Cube with a blocked view.

An hour of my day...gone.

Score one for my customer service skills. I've just spent an hour. Yes, an hour, on the phone with a user. Not just any user... the director of Engineering. As he's heading for the door for a business trip. "Hey, can you tell me..."

It's understandable. I'm certainly not the most adept user when it comes to technologies I never have to use. I spend a lot of time searching for stuff on our portal. Yeah, I know. One would think that I'd be better at it than I am. But no. I'll let you in on a little secret...computer professionals don't know everything about every little piece of software out there. Throw me in front of an outlook mail interface and I'd be panicking and reaching for the wine.

But I digress (common occurance, isn't it?) . I spent an hour walking him through necessary steps to work offline, how to get his changes back to the server once he is back in civilization, stuff like that. Even set up his connections so when he's out of the office he still feels like he's here. And again, I had to go off a reference document to set that up for him. I don't do it every day and when I did it at home, I just about threw my computer out the window. And I did well. I usually hate taking those calls. Busy people, lack of time, a lot of frustrations, and high enough up that he mentions the Director of IT comfortably. High enough up he can probably see the river from his office, instead of just valley and parkades.

I had to suck it up and take about 20 minutes of pure frustration at mail file size limits and archive file size limits and what this means with the new legislation in effect in the US, etc. Like I have any control over said limits. But that's my job. Reassure him I'll bring his concerns up to the server guys and let him know I'll see what I can do for him. Which is likely nothing, but I guess I get to try. I'm sure the server guys just laugh when they see my number on their call display. Such is life. I'm still learning to live with the red tape.

I could even explain the reason for some of the red tape to the user. blah blah, server space, blah, thousand users, blah, blah, cost of storage, blah blah blah. I thought I was quite eloquent about it. I'm sure I was, in fact. He just didn't agree with the reasons for it.

Now if you don't mind, I have new pictures of my nephew to look at that my sister in law sent me.

posted by Erin @ 2:25 PM