I'm the most senior of two software developers at my (small) company and we have a desktop support guy as well. Sometimes the desktop support guy will defer issues to me that he thinks aren't computer issues so much as website issues.

The problem is that he's incredibly persistent about issues (which, in and of itself, isn't a problem) and that every time he re raises an issue he's raised before he tries to turn up the heat and he makes increasingly bigger fusses about it until I react in such a way that causes him to go to HR to complain about me. Like last time this happened he stormed off saying "I'm just trying to do my f-ing job!" when I was trying to explain to him why I couldn't do what he wanted me to do.

This presents several problems.

• The fact that he's always trying to turn up the heat is effectively him trying to jump to the top of my priorities. If I'm working on a task given to me by the owner of the company and the thing he's having issues with has an easy workaround then people should utilize that workaround. If he doesn't agree with my prioritization of things the proper course of action, in my opinion, would be to go to my supervisor (ie. the owner) or something idk
• Sometimes the issue is one that's simply beyond my control and having it by #1 and only priority won't make a difference

Sometimes I think it can be helpful to give people the illusion that you're doing something about an issue if only to placate them. Like people used to complain about the website being intermittently slow and so what I'd do in those situations is I'd sit behind them and do nothing but watch them for 10m. If the website was slow I'd see it real time instead of it taking x minutes to get to me through the proper channels. There was no guarantee that this would actually result in a fix but it was useful for optics purposes. eg. people would see that I was giving the issue my full and undivided attention and thus they'd get off my backs. But in this particular case the issue is one that sometimes happens, at most, twice a day, and sitting behind someone doing nothing but watching them for 4h is excessive pandering. Doing it for 10m isn't so bad but 4h? That's a half day! And for this particular issue, doing that would be 100% for show. Like at least for the slow website scenario I could maybe do SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST when I saw that the website was slow but for this particular issue I can't even do that - a nanosecond disruption would cause the issue he's convinced is a dev problem and I can't move my fingers fast enough to capture real time data on a nanosecond long issue.