Today's treat is a guest post from Scott Moore, who blogs at The Moore You Know. He's partly responsible for the much-missed Dr. Awesome blog, although he likes to say he only wrote about 12% of the site. I guess that makes him a Dr., if not awesome, right? Enjoy!
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Ricky asked me to write a guest post probably about 3 months ago now. The topic was to be something along the lines of frustrations with my IT department. I wish my delay in response to him was because I was out doing something awesome enough to earn my own Wikipedia page or get my Twitter account verified, but really, it’s because IT people scare me.
Why? Have you seen Terminator? Exactly. That was a bunch of bored IT guys sitting around one day playing with electronics when all of sudden they had a programmable cyborg assassin traveling though time to kill a young prepubescent male. I was once a young prepubescent male, so that really hit home with me. You won’t see me clowning on IT. No way, I love those guys.
But since Ricky asked, I thought I would offer up a couple constructive compliments on IT improvements:
1) I think IT departments should have pre-prepared conversation topics readily available to help fill the inevitable voids that are bound to happen when troubleshooting different computer issues. Every time I have to call in there are always long stretches of awkward silences. These could be avoided if each IT member had some note cards with the day’s current events printed on them so we would have something to chat about while my computer is rebooting. For the record, I would ask the IT representative their opinion on the subject and then adamantly agree with anything they said as to avoid them programming a cyborg assassin to travel through time and kill me right before I screwed up my computer.
2) Don’t explain it to me. I know, I know…give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man about phishing blah blah blah. I know you want to teach me about what happened so I can fix it myself next time or maybe avoid it all together, but when you're talking about RAMgigahertzes and pixelmegabytes all I hear is Charlie Brown’s mom. It would actually save us more time in the long run if you just get in, fix it, and get out. We both know no matter what you say I will break the exact same thing again next week which will mean another teaching moment with us going through the whole thing all over again while we both act like it didn’t just happen the week before.
With that said, I wouldn’t put too much stock in my advice because, honestly, I only know two things about computers:
1) I enjoy them
2) then they break.
Yes, it is pathetic how someone who grew up watching Transformers could know so little about technology. I blame Michael Bay.
No matter who’s to blame, it is true, if computer illiteracy were state obese rankings I would be Mississippi - #1! I wish it weren’t so, and if they had a Rosetta Stone for computers, I would try it. But for now, I am one of “those users” Ricky always talks about. I’m sorry.
The good news, IT guys, is that it's people like me creating jobs for people like you. So, you’re welcome?
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