O O Ø O O O O
Signoff
How well do you know your systems support professional?
You know the guy. He’s the quiet, mousy-haired, pencil-necked kid who’s always around late, figuring something out, tinkering with stuff. Casually dressed maybe, or perhaps inexplicably formally attired. (Why? What for?)
But who is this guy really? What makes him go? And how do you get on dealing with him?
Well, do you have problem out in user land? Is your software frozen or your hardware hung? Is your data corrupt or your network slow? Is your vendor being a pain? What about training? All of this stuff is in the online jurisdiction of your systems support pro. So if you run into trouble, he’s there to help.
Busy? No problem, because he’s flexible. He can come in early to solve your problems without disturbing your workday. Or “Maybe I’ll get you to come back at lunch” usually works. And don’t forget the conveniently late scheduled outage windows—convenient for you, that is. That way he can boot the servers, recompile the kernel, jiggle the knob or whatever he does back there without disturbing your busy schedule. We know it’s hard for you to fit time in your day between status meetings, 1½ hour lunches, and sending rude email attachments to your buddies at the next company over.
And talk about convenient! He’ll always come to see you since he doesn’t really have a work space of his own. He lives in the server room, with those machines he loves. One phone call is all it takes. Or maybe a phone call and a few gentle voice mail reminders.
Working late? Month end? Arbitrary deadline? Give him a buzz on his cell, or his pager, or call him at home. Hell, call him late at work and leave a message saying “I hope you’re still in,” or better yet “I need this before 8:00 tomorrow. Hope you get this.”
Technical troubles at home? Bring them to our man. He especially appreciates the types of problems that involve technology he doesn’t support at work. Variety, right? It’s good to give him a break from the tedium of getting his job done during normal work hours. He’s also a good source of below cost, hard-to-get software. Good for those situations such as “Our 14 year old was removing files to make room for a game, now the OS won’t boot.” If he gives you a crazy look with his weak, bloodshot eyes, might need to grease the wheels a bit. The offer of a “home cooked meal” is usually sufficient: he can’t cook. Never mind that he has no clue whether you or your spouse can either. He’d love to burn up his weeknight off to meet your kids and smell your house.
Need results right away? Try a physical threat like “I’m going to wring your Goddamn neck,” because he’s use to taking full responsibility for the inter-operability, health and wellbeing of software he didn’t write, hardware he didn’t spec, a topology he didn’t create, multiple competing standards that no vendor fully supported, business functions that were never completely understood, an implementation in which he was never involved, staffing by individuals he didn’t select, management by castoffs who never wanted the responsibility, a lowest bid supplier chosen by a formulaic purchasing clone, rogue systems from disgruntled departments, sloppy kludges by wayward do-it-yourselfers, a vendor with exclusively self serving interests, recklessly irresponsible third party techs, restricted budgets, short circuited testing, nonexistent end user training, glacial desktop refresh programs, missing executive buy-in, expectations he can’t manage, problems he can’t replicate, preconceptions he can’t change, political games he can’t see, historical departmental wrongs he can’t right, personality conflicts he can’t resolve, and miracles he can’t conjure. He’s a service provider, and a cost centre. He lives to serve. Doubly so if he’s a consultant. So corporeal threats usually light a pretty good fire.
Grab him before he has his coffee, or while he still has on his jacket in the morning. Or grab him in the elevator, while he’s totally captive. “When are these fucking computers going to work like they’re supposed to?” would be a good way to lead into the conversation. (Don’t mention that it’s been three weeks since you properly shut down your PC.) Also, you can wait until he’s eating his lunch at what passes for his desk. Ask him if he minds being interrupted while he eats, and then continue regardless of the answer. (Sometimes the tedium makes him cranky. Break it up for him.)
“When are these fucking computers going to work like they’re supposed to?”
At the end of the day, when you’re done all your work and you’ve cleaned up your desk, pop him a question just as he’s going out the door.
Show him you can speak his language. Pepper your conversations, messages and emails with meaningless gems such as “you’re getting down into the guts of the computer,” when he fires up that Start Menu gizmo, or “I’ll let you work your magic,” just before he re-enables your network account by flipping off the caps lock. Throw in phrases you’ve gleaned from the media like “upside down and in the ditch on the information superhighway,” when you’re describing an email glitch.
Actually, just be sure to use the term “information superhighway” lots.
Quite the guy, our man.
Do you like the way he takes the shortest route to the door when he leaves, and can’t make eye contact with any of the users along his way, for fear of triggering a “before you go” lead into “why’s my computer so slow,” or “can you help me with my corporate communications mail merge?”
