Tech support — Blog

Evening tech support

The thing about working in IT support is that I get asked by friends for help with their IT needs as well. Heath Ledger’s Joker in the film The Dark Knight famously says: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” He forgot to mention that when friends and family comes calling, you do have to do it for free.

Such was the situation last evening. I was all ready for the wind-down phase of my day. About to hit the shower, then straight to bed. Then suddenly a phone call from a friend. She somehow did a factory reset on the WiFI extender in her room, and it’s no longer working. Without a functioning extender, the network signal to her office is super weak, therefore extremely difficult for her to work-from-home.

Of course, it was me who setup the WiFi extender initially. So you can say I felt even more obligated to assist. No good deed goes unpunished. I guess I’m not going to sleep on time!

Thanks to the magic of video calling, I avoided having to make a house call (the friend lives close enough). With streamed visuals I was able to guide my friend through the setup process. 15 minutes later, she was all good once again. Indeed, it’s technologies like Zoom that allow IT support folks to do our jobs during this pandemic. Providing instructions while being able to see what the users are doing is exponentially better than asking them on the phone to describe what they see.

Especially when those users are our not-so-technically-inclined friends!

Working from home

As a person whose job doesn’t really suit the mythical work-from-home paradigm - tech support at a university - the notion of having no commute and working from the leisure of my very own desk was not something that crossed my mind often. Not that I wouldn’t want to try it, but in my line of work, being remote is a disadvantage; computers are best troubleshooted in-person, when I can see and manipulate exactly what’s going on.

Well, the coronavirus is the paradigm shifter that keeps on giving. Within the span of one week, San Francisco State University took all its classes completely online, and effectively barred any non-critical personnel from coming to campus. All of a sudden, I was thrust into a role I’d thought would never happen: helping faculty and students with technical problems while sitting in my room. What once was thought impossible: converting the whole university to remote education, we now try and make the best of it, using the wonderful collaborative technologies such as Zoom and Slack.

It turns out, tele-troubleshooting can be effectively done, just in a wholly different sort of way. How you disseminate information goes from conversational to almost entirely in typed words: writing concisely and conveying difficult tasks using common language become the skill to have and develop. You’re force to be creative, too: the physical barrier of not being able to meet up is something we must navigate around, and on certain problems it’s a supreme challenge. For example, it’s not so easy to exchange a laptop that won’t power on when you don’t have access to backstock.

I have to say it’s been fun to come up with new solutions to these challenges, and it’s been a great learning experience thus far working from home. It’s also really nice to be able to climb out of bed, sit on my task chair, and already be ready for action. The one thing about “normal” work that I don’t miss at all is the dreadful commute. However, I do miss being at the actual office, seeing my coworkers, and the social collaboration that can only happen in-person. Video conferencing is great, but physical face-to-face interaction is crucial in our area of IT support.

There’s at least one more month of working from home to go. As with most things in life, I’m going to enjoy the process while it’s here.