Last night, I had a wonderful dream. I saved a child from a building that was about to collapse. Some of the details are a bit fuzzy, it was a dream after all, but I remember standing outside the building with a feeling of happiness and peace. Well, that is until my cat started scratching at the door to be let out…half an hour before I usually get up. Ah, the joys of cat ownership.
Well, the cat did not really ruin my morning, and neither did the chaos of getting ready, despite the best efforts of my wife, my son, and the new puppy. I was a little late for work, but that is fairly normal.
I work for a state agency, in the IT department, and ever morning from 8-10 I man the helpdesk. My first call of the morning?
“I can’t get my password changed.”
That’s an easy one, and a good way to start the day. Now, password changes are a common problem at our agency. There are only about a dozen places that employees have to log on to. Fortunately, most don’t have to log on to all of them. Unfortunately, almost no one can keep track of the half-dozen or so that they do have to log on to. We often get calls saying they cannot log on to their PC, when in fact, they have been logged on to their PC for hours, and now cannot get logged into the subsystem where they actually do their work.
Well, rather than ask a dozen questions trying to find out what they are trying to log in to, I just asked for the number that we use to connect remotely. Connecting in remotely allows us to do things on the user’s PC, rather than relying on the user to do what we tell them to. I used to work at Dell, and that was a major problem. Once I get connected, I quickly see that it is a problem with the mainframe password that is the problem, again, an easy one to start the day. I walk the user through changing their password and everything goes smoothly, until….
“Why does it work when you do, but not when I do it?”
I bite my tongue, hard, and answer politely, “I don’t know, technician’s luck.” Then I hang up, before my sarcastic nature gets me in trouble.
Boy, I just want to answer a question like that honestly sometime.
“It works when I do it, because I do it the right way.”
I can just imagine the conversation that follows that.
“Why does it work when you do, but not when I do it?”
“It works when I do it, because I do it the right way.”
“But I did it the same way you did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.”
“No, you didn’t, because if you had done it the way I did it, the right way, then it would have worked.”
Oh well, I can always dream, and maybe write about it in my blog.
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