Ask the assistant what’s overdue, and it knows

The helpdesk was the last big screen the assistant couldn’t see. Now: “what’s overdue?”, “what’s unassigned?”, “what’s on my plate?”, “raise a ticket for Acme about the failed install”, “assign #1042 to Sam”, “mark it solved”. It reports the SLA state in words - on track, due soon, breached - rather than making you read timestamps. It respects your mailbox permissions exactly. A shared inbox is divided up on purpose, and the assistant only ever sees tickets in mailboxes you have access to. Ask about one you can’t see and it says there’s no such ticket - because confirming a ticket exists but isn’t yours to read is a disclosure in itself. It also won’t assign work to a teammate who can’t open the mailbox it lives in; that’s worse than leaving it unassigned, because it looks handled. And it keeps your reporting honest. Raising a ticket’s priority re-targets its deadline from when the ticket was raised, not from now - so an already-late ticket stays late instead of quietly getting a fresh window. Solving one tells you it has emailed the customer a satisfaction rating, so nobody marks a ticket solved “just to see”.