is managed by an overseas team. The previous process to get permissions to the wiki was to send an email to their infrastructure distribution list with your request and the issue would be dealt with in a day or two. It was fairly effective from a customer perspective.

The new process to get wiki permissions is to file a ticket in this custom-built ticketing system they’ve adopted. You find this out by sending an email to the infrastructure distribution list and reading the “out of office” autoresponder thing that comes back.

You can’t file a ticket unless you have an account on the ticketing system. That’s… well, not unheard of, but a bit inconvenient. Fine, I need to create an account.

In order to get an account on the ticketing system, you need to file a ticket. No joke. As one colleague put it, this is sort of like a secret society - you can’t get in unless you already know someone who’s in and will “vouch for you” by creating a ticket on your behalf.

Three working days later, I have an account so I log in. The ticketing system is a totally custom beast that was initially written starting in 2001 and hasn’t really been updated since 2008. It looks and behaves exactly like you think - it’s very bare-bones, there’s no significant help, and it’s entirely unintuitive to people who don’t already use it every day.

Seeking out help, I notice in the autoresponder email there’s a wiki link to a guide on how to file tickets. Cool. I visit that link and… I don’t have permissions to see the wiki link.

In order to see the guide on how to file tickets, I have to file a ticket. Of course, I’m not sure what kind of ticket to file, since I can’t see the guide.

I search around to see if there’s any hint pointing me to which ticket type to file since they all have great titles like “DQT No TU Child Case.” Totally obvious, right? I end up stumbling onto a screen shot someone has taken and posted to a comment section on an unrelated wiki page referring me to the type of case I need to file.

I don’t see the right case type on the list of available tickets I can file. Turns out I don’t have ticket system permissions to file that kind of ticket.

I have now opened a ticket so I can get permissions to open a ticket to get permissions to delete pages from the wiki. This is after, of course, the initial “secret society” ticket was filed to get me an account so I can file tickets.