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The Help Desk is not an easy place to make a living, and not only for technological
reasons. Each and every day a new challenge is presented, which at once stimulates,
frustrates, angers, puzzles and eventually activates the brain. However,
not all calls invoke the gamut of emotions. Some are downright simple and deviously
fun to respond to.
Yesterday, I received a call from a user with an odd, yet pleasantly mindless,
request. The building I work in houses nine floors of employees of the company
for which I work, and also houses several tenants, scattered throughout the
building. One of those tenants resides directly to the left of the door to
the IT department (or the "bat cave," as it is affectionately known).
At exactly sometime in the afternoon between my first and second smoke breaks,
the following exchange took place on the Help Desk line:
Me: Good afternoon, Help Desk.
User: Hi – got a question for you.
Me: Okay – shoot!
User: Are you busy right now?
Me: (I'm always busy….ask now or forever hold your peace) NO, not at
all, what can I help you with?
User: What does it say on the door outside your door?
Me: The door outside my door?
User: Yeah, the company name on the door outside your door. I don't know
how to spell it.
Me: (Are you kidding me with this request??) Hold on, I'll put you on hold
and go check.
I walk to our door, open it up, look at tenant's sign, store everything in
my short term memory, walk back to my desk, and take User off hold.
Me: It says (insert company name here).
User: And is there punctuation in the name?
Me: You need the punctuation, too? I apologize; I thought you only needed
correct spelling.
User: (slightly rude) Yes, I need an exact address for mailing purposes.
Me: (FOR MAILING PURPOSES? IT'S AN ELEVATOR RIDE DOWN A FEW FLOORS!!!) Let
me put you on hold one more time.
I grab our digital camera, walk outside our door, and snap a picture. Take
floppy out of camera, take to my desk, save, and attach to e-mail, and send
it to User.
Me: You should be getting a picture attachment in an e-mail from me with the
exact spelling, punctuation, capitalization and font color. May I help you
with anything else?
User: (Silence, then, that clucking sound you make with your tongue when
you're irritated at something someone has done) – Click –
Be kind to your support people; they work hard to be good at what they do.
Sometimes, what we do is read words from a door, because it's close. Sometimes,
we adjust thermostats in offices because it's too cold or too hot or too
humid or too dry. Sometimes we sympathize with and console you because you
didn't save your document at any point throughout the four hours you worked
on it, and now it's gone. Remember, though—here in the Bat Cave, we
always get the job done. Sometimes with a smirk on our faces.
For user reviews and opinions on the Sony Mavica MVD-FD91, which I used to
snap the picture, click here. The Mavica is large for a digital camera, but
the convenience of saving to a floppy directly from the camera outweighs the
inconvenience of its size, for our purposes. Let me know what you think about
YOUR digital camera.
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