I love it when users need help. I don't love it when they don't know what for.
Users are the reason I'm employed, and contrary to society's belief that I should hate people, I don't. I enjoy resolving an issue that has a user stymied and unable to continue working.
This doesn't mean I'm beyond having some dastardly fun with users who don't even know what they're asking me to help with. If you don't have time to read an error message, then you're too busy to ask for help.
I actually had the following conversation with a rather bright young CPA...
CPA: Hey, I need your help.
Me: Sure, what's up?
CPA: I was trying to run some numbers and I got an error.
Me: What program were you running?
CPA: Yeah.
Me: Yeah, what?
CPA: I was running the program.
Me: What program?
CPA: Yeah. Then the error popped up.
Me: What was the error?
CPA: It was long.
Me: Do you know the gist of what it said?
CPA: I didn't read it, because it was long.
Me: *Muttering to myself* Yeah, details can be really annoying. Like the federal tax code. And if you just ignore it, it'll go away. Did you leave the error message up for me to come see?
CPA: Nah, I just clicked OK.
Me: Well, that's a known issue. You know, if you reboot and give it 5 minutes, I can fix it from my end.
CPA: Thanks, I knew you could fix it.
Me: Glad to help!
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2 comments:
Are you going to finish the story? Did you have to do anything else? Did he call you after the reboot?
And if I ever need to create some sort of business software, I'm going to call it "Yeah". That should please the IT people. Or maybe I should call it "The Program". That would also be fun.
I didn't do anything else. He was actually using a federal network I didn't have admin rights to. He'd been instructed to call them with any issues many times before, so I just decided to have some fun with him.
He did come to me about a week later and said "Thanks, that worked great!"
I'd buy software called "Yeah". How could you pass that up?
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