I received a message from my cousin Sam last week. She had encountered an issue on her desktop that had stumped her regarding Excel, so she asked me if I could come out and take a look at it.
I rode out after work and was able to quickly figure out what the issue was. Then she asked, “Can you take a look at my fax? It faxes out just fine, but it won’t receive faxes. It never picks up.” It was a Dell 946 All-in-one fax machine and it was completely foreign to me.
I said I would, though I made sure she knew it was not my area of expertise. To get a printer to work correctly, I usually turn off and on the printer and reboot a computer.
All I knew was what my Uncle Roger told me - they had a fax line installed and it was dedicated for the printer/fax.
I tried calling the number first to make sure it would ring. It did. It also never picked up, just as Sam described. Check.
I found the manually very quickly and made sure the phone cord was plugged into the fax slot and not the phone slot. Check.
It had great instructions in it for identifying how to receive a fax. As I traversed the menu on the fax, it looked nothing like the manual! WTF! My Uncle Roger was there as well, so I had verification I was not crazy. He and I both were stumped.
So, as all IT people do at some point during the day, I pulled up Google. An IT person, contrary to rumor and "The Peele Hypothesis," cannot know every given IT thing. We may have vague thoughts or ideas about certain unfamiliar items. We may have troubleshooting techniques that drive an end-user crazy because they seems so simple (ie. “So is your power on?”) We may know someone across the room who knows the answer without researching it.
My experience is that IT really becomes less about what you know and more about how you can research and find the answer to things you have no knowledge of. I spent 30 minutes searching, changing my search criteria, and trying to find the elusive answer when magically I came across a discussion board where someone else had a similar issue.
A wise man known as PudgyOne had helped that poor lost soul in February 2011 and thanks to him, I looked like a genius when I pulled up the properties, changed a drop down box value and successfully got the fax to pick up after 3 rings. I was so excited, I joined the site just to let him know how much his answered helped me 16 months later.
As I laid down to go to sleep that night, I thought about how cool it would be to buy that guy a beer, but sadly, I don’t know him and I’ll never meet him in person. But wouldn’t it be great to send him a beer though!
As I got drowsy, I created in my mind a new economic currency known as the CyberBeer. The CyberBeer is the equivalent to approximately $4 US and the purpose is to send someone a CyberBeer, particularly on something that he or she wrote up on a public board several months ago, as a token of appreciation. The $4 US unit is derived from the $3.09 Happy hour price for a double of mainstream American beer at my local bar or the equivalent of a pint of real beer. But what’s great is you can send the CyberBeer with a click of the button.
I am not sure it is enough to base an entire economy on. I doubt it would ever catch on. But I like the sentiment.
I think more than anything my mind just wanders too much as I try to sleep. Tonight, I’ll have a cold one and silently toast all those super users who happily offer others support by documenting their findings publically. Every non-IT person reading this (12 of you?) should go tell their IT person how much you appreciate what they do. No matter how frustrated or angry you get with them, they eventually do solve the issue.
And this October 10th, make sure to thank your IT guy and make it National Thank Your IT Guy Day. It’s on 10/10 – that’s binary (credit to Richard Brown for that.)
Your IT person will get that joke even if you don’t.
I mean, why not? There’s a National Nurses Day, a National Bosses Day, National Secretaries Day ….
