Princess Fix IT

Thursday was a very good day for the Princess. It was one of those days that serves as a small reminder that I do indeed, love my job. As you know dear reader, that can waver on occasion, or at least appear to waver from some of my past musings, but the enjoyment and satisfaction I receive from my job may not translate on this site as much as it should. So let?s set the scene shall we?

6:02 PM Myself and Tuggie exit The Fort, ready to end our day. Walking down the hall, a gaggle of The Original Red Cape Brigade floods out of a nearby office, beckoning for our technical expertise, so naturally, we do our duty and step in. Awaiting us is the following message, ?No operating system found.? Now you may shudder at the serious nature of this message dear reader, but not we IT Folk. We live for this shit. Immediately I ask the user a question, get the answer I was looking for, wave my wand and tad ah, all is well.

6:05 PM Myself and Tuggie exit the user?s office and venture out into the winter weather to grab a smoke and make our way home.

Three minutes and my job was complete. Now those of you with a technical grasp on things may know the question I asked of the user and have the knowledge to determine the cause of the error, but that isn?t my point. What gave me such a tremendous dose of satisfaction, aside from performing under the massive pressure that is TORCB, is that I had enough sense for that to be my first question. Technical support is a precise mixture of knowledge, research and communication. If you do not ask a user the proper questions, you will not come to a fast and hard solution. Users are not prone to offer up information freely, so you have to be able to extract it from them. As delicately as possible, of course. Alright, alright, so I?m not known for my delicate nature, but you get the point. Ahem.

This particular solution was beyond simple and I write this entry not to tout my knowledge, but to express why I enjoy what I do. To walk into a user?s office, ask a question and offer up a solution within minutes, equates to a very satisfying moment. To then realize that one question saved a tremendous amount of your own time as well theirs, is very important.

For those of you still curious what the problem was, it was a basic case of an external drive plugged into the USB port while the user was booting up his machine. It confuses the PC?s boot order, so unplugging it brings about proper functionality by booting to the system drive. It certainly wasn?t my proudest technological moment, but it brought about more internal justification that I am where I?m supposed to be, that I am fit to do this for a living and that it makes me very happy.

It was a good day.