How to get Help
I asked Mr JM about his work – he does Helpdesk for an Aged Care company. He says he helps people to use their computers; they call him a Desktop Support Engineer. Specifically I wanted to know what is the best thing for people to do before they call for help.
His response? ‘If the computer is not responding, NOTHING!’
What he means is that, quite often, things are recoverable if help is called before anything changes. But mostly computer users will fiddle and try to fix things they know little about and in the process spoil the chances of getting back the document or data.
Of course, if your computer has given the much talked of BSOD, (Blue Screen of Death) there isn’t likely much you could have done.
He also thinks that not enough people read the Manual – in a previous job he had a sign behind the desk with really big letters ‘RTFM’ In tiny letters the rest of the word showed as Read The Manual, with the F standing for what you think it does.
Another point he made is that most people think they have done something stupid and so they lie. The Helpdesk guy will ask what they did and they try to make themselves appear less stupid by trying to tell falsehoods. It goes much smoother if the user tells the helpdesk what they actually did. That would be the last thing that was done just before the computer malfunctioned.
According to him, the stupid people are those geeky types being paid small fortunes to develop software that works the way humans expects it to – which is difficult in his view as most of those geeky types havene’t actually met a human.
Leave a Reply