The computer staff comprises individuals with diverse interests, areas of expertise, and approaches to solving problems. Therefore, different members of the computer staff may give quite different responses (both in form and content) to a given query; furthermore, if a computer staff member feels unqualified to help you, or feels qualified in theory but the staff is currently having all requests of a certain nature be handled by a particular person (unfortunately these kinds of assignments are rather fluid and often merely a temporary agreement from a recent staff meeting, and thus we cannot maintain a published list of area assignments), then you might be sent to someone else. This often leads people to wonder, “Who handles hardware repair issues?”, or “Who knows the most about Microsoft Word conversions?”... in short, you might wonder, “Whom should I contact about the thing I really need to contact someone about right now?”.
The short answer is simply this: if you're not sure whom to contact, then contact system@math.arizona.edu. And we might add: even if you do feel sure whom to contact, you should probably still just be contacting system@math.arizona.edu. The gory details and reasoning behind this, as well as the exceptions to the rule, appear below.
All messages to system@math.arizona.edu go into a ticketing system. They are assigned a unique ticket number and then sit in the incoming queue of new unanswered tickets. All members of the computer staff see the messages in the queue, and pick off the tickets they feel qualified (or are assigned) to handle. After taking ownership of a ticket, the computer staff person has first shot at additional correspondence on that particular ticket.
(When someone is out sick for an extended period of time, other members of the computer staff will check on the sick person's tickets. And when someone is going to go on vacation, they will assign active tickets to another computer staff member.)
In general, it is not a good idea to send a request directly to a staff member's individual e-mail address. For one thing, they may not be the person who should handle the request at that time. In particular, they may be sick or on vacation, and your request may go silently unhandled for a long period of time. But all rules have exceptions. For example, if you have an unusually sensitive message whose content should not be sitting in the queue of new unanswered tickets (visible to all members of the computer staff), then you might feel compelled to write to a particular person. Or if one of us says to you in person, "Please send that file to me by e-mail so that I can take a look at it", then of course that's an invitation to use their individual address.
Only under most extraordinary circumstances should you send a request both to an individual's e-mail address and to system@math.arizona.edu, as this leads to computer staff confusion (which one of us is supposed to be working on this?) and often even to wasted effort when multiple people independently work on your request at the same time.
A message to system@math.arizona.edu is seen by all of us, and precisely one computer staff member will handle it. On the other hand, a message to a particular computer staff member is seen only by that person, and might go unanswered if that person is too busy or sick or on vacation. And please don't send messages both to system@math.arizona.edu and to individual computer staff member addresses, as this causes us a lot of confusion and wasted effort.
