I've come across arrogant enough times and also incompetence. Lazy is not at all uncommon either.

I've never come across all three together!

You missed out rude. Arrogant and rude together suggests the behaviour was selected to cover incompetence. Incompetence can appear as laziness. Instead of saying "that is beyond my ability" the person says "that is too trivial for me to bother with" or "I am busy with something far more important".

I recall with a previous job (going back to the 1990's here) the company's IT support bod had responsibility for managing all of the PCs and about 4 Sun workstations (I said it was in the 1990's). He became quite notorious: if you needed something sorted out on a PC then he would be too bust sorting something on the Suns; if something had to be dealt with on the Suns then he was too busy sorting out a PC issue.

This went on for about 6 months, but came to an abrupt halt one day when one of the company's directors came into the IT office *much* earlier than normal and caught him being a very naughty boy. It turned out that he was running his own IT support company during corporate working time and using the corporate resources to support his own business. The director went truly ballistic (I heard when I was in my office at the other end of the building) and sacked the IT bod (for gross misconduct & breach of his employment contract) on the spot - he was out the door within 90 minutes (the delay because they made sure that he was given his P.45 before being kicked out).

Well deserved dismissal

"No, they're just rude to us and do nothing. They like to be left alone," the manager explained

Is one of them called Simon perchance?

And does the younger one have a poor complexion?

If they were, then any threat of firing would have been met with a certain cute falling distance of push back (out of the window, three floors down, basement style in the elevator shaft).

I got the impression that Simon and PFY are actually very skilled and have set things up so others can complete their actual work without having to trouble IT leaving them with plenty of time to play games, go to the pub and get whatever they want at company expense. Their methods for dealing with a BWI* or an audit can be extreme.

* I was going to link to the [1]Jargon file but Boss With Idea isn't there. (The implication is that although new to the boss the idea has turned up before repeatedly and if implemented would have time consuming and expensive consequences but no benefits.)

[1] https://jargon-i18n.com/en/pt01.html

Former employer implemented a call quota for all help desk staff. And then allowed the same staff to cherry pick calls from the open calls list.

Password reset? Yeah loads of takers. Busted hardware? Not today.

In fact any job.that was in anyway involved (ie more than ten minutes) could stay in the list all day. But management could point to closed call numbers as an indicator

of success……….

That's Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

[1]wiki

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

AKA "What gets measured gets done"

In a previous role I've seen the queue assigners preferentially passing the easy tickets to their mates and doling out the harder or time-consuming one's to the people they didn't like. Fortunately, the senior manager liked to check the stats and saw the trend so told the assigners to stop it.

I also once had a block of about fifteen tickets dumped in my queue in the middle of a Friday afternoon that had been assigned to someone the previous Friday but hadn't even been looked at. It was someone who'd been there for donkeys years and was marking time until they could retire, and they hadn't touched them all week. As I'd done around ninety tickets that week already, I kicked off and got them put back in his queue. Wasn't doing that lazy bastards work for him.

It's why ticketing systems have the option to auto-assign tickets to agents to stop them cherry-picking easy tickets.

Depends on the auto-assign system. I worked a job that used salesforce and the ticket would appear on your salesforce page with just the ticket number, that you had to accept and complete, or reject and get fired for rejecting tickets. Management loved it because the lazier staff would be rooted out and fired, and the tickets would get randomly assigned.

However until it's accepted it is just waiting with no updates on the ticket. People would open a new tab, check the ticket in the system to see what it is and then accept or "oops my browser refreshed and now it's gone elsewhere without being tied to me in any way".

Ever come across anyone at work who is so busy he spends 30 minutes telling everyone he meets how busy he is?

Yeah, we all have, he was our last IT guy, the new one never speaks to anyone, but manages to get everything done, and all the jobs the last guy was "too busy" to do...