Thirty Years at the Help Desk

People assume IT support is about computers. After thirty years of it, I can tell you it is mostly about people — computers are just the thing everyone is standing around when the trouble starts.

The problem is rarely the problem

Someone says the printer is broken. The printer is fine. What happened is that a driver update changed the default tray, and now every document comes out on letterhead, and they have a meeting in ten minutes. The technical fix takes ninety seconds. The part that matters is the ten minutes.

Learning to hear the real problem underneath the reported one is the whole job. Most of what I do is translation:

• What the user says
• What the user means
• What the system is actually doing

Those three are almost never the same thing, and the gap between them is where support work lives.

Patience is a technical skill

I mean this literally. The fastest way to make a problem worse is to start changing things before you understand them. A calm five minutes spent reproducing the fault will beat an hour of confident guessing every time.

The most expensive words in IT are "that shouldn't be possible."

It is always possible. Go look.

Write it down

The version of me from six months ago is a stranger with no memory, and he will absolutely hit this same problem again. Documentation is not bureaucracy — it is a message to that stranger.

Same reason I keep making things and putting them online. Some of it is for other people. A fair amount of it is a note to myself.