techrecovery | You... appreciate me! Cool!

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.