Hello again blogosphere!
I thought I would take this opportunity (read: this evening laying in bed at 12am feeling inspired to write a blog post) to talk with you about what I do for a living. That sounds too formal, it's just a job that I work which gives me money. But that sounds a lot less involved than it actually is. See why I thought it might be worth while to talk with you about it? It also just seemed to me like I never really talked about what my job actually IS or what I DO so I figured why not.
I work for the Office of Information Technology at my university. I'm a held desk telephone support, which means that I sit at a desk and answer a phone. 90% of my job revolves around passwords. See, University of Maryland has this super secure system where your password expires every 180 and must be either reset before then or you need to have security questions answered in order to reset it yourself. The passwords need to be between eight and thirty-two characters, must contain at least one upper case letter, at least one lower case letter, and at least one number or symbol, AND if they are based too closely on a dictionary word they will be rejected. Oh, and you can only use a password ONCE. Meaning you can change it up in different ways, but you can't just reuse an old password. Lovely, right? Now you see why this is 90% of what I do, because if a person has forgotten their password or has let it expired and somehow not yet security questions or doesn't remember the answers to them, the only way to get back into the system is either come down to my office or call us up and have us do it over the phone.
However while this is as I keep saying the majority of what I do at work, that other 10% can be a lot more intensive, time consuming, and prevalent on any given day. This is why the student workers get the awesome work environment that we do*, because of some of the ridiculous bullshit we have to deal with.
Just think of anything that you, a whatever level of internet/computer savvy person think is common sense. Now disregard that. Checking your email? Brain surgery. Looking up information you have a question about online? Rocket science.
No, I'm serious. Think of the most inane and insane question regarding a computer or the internet you possibly could and chances are either I have gotten it or someone in my office has gotten it. Much like the call I had recently.
I got a call from a women having trouble sending emails. Okay, not that big a deal, tons of people have problems like that. The ridiculous part is in what she was trying to tell me the problem was. This professor had convinced herself that when she tried to send a picture (she referred to it as "shipping" which I thought was adorable at first but got annoying after the third time) her computer was trying to send the file through the OLD university server. Now, this isn't 100% out of left field. We have switched servers in the last decade so this is possible.
Protocol is to walk through step by step what the customer is doing to find exactly where the problem is*, so I had her go into her email and first send a test message to me, and then send a test message with an attachment to me. No problem. Then she tells me that isn't where she's having a problem. Ooookay, I did kind of notice that but go on. She explains that when she tries to send am image her computer is "popping up and trying to connect to the old system." Okay, I don't understand at this point so I go to one of the "full timers"** and have them to a remote session, which is this cool program that allows you to see what the customer is seeing on their computer (LogMeIn.com).
Leaving aside the fact that her computer was PAINFULLY slow (seriously, I would have smashed this machine a long time ago) I have her go through all the steps to send an image. This is one area worth mention because I had to figuratively hold this woman's hand, an acredited professor, step by step not too far off from this:
Me: So go ahead and show me and the technician where the problem is.
Professor: It tries to connect to the old system when I ship a picture.
Me: We just need you to show us so we can determine what the issue is.
Professor: Alright, so what should I do?
Me: Go ahead and do whatever you would normally do to send an image.
Professor: How do I do that?
Me: . . .
Me: Just go through whatever steps you would take to send an image.
Professor: Oh, okay!
That is how this ENTIRE conversation has gone to this point. Massive, supreme headdesk like you would not believe.
Moving on, the women goes a opens the image (this is a Mac by the way, which will matter in a sentence or two) and explains that somewhere there used to be an option to email it, and while she is saying this she's trying to find it in the options. I would love to say that it is at this point that I understand the problem completely and get the issue resolved and this woman off the phone, but it isn't. We go back and forth and back and forth for several more minutes and then the conversation becomes that this odd program (Mail) keeps opening at "odd, random times." This is the point at which I stop her and explain that when she tries to send an image directly from the image viewing program (Preview for all you non-lower-case-I-cult people) the computer will automatically open the Mac Mail program (which I have to assume at this point was set up for the old email system) and try to send through that.
I then spend, I am NOT exaggerating here, another TEN minutes explaining that when she wants to send something like an image or a document as an attachment in an email, she has to go to her email and attach it THERE-- which, I would like to point out she already KNEW how to do because we walked through sending me that test message with an attachment!!! *dies* But that is not the end. I then have to wait while she tries to DO this with me on the phone because she doesn't believe me that she can attach an image she has been looking at on her desktop via email through the email program. I. Can't. Even. So once she's got that sent to me and believes me that it worked, we then have to spend another five minutes going over, no no, really all you have to do to forward an email that has an attached image to someone is FORWARD that message the same way you normally would (which she has to verify be forwarding me something), and YES that still means that if she wants to send a NEW message with an attachment she has to create a NEW email message and attach the file FROM THERE.
And see how much I've lost my tempter just in this over-long blog post? Imaging sitting there on the phone with a person like this, who is honestly probably a very nice individual and really isn't trying to be a pain, they just don't understand (this women was 74, I checked) which is really okay but you see what I mean? In the end the phone call took 35 minutes, when we usually try to get a customer's problem solved and have them off the phone in under 10.
I think I've exhausted myself with this post, and I'm not even sure now what the point of it was. I guess I just wanted SOMEONE in the world to know what exactly it is I do for a living.
Hope you all are well, and I'll talk to you again soon.
* We are basically allowed to do whatever we want while we aren't on a call. A lot of people bring their own laptops, or use the office computers to chat, check email, browse internet, watch videos/movies/tv/etc. A lot of folks even play games (I've played Minecraft quite a lot myself). As long as we answer the phone and help the customers while remaining polite we get to do what we like. We are afforded this awesome environment because a lot of times when a customer calls and doesn't understand something or is having a bad day or whatever, they take it out on us. I've been very fortunate and never had someone openly curse me out, but I've gotten very close. People get impatient, they want someone to blame and the anonymous person on the phone is a very good target. I've had people who are belligerent, and the worst I've ever had is when the caller asks for a manager, which is seriously the WORST, but again we have a GREAT office where the full timers** always have our back (provided we have our bases covered) it's just that you never want a call to come to that point.
** Full timers refers to staff in the office that work there full time, don't really take regular calls, and are there to answer our questions and help with issues we can't solve. They have access to systems that the students don't and basically have the ability to fix things we can't. Like when a student calls and needs to be put*** into a class they registered for, the students can't do that but a full timer can.
*** For the record this is NOT my department. We have this thing called blackboard (maybe you've heard of it) and when a professor is stupid or whatever and a student hasn't been given access to that class on blackboard, a full timer would have access to add them.
