Over my vacation, Liz (who I imagine is a fairly typical business computer user) vented a bit about the IT guys that she's worked with. She would be in the middle of important business stuff, her computer crashes, and all of a sudden she's at the mercy of generally inconsiderate and tactless computer nerds, who can make her life a lot easier or a lot more difficult. The message that I got was basically "I need to kiss *this* nerd's ass just so I can get back to work? Who the hell does he think he is?" (I'm paraphrasing here).

I totally understood where she was coming from. I've observed it myself. There's even a Saturday Night Live skit about "Your Office IT Guy", where the joke is this nerdy guy who berates people and lords power over them for not knowing "simple" computer knowledge. I think those guys are pretty common.

It was sort of eye-opening to get a user's side of the story. It really made me think about my own job, and my own dealings with users. I'm not a "front-line" support guy, but I still do deal with users pretty regularly.

It's always a tricky subject. When people are having computer problems, particularly when they really need to get stuff done, they are sometimes in a strangely vulnerable, defensive state of mind. It gets even more interesting when they actually screwed up (deleted an important file or something) and caused their own problems. I've seen generally good, upstanding people "forget" what they did, or even directly lie to cover up a mistake they made. No one wants to have their mistakes drawn out to the light of day, and unfortunately, sometimes that's what we have to do.

A good example: There was a trade error a while back. The trader received a PDF file that had 4 pages of orders that needed to be executed (an "order" is something like buy x shares of this, sell y shares of that, etc). He executed the orders on pages 2, 3, and 4, but not the ones listed on page one. When this came to light, he accused the email system of dropping the first page of the PDF attatchment. It wasn't his fault, it was "the system". ("The system" gets blamed a lot).

Well, when errors that involve dollars happen, they are investigated. We try to figure out what happened, and see what we can do to prevent them from happening again. When "the system" is blamed, it's sometimes my job to investigate.

My strong inclination was that it's impossible for a page to be dropped from a PDF file in transit over email. I can't explain technically WHY it's impossible, I just know it to be so. So I talked to the user, and asked him exactly what he does when he gets these files. He showed me that he opens the PDF, and prints it by right-clicking to bring up a pop-up menu, and then choosing "print". When he was doing this, I noticed that the option just above "Print" was "Delete Page" (whoever designed that menu should be... punished).

I talked to his supervisor, saying that I couldn't explain how a page was dropped from the fax. But that I did notice the menu thing, and IF the user accidently deleted the page, and then re-printed, that would yield the same results as what we were seeing. The supervisor, being a smart guy, smiled knowingly and they accepted responsibility for the error report.

So it's a weird thing. To a certain degree, there are battle lines drawn. I'd be lying if I said that we (computer guys) didn't joke about how idiotic the users could be. They screw stuff up, and it's our job to fix it. How could there not be some resentment? And I'd be stupid to think that they didn’t have jokes at our expense as well. I mean, how could you not? Have you SEEN us?

Yet we still meet in the lunchroom, and smile and say "hi" to each other. I've had my ass kissed by users. We've been on the receiving end of "thank you" awards, cookies, candy, nice emails, etc. I like to think that it's genuine, but some part of me knows it's also proactive back-scratching.

In my own personal experience, I like to think I'm pretty good at dealing with the users. I understand that we're all on the same team, and have the same goals in mind. I realize that they are helpless when their computer is down, and I like being a hero (in my own mind, at least) when I can help 'em out. It's harder when they are impatient or difficult or defensive, but I understand that that comes with the territory. I try not to be too elite and holier-than-thou, but sometimes it can be difficult to not sound smater/better than someone when you ARE "smarter" by the very nature of knowing more about computers than they do.

So it was interesting to hear uncensored comments from Liz. It kind of makes me want to informally talk to business user friends here and get a better idea of what their experiences are like.

Any of you have any good/bad stories, from either a user or support standpoint? Just curious.

PS: Check out Lake Powell vids, courtesy of Baditude! Thanks buddy!

http://baditude.net/Home/video/powell_partone.wmv
http://baditude.net/Home/video/powell_parttwo.wmv