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Every now and then, I’ll have an off day. I’m sure all support people have them, and I’m sure users are aware when my coffee was too cold or the traffic was too bad. That’s why when they call I’m telling them to reboot for a Word formatting problem. I just don’t make sense sometimes.
Like the time I misunderstood a user who couldn’t get her mouse to work correctly. The call went something like this:
Me: Good morning, Help Desk.
User: My mouse isn’t working.
Me (assuming that, as usual, the mouse is dirty): Did you clean it?
User: No, I didn’t.
Me (lecturing): You have to clean your mouse or you’ll see that jumpiness on the screen.
User: My mouse isn’t moving at all.
Me: Well then it must be really dirty
Five minutes later, the user calls me back. The mouse still isn’t moving. So I, in a huff, march my silly behind up to her desk and tear the mouse apart, being sure to point out the dust bunnies living in the mouse as I clean it with as much attitude as I can muster. I put everything back together, flip the mouse over, and (lo and behold) it’s still not working. That’s when I realize the mouse isn’t plugged into any port on the PC. Sure, it wasn’t moving. If I’d been “on my game,” I’d have asked first what the user meant by “my mouse isn’t working.”
Then there was the time when I was troubleshooting a printing issue. No one could print to this printer. If there’s one type of problem which drives me absolutely crazy, it’s anything dealing with a printer. For some reason, the devices irritate me to the nth degree. So, on this particular day, no one could print to the printer. I powered it off and back on (my famous “on-off method of repair”). I printed a test page. I opened the cover, checked for jams, closed the cover, repeated three times. Still not printing. The users, of course, are frustrated beyond belief because they’ve been out of the tree-killing business for almost an hour while I’ve just been pushing buttons. I reach my uber-frustration level and ask my supervisor to look at the printer. He plugs in the network cable, which had been removed or simply come loose, and I grin sheepishly and vow to always check for connection issues before asking him for help.
These examples are just silly mistakes, which (besides making me look pretty dumb) don’t really cause any harm. But I’ll never forget one call, where I felt like I was going to lose my job because of my own stupidity and carelessness. Any user who calls a Help Desk dreads something like this happening. All I can say is, I feel your pain. I’ve been on your end, and the other end (you know, the one causing irreparable harm). Not pretty or fun.
User calls me with a simple Word problem relating to workgroup templates not showing up where they needed to be. User specifies (multiple times, if I remember correctly) that the document currently open must not be lost in the resolution of this problem. In order to fix the workgroup template problem, I need to shutdown and restart Word. So, I click File, Exit, No.
WHAT?!?!?! You clicked NO? Yep – I clicked no to the save prompt. The sound of silence was deafening from the user’s end. She was too angry to say anything, so she hung up on me. There I am, holding my phone, stuttering to myself in disbelief that I did something so undeniably stupid, knowing there’s no way for me to recover the document. In my bitter, defensive response when later asked what happened, I explain that the user shouldn’t have worked on a document for three hours without once saving it. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t my fault it was gone.
I’m much more careful now. That user doesn’t know it, but her lost document made me better at my job. At all costs – protect the documents! I’m not perfect – and boy have I shown it a few times! It’s nice to get that off my chest – now I can pretend again that it never happened.
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