Lightbulb moments

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

I’m sure by now we’ve all heard the horror stories of working on a helpdesk, and after 7 plus months working on one I can totally see exactly where they’re coming from, and even have a few of my own. On the other hand, one thing that I get working on a helpdesk far more often than I do working in the server room are the “lightbulb” moments with users. That moment when you’re explaining a concept to them and they not only “get it” but see exactly why the concept is so good.

I have these on a regular basis. Today, I had it with someone who spends a lot of time importing/exporting data into a contact database when she understood exactly what the CONCATENATE function in Excel could do for her in terms of getting fields from different sources mapped correctly. Tomorrow or the next day it’ll be something else.

Those moments make all the other stuff worthwhile.

Tags: HelpDesk

61223-060411-529366-31
© 2006 All Rights Reserved.

Share with your friends!
LinkedInMastodonBuffer

Similar Posts

Morning news with my coffee

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

SafeWeb users are vulnerable. Oh the irony. Should we start calling them (not so)SafeWeb? *L* The Register is baffled by ICQ “hack”. Was it hacked or wasn’t it? You be the judge… Trillian version .725 is out, the latest in the AIM connection wars. Why aren’t the Olympics over yet? Haven’t we had enough drama,…

Thanks!

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

Thanks to a suggestion from Anita, I found a different referrer script that, while still not running locally, at least did include instructions on how to limit the number of characters it shows of a title. That should keep the table layout from getting screwy. I’ll tweak it as referrers start showing up and I…

|

Reading – Making your PEOPLE an essential part of your cyber security strategy

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

This article reminded me of a statistic I saw during a presentation on insider threats last week. In a recent survey, over one third of employees would willingly sell their passwords/access to anyone, some for as little as $150. See the problem here is that while so many people are starting to wake up to…

Pretty good week for Google

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

Does anyone else remember seeing so many little, yet very useful, announcements being made by one company the way Google made them in the last half of this week? We got new Gmail features, vacation auto responder and Contact Groups, they put out a Blogger comments Firefox extension along with a Safe Browsing extension, and…

Linked – Former Google In-House Discovery Leader Says It’s Important to Invest in People Before Tech
|

Linked – Former Google In-House Discovery Leader Says It’s Important to Invest in People Before Tech

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

You know, we could ask the same question at many corporate law departments, and also at law firms. “When I came to Google my hypothesis was, what would happen if you really invested in the people?” she said. “And then I went out and found those people.” Often, eDiscovery is an offshoot of something else….

Linked: Employees’ email still drives most of the data loss at organizations
|

Linked: Employees’ email still drives most of the data loss at organizations

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

A good chunk of these breaches are not someone actually trying to steal data, but just someone trying to either make something more easily accessible outside of the office or taking information when they leave related to things like contact information, maybe some documents they’ve written themselves that they want to keep, etc.

It’s likely that these folks aren’t actively trying to commit some sort of corporate espionage, they just aren’t really thinking about what they do. It might just be that the once-per-year required video just isn’t enough to make it top of mind every day.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.