Update on the 15499 viruses from yesterday...

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

Had a call from the head's PA again this morning, asking if she could see me before I leave today as she had something for me. We joked about it being my P45 (seriously, I was worried!), then I said I'd pop up to her on my way home at about 3.30. She just came down to my office, with a beautiful bunch of flowers and a box of chocs to say thanks from her and the head for always dropping whatever I'm doing to help them out.

Or in other words, "thanks for doing what we pay you for, Jo!"

Appreciation like this I can cope with. :)

Comments

[perkybitch.livejournal.com]

Rock on, its nice to be appreciated every once in awhiles :)

Now, I have yet to see that shit, for myself.

[nyquilusa.livejournal.com]

Mmm, warm fuzzy tech support stories rock.

I've got one to share. A sweet old lady signed up with our ISP, but couldn't get online. After troubleshooting for a while over the phone, I asked her to bring her computer to the office. Turns out to be a bad modem.

She was the nicest person I had talked to in months, and I did not want to return her computer broken and unable to use our service - especially because she also dropped off a box of the best brownies I've ever had, we get a few dollars commission on new signups, and refunds take weeks. It just happens that I have a friend who owes me money but was never going to pay it back, but he also had heaps of hardware. He gave me a modem the next day. Actually my computer geek roommate gave me one, too. Since it was my day off, I dropped them off at work, intending to put one in later. Another tech got to it first. Found the drivers on driverguide.com and got it working.

When we gave the computer back and told her it had a new modem, no charge, she was impressed and brought another batch of brownies when she picked it up. I figured the modem-brownie exchange was a good deal and the end of it, but she did something else.

Turns out she is friends with the owner of another small ISP that was about to go out of business. She talked to him, and he contacted us to transfer his several hundred customers to us. The best part is that all of his customers actually know how to use their computers properly, so it was little work for us, and our extended hours and functional billing system are better for them. True story :)

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

Now that is a cool story :)

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

it's always nice to see/read some of the happier moments in tech'ing.

i had two interesting moments of my own when i was a student tech. the first one was during the first summer i worked as a tech (i had worked during the year but it was a big privelege to be hired for the summer as they had very few openings). an incoming freshman and his mother came in asking to be networked. it's the middle of the summer so no logons have been created for the new students yet. so, we told them that and said we'd do what we could now and see if we could make things quicker when he fully moved onto campus in the fall. we had a line of other machines so we told them come back late afternoon. they came back with a give of some really good, not so cheap tube shaped cookie things. man were they delicious.

the other incident was while working with my old computer volunteer group. we'd go out and network the incoming students during orientation weekend and during the 3 weeks/weekends following the start of classes. we put together schedules and notified the freshmen of when we'd be in their buildings and it was pretty much based on population of new students. this one building, an all girls dorm, was later in the orientation weekend blitz. we arrived on the scheduled day and time to 30 or so girls who burst into cheers and applause and a multitude of thanks for being there to network them. that day also gave rise to an amusing thing said by one of our team members. this was before LCD monitors were the norm and the one guy said "is it bad when you walk into a dorm full of cheering girls and find yourself drooling over an LCD monitor instead?"