You... appreciate me! Cool!

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

Recap: I work at a University's Arts Faculty's Help Desk.

I had a prof come in a few weeks into the term and ask me to teach him how to upload materials to his course's website. Turns out that he just has a page on his personal webspace that he uses to link to some interesting documents and sometimes lecture notes.

He had several sets of different instructions that were varying difficulties... there are just so many ways of completing this task on campus machines that he had received contradicting instructions that were too difficult for a complete n00b (FTP to the site, download the .html file, add the new link, upload the .html file, upload the file you're linking to, with varying ways of doing each).

I thought about it for awhile, and then had him map the network drive containing his website to his work machine. This let him drag and drop files to upload, and to edit the website live. Then I held my nose and had him update the indices in Word so that he could just type, highlight, and insert a link and double-click on the file already uploaded to the site.

He was so thrilled. It took a lot of practice and a set of written notes, but he could do it, and he understood what he was doing. You should have seen how astounded and happy he was to learn that if he uploaded a new version of an already linked document, the link would point to the new doc (I'm sitting there trying to explain "Well, a link points to the filename...")

He was always patient and polite and hardly got frustrated, even though a lot of basics were missing (he had Word minimized and My Documents open once, and when I reminded him that he had Word open already, he pointed to My Docs and said "Oh, so this is Word?")


SO (point of story) he called to have me help him upload the last thing for the term (exams are coming!) and when I dropped in, he presented me with a $10 giftcard for the University stores. To me that's totally sweet of him! I was only coming by on the clock but I guess he appreciated the one-on-one time.

Yay! Nice customers! Actually, a lot of them have been exceptionally polite lately. I think it's the pretty weather.

Comments

[jecook]

::awards you 10 golden coins::

It's a _very_ rare thing for the on site techs to get anything beyond a "thanks", if even that.

I once got tipped _$20_ from one of the clients my company at the time did work for. Our official policy is not to accept tips, and I told the guy that, but he insisted, and I did not want to upset him....

Besides, I did some stuff that was not exactly within the scope of what I was there to do, but it was trivial to do.

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

Best tip I ever got was a bottle of homemade wine. I was working at Future Scrap (Best Buy subsidiary in Canada) at the time, and the local Uni was running a Linux night course. Word got around that not only did we do OS installs, but had a competent Linux guy (me) so I had a bunch of linux installs to do for students. One guy was so happy that I got his POS Compaq to work with Linux (Back in the era of 'everything is wierd proprietary shit') that he brought me a water bottle full of rather strong homemade wine.

[swwinchester.livejournal.com]

Best tip I ever got as a tech for your American Counterparts?

Assistant manager of a Panera Bakery in the same complex our BB was in came in with a broken desktop (Virus infection, I think it was Blaster ... not sure). Asked how fast we could do it. I look at the machine, know what it is, and say "Drop back around lunchtime. I'll have it ready."

Now, at the time, I had NO idea where this guy worked, he was just happy to hear that. So he drops back, and he's got a HUGE ass box of assorted pastries fresh from the bakery for myself and the other tech on shift. After that - like 2 months later - the other tech stopped in there one day for lunch, the guy recognizes him, and gives him 2 sandwiches on the house (One for him, one for me) since the box was running super-smooth (at that time, we had a much more LIBERAL policy about what we would do for the cost of a virus removal - since we were allready DOING a lot to get that virus out, we'd apply all of the patches using an autopatcher AND clean up startup at no cost during our efforts to make sure the virus was gone and not coming back).

You're right, though ... the best tips frequently aren't cash. Always be nice to a nice customer, because you NEVER know what might come of it ... I have since switched out to working in a Pharmacy (lack of tech work), and one of my old BB customers came in with an emergency script. He THANKED ME for all my work back in those days and has since transfered his scrips into my pharmacy because "I know they've got superior service. SWW works there."

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Heh, that's great to hear. One year, after I'd recovered a hard drive for a professor, I got a bottle of scotch. In seven years, that was the only gift I received while working at a college. 'Course, it I still remember it.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

You... appreciate me! Cool!

You make it sound like that's uncommon. It should be:

You...appreciate me?!? *THUMP*

Which is what people do when hell freezes over.

[taleya.livejournal.com]

Score :D Best I got was a giant bottle of baileys for rebuilding my Aunt's machine...but that's family so it doesn't count :P

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Word to that. Booze is the greatest gift a tech could ask for.

[devilkitty0.livejournal.com]

The desktop consultant's frequent flyers give them goodies that they share with the rest of the group. Pastries, cookies, grapefruit from retirees...

What kills me is that most people are nice to the concultants and terrible to the help desk when they are reporting the problem.

DK

[spiker-uk.livejournal.com]

Mine was a very nice bottle of port for helping an academic recover her LaTeX source for a paper due the next day.

At 3am in the morning, by 'phone from home.

So yeah, definitely not "on the clock" time for me. :) (I'm a 9-6 desk jockey/systems programmer rather than a standard helldesk type.)

[network-nerd.livejournal.com]

1985, I think it was, or perhaps 1986, my boss came in with a box that had arrived from the University of Waterloo library, labelled "backup tapes". It was addressed to our team, but not any specific individual, so he was trying to find which of us was expecting this shipment.

Nobody was.

So he opened it, and inside were two bottles of nice wine and a basket of other goodies. We *HAD* been doing a lot that year to get our part of their new computer system operational....

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

Did you work for UW at the time, or were you off campus?

That may or may not be my campus... :-P

[network-nerd.livejournal.com]

Although I had attended, and eventually graduated from, UW, I was at that point working for a company in Markham that built systems for libraries and credit unions.

[tallguy.livejournal.com]

I had spent a lot of time working with a client to get their network running and installing and training them on our software. I guess were chatting at some point, and I mentioned that I was a vodka drinker.
Later that month, I received a bottle of Absolut in the mail, with a note that said "Have a drink on me!"


There was another client who was in the same line of work at Tony Soprano (both kinds of work). He was concerned that we wan't getting enough attention from our company, and was quite vocal. I was sent to meet with him and smooth his ruffled feathers. As we shook hands at the end, he slipped a $100 bill in my palm, and staring me in the eye, said "I wanted to make sure there are no hard feelings between us."
After staring at the C-note for a minute, I handed it back to him and told him we can't accept gratuities. Ten points for ethical behavior, minus one hundred points for not knowing how the "business" worked.