The thing about working in IT support is that I get asked by friends for help with their IT needs as well. Heath Ledger’s Joker in the film The Dark Knight famously says: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” He forgot to mention that when friends and family comes calling, you do have to do it for free.
Such was the situation last evening. I was all ready for the wind-down phase of my day. About to hit the shower, then straight to bed. Then suddenly a phone call from a friend. She somehow did a factory reset on the WiFI extender in her room, and it’s no longer working. Without a functioning extender, the network signal to her office is super weak, therefore extremely difficult for her to work-from-home.
Of course, it was me who setup the WiFi extender initially. So you can say I felt even more obligated to assist. No good deed goes unpunished. I guess I’m not going to sleep on time!
Thanks to the magic of video calling, I avoided having to make a house call (the friend lives close enough). With streamed visuals I was able to guide my friend through the setup process. 15 minutes later, she was all good once again. Indeed, it’s technologies like Zoom that allow IT support folks to do our jobs during this pandemic. Providing instructions while being able to see what the users are doing is exponentially better than asking them on the phone to describe what they see.
Especially when those users are our not-so-technically-inclined friends!
Resting place.