Lightbulb moments

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.

Similar Posts

  • Weekend Fun

    We had tickets to the Ohio State-San Diego State game yesterday afternoon, and since Angela had to work a morning event on campus well before game time, Finnegan and I had some time to ourselves to tour the campus. He’s got a couple of his favorite poses over on his blog. Speaking of football, any…

  • Interruptions..

    Not making the progress I want to so far. Had a few interruptions, and I’m expecting a few more, unfortunately. One of those “Mike can you tell us ‘XYZ’ from this data even though we never bothered to track the data that would actually tell you “XYZ” from the start of the project and have…

  • What I’m Sharing (weekly)

    Going #Faceless One in four Americans won’t do business with data-breached companies – How soon before we can’t find any who weren’t though? Keeping machine learning algorithms humble and honest in the ‘ethics-first’ era Sitting at the Same Lunch Table: 3 Key Ways to Ensure Legal and IT are in Sync The Workstream of eDiscovery:…

  • Comments fix?

    Andy tells me that he got aspcomments working with the new, longer blogids that the new version of blogger is going to be kicking out. I haven’t tried it yet on the test blog, but probably will tonight. Hmm here’s a pretty good hint that I should learn more about programming myself, huh? I knew…

  • Blocking popups

    I installed the new Google Toolbar yesterday on my work machine. I have made a somewhat half-hearted attempt to use IE a bit more than usual, but not a whole lot more since then, just to see how many popups it blocks. As of 1:30 this afternoon the count is 42. So I wonder, exactly…

Leave a Reply

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

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)