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

[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."