Why I Love My Job

[FallenAce]

Helping out on the tech support phone line can be fun! I'm including a note about the trouble ticket I just closed. This is the help request I received, followed by my closing comments:

MESSAGE: Summary Detail Their VIP system is not working can someone please call her? She can not get her system to go on. It is not letting her do anything.

CLOSING COMMENTS: No issues with machine. CU says the system was taking too long to boot up, so they just kept rebooting until, to paraphrase, they "booted from the diagnostic CD five or six times by pressing F10 or something" and then the machine worked.

Do you see how helping out on the tech support line can be fun?

[Daesania]

Man...I feel the pain in this thread. I work helpdesk, 6pm to 6am for my company. We do business outsourcing for companies.. IE: hosting their windows or unix servers, exchange servers, mainframe, etc. All together we have approx. 60 customers... each one is completely different and we're expected to know quite a bit about these customers. Bleh.

Luckily, 70% of my calls get transferred to mainframe operators :D

[Apples]

I love my job because I get to browse these forums all day thinking about awesome stuff.

[Daesania]

That's what I do too :) In my 12 hour shift, i probably do actually 3 hours of work. The helpdesk has control over the satellite TV and radio, plus free internet all night long.... AND they just put a mini fridge and its right next to my desk. Holla.

[FallenAce]

I usually enjoy working the support line because a lot of this stuff is so brainless... not to say yours isn't difficult, but the questions we get are ridiculous sometimes. I typically stay off the phone when I can, but it can't always be helped. I build the computers that these people can't use, so when there's a question that can't be answered, it ends up getting turned over to me, as I'm apparently the be-all and end-all of my department, even though the next-least senior person has been here 3 times as long as I have.

We deal a lot with PostgreSQL as our primary database system for these machines, and I learned everything I know about PGSQL from watching people hose the DB, but apparently that gave everyone else license to not learn what SQLSTATE ERROR=58000 means.

Once, one of my bosses asked me, "What does a security certificate do?"
"What do you <I>think</I> it does?" was my response.

[jonfitzsimon]

Retail management, yeah!