Because it's the right thing to do?

A tranquil start, anyway. View from my bus stop.


I have a new scanner in my office, and it's hooked up to a new PC and I think I have used it three times. A coworker wanted to use it yesterday. First thing, the computer wouldn't find it. It had been turned off while the computer was still powered up, and apparently the pc can only find the scanner once per boot. I told her to reboot the computer. She rebooted the scanner. I repeated that the scanner had been shut off and the computer hadn't and she should retry rebooting the pc. She finally relented and rebooted the pc.

I got a call to go help someone with a Word document, they were trying to make a memo out of stationery I'd created for another professor. Layout in Word. The two are in vastly different universes. Word is counter intuitive to a designer. I was able to help her but it took about 10 minutes longer than it should have.

I come back and the lady trying to use the scanner is stumped and asks me to take a look. I'd forgotten that for some reason, the scanner menu is hidden at the bottom of the screen, nearly invisible. I guess the first time I used it, I dragged it down there out of the way for some reason, and forever that image is imprinted in the scanner software's memory. Another hurdle hurdled.

Himming and hawing out loud very loudly for some time she starts reading me the error messages on the screen generated by the scanning software and that oh no, it's frozen. I don't say much except that I haven't used Adobe Elements to create scans, although it should be easier to do it that way. She tries again and gets the same error. I tell her to try using the scanning software directly without Adobe. It seems to work, scans the image in the "overview" pane, but then gets an error for the next scan. I'm across the room and can't see exactly what she's doing. It's always just worked for me. She said it's "obviously broken" and I replied that it's always worked for me. I told her there's a huge manual that's very helpful on the desk, or she can call our own Helpdesk. "Oh so you're not going to help me, alright. I'll get this done somewhere else."

I helped her when she asked for help. Reading the error messages of the screen, sighing loudly, repeatedly saying "okay, okay hm now what" is NOT asking for help. It's noise to be ignored. And I did help her when she needed to move the interface window from the bottom of the screen and told her to reboot the pc. Those things were helpful.

But just because this hardware happens to be in my office means that I'm the de-facto technical support for it? We have people for that. An entire department devoted to hardware. Use them.