Before closing a 'quick fix' ticket, ask how many times you've closed this exact one before

Some tickets are genuinely one-off. Others are the same underlying problem wearing a slightly different description each time - a password reset for an account that keeps locking out, a "can't access the shared drive" that's really a permissions group nobody's cleaned up, a printer that "just needs restarting" every single week. Each individual ticket takes five minutes to close, feels like a small win, and quietly costs far more than the one ticket that actually got fixed properly the first time round.

When a fix feels routine, ask the model to check the ticket history for the same requester, the same asset, or the same short description over the last few months before you close it as a one-off. If it's the ninth time this exact issue has been closed the same way, that's not nine quick wins

• it's one unaddressed root cause with nine tickets attached to it, and the actual fix is almost always cheaper than the accumulated five-minute patches.

The pattern check costs you thirty seconds per ticket. Missing the pattern costs whoever's on the service desk the same five minutes, forever.