No, I Will Not Fix Your Computer

You've probably seen this. It's perfect weekend attire for the IT professional. Maybe you don't go as far as wearing a T-shirt that says, "No, I will not fix your computer." But do you tell people to leave you alone when they ask for help?

If you work in IT, the world assumes that you can fix home computers. It doesn't matter if you're the network guy, the mainframe guy or a Web designer--people only understand that you work on computers, so you must naturally know how to fix their broken machines.

In an ideal world, home PC owners would fix their computers--or at least they'd know how to boot from media and run chkdsk. But in reality, people bring their computer issues to IT pros, either those they know or those they don't.

With that in mind, here's a story I've been following. Maybe you heard that the mayor of Racine, Wis., was recently arrested in Dateline-esque style sting.

Disturbing as it is that child pornography was found on his computer, what's interesting is the way he got caught. The (now former) mayor apparently "brought a personal computer to city hall and asked city workers to fix a problem with it. Whatever the workers found was turned over to Racine police,
who in turn passed it on to the state task force."

I also read that the technician who worked on this machine in August 2007 copied and saved the files, and then went to the mayor and suggested he delete them. It was more than a year before the computer tech turned the files over to the police.

If you ever do need to take your computer in for service, take caution. While you don't have illegal files or images on your PC, you may have personal data and files that you don't want others to see. And it's not uncommon for computer technicians to find--and make copies of--materials they find on customer machines. Keep that in mind when you're seeking help with your computer.

People really would be best off fixing their own computers, but in reality, their choices are generally limited to trusting strangers in a repair shop or trying their luck with the IT guy that they know. When you're that IT guy, and people come to you, what do you say? Do you try to help out, or do you just point to the T-shirt?

We Can Learn from End Users

I spent a year in high school working as a busboy at Sizzler Steakhouse. You might think that anyone can do that job--and admittedly, the stress level wasn't high compared to other jobs I've had. But when you go to a restaurant, do you notice the busboys? If you were one, sure; otherwise, probably not.

And yet, how the busboy does his menial job can set the tone for your whole dining experience. If your table isn't wiped down properly, you may conclude that the whole restaurant, including the kitchen, is dirty, or that the employees don't take pride in their work. You may even end up taking your dollars elsewhere.

Sometimes the restaurant was busy--often it wasn't. During the slow times, our manager would ask us to make sure the dishes were washed, dried and put away, and that floors were cleaned. When things got really slow, we cleaned the walls. Sometimes we'd wonder, "what's the point of cleaning a wall?" But we learned that, without a good scrub-down, walls can get quite dirty over time.

The point is, customer service matters. It certainly matters in IT. So how can we "clean the walls" in our IT environments and do our jobs better? For starters, we should change the way we think about our customers--the end users. In some help-desk environments, "lusers" are commonly belittled for their lack of technical expertise. But we should take a moment to step into their shoes. These people might not be technical, but that doesn't mean they aren't intelligent. They just don't share our background.

 

A co-worker of mine once snapped at a nurse when she had problems logging into her workstation. She responded by asking him if he'd like to come up the hall with her and fix an IV or administer some drugs. Touche. The nurse was just as knowledgeable and passionate about healthcare as my coworker was about technology. Working with computers was important, but it was only a small part of her job. She just needed to enter data and to print some reports. She didn't care about drivers, passwords or proper startup/shutdown sequences. Once we showed her how to do what she needed to do, she was fine, and we didn't hear from her again.

End users may not know computers, but they know when they're running slowly. How often do you take the time to actually sit down with your end users and find out how things are working from their perspective? I've had users who were printing out reports from one system and retyping the data into another. How easy would it be to save folks from that effort and aggravation? Just leave the raised floor and take a walk. Find people in other departments that use your systems and ask them for feedback. Ask them if you can look over their shoulder while they use your machine sometime.

End users are our customers. If they weren't using the data we store and process, there would be no need for us. And if we have a better understanding of users' problems and frustrations, if we show them better ways to do things, the entire organization benefits.

It's true that there's never much time for "cleaning walls." We're always told to do more with less. But we should make the time for our end users, our customers. We can learn from them.