it all started with quota's. A few things to bring up -- mandate, once we lost someone (deskside support) we could not hire someone to take their place.
Call volume changes constantly. Some months are busier than others. Add to that the unpredictability of bad patches, HW errors, and virus infections.
That said, here is how things played out where I worked.
3 weeks with low call volume, lose a person. after another 3 weeks, lose another person. Then we were hit from a bad patch, very busy and long delays for fixing things because we were down to 10 (from 12) people.
During this, Code Red hit, and we were sent to fix this, including servers which we were normally not allowed to touch. We had to split the team into 2 groups, 1 for patches/other problems, 1 for code red.
After this fiasco (lots of downtime for many people and some servers I may add) we hit a low call volume. Our high volume wouldnt roll over.......
Needless to say, within a month we had to let someone else go. Then we got busy again, and once again, the lows hit. When I left, we were down to 5 people. At the same time the helpdesk got hit pretty good as well and help services turned to cr@p. All 5 of those left on deskside for 600 people, ended up leaving within a year. Last I heard they were down to 2 deskside people, and the team lead. This is because of the constant changing of duties as well, which were designed to lower call volumes for a period of time, to cut people, and then re-add services later.
Basically, in my opinion, you are on a downward spiral, it may be time to brush up on certs and get out