Lucky for the health of the company he can do everyone’s job for them. He’s a self taught pseudo expert in drafting, geophysics, petroleum economics, desktop publishing, reliability centred maintenance, production accounting, gas marketing, regulatory affairs, geology, mapping, electric deregulation, land management, work-flow analysis, telecommunications, facilities maintenance, data processing, production engineering, media relations, copy writing, design, layout, translation, syntax, grammar, materials management, inventory, procurement, requests for proposal, interviewing, project management, financial analysis, capacity planning, environmental protection, lighting, building maintenance, and feng shui. Among others.
Everything working fine? Great, it’s about time. But why can’t you do this trivial and useless (but neat-o keen) thing you can do at home on Windows 98? This is also the time for you developers out there to pile on. Try “I need this non-standard tool because its’ the only tool I know,” and “At the last place I worked, we were allowed to do this ridiculous and dangerous but convenient-for-me thing.”
Notice how he stays close to the city on weekends so his pager will still work? What commitment! Notice how even when he’s not wearing the pager his hip still twitches, as though he can feel its phantom presence vibrating there. What commitment!
He can deal with the pressure of supporting as few as six and as many as several hundred users, occasionally singlehandedly, but more often with someone with a freshly minted MCSE certificate who’s never seen a command prompt, and can’t type anyway. Never mind that he supports your entire enterprise, he’ll do it all on the cheap, because he’s young. Bonus! (The home cooked meals go a long way too, remember?)
But if he’s a consultant, be sure to rub him with how high his rate is, even though he doesn’t see anywhere near that much. He’s grown accustomed to shouldering the expectations of performance and professionalism that come with the territory, but on a lesser wage.
He’s the dude that shows up anyway, and answers your phone call, even when every fibre of his body is crying out to leave the accursed receiver in the cradle. But he picks it up anyway. And his query is invariably “How can I help?” Regardless of circumstances, history or personality, he wants you to be able to do your job. And that’s all he wants. Honest.
Regardless of circumstances, history or personality, he wants you to be able to do your job.
And he can do all that: He can restore your network access, refresh your database, plug you into that temporary store, upgrade your RAM, clean your keyboard, install that legit bit of software (or that illicit one in a pinch), grant you access to the mainframe host, hot up your network port (and move your furniture to do so), configure your protocol stack, twiddle your user configurable options, increase your bit depth, optimize your boot sequence, show you the keyboard shortcut, upgrade your OS, drop an analogue line into your quad, set up your new hardware, do the dog and pony show, swap out your motherboard, grab you a shiny new IP, throw in a SCSI card, burn a quick CD for you, restore from tape, wait on the vendor’s help line, diagnose your dialup, kill your rogue process, jump start your printer queue, bulk load your data, OCR your legal document, teach you how to do it, resurrect that dead server, encrypt your mail, break your forgotten password, create your network profile, assign you to whichever departmental groups you need, reroute your emergency print job, read, write, create, erase, break out, drop to shell, net use, net share, net logon, upgrade the fleet, disinfect the network, spec and order your gear, fix your interrupt conflict, resolve your Ethernet collisions, triage your deprecated system, revamp your systems standard, install your expensive mission sensitive enterprise suite, drill down, hup, format, restore, move, ncopy, spare you from tedium with whichever scripting language is at hand, cascade, upgrade, upgrade, and upgrade again until the vendor gets it right, hot patch and cold boot, synchronize, redundantly array, mirror, store off site, rewire, patch, route, re-route, block, deny all, setuid, chmod, chown, pipe, match your regular expression, download, decommission, stress test, benchmark, map back, diagram, certify, beta, register, instantiate, integrate, replicate, emulate, VPN, tunnel, switch your port, sniff your traffic, audit, log, roll out, mock up, prepare your AV equipment, ghost to template, quick restore, fast copy, clear your cache, populate your table, recreate your index, execute your procedure, drop your constraints, shore up your table space, optimize your query, write your triggers, apply your primary key, standardize your desktops, model your data, map your process, swap your processors, add a hard drive, attach a peripheral, chase out the defect, diagnose the fault (tolerate the fault), tension your tape, secure your source, validate your identity, watermark, hexedit, chomp your linefeeds, send as binary, recompile, reconcile, recreate the error, eliminate unnecessary complexity, terminate with extreme prejudice, monitor performance, document, diagram, illustrate, summarize, un-install, manage tasks, remove bottlenecks, cluster, pipeline, go to the mat for hard won principles and technical elegance, truth and beauty, and then compromise it all for a usable workaround that keeps you running for another day. And so he can go home at night.
In short, he shakes the holy root over your entire wired domain.
He’s driven, inexplicably.
He loves these infernal machines.
He’s committed. (We mentioned that.)
This is why he’s on this Big Blue and Apple-][e-monochrome-screen-coloured planet.
And who is this guy, your systems support pro?
He ain’t me, babe.
He ain’t me.
Evan Spence
Tuesday, July
31,
2001
PD DVI
Note
All of the above comments appearing quotes have actually been said to me at one time or another. The one about the 14 year old deleting files was while I was at home on Christmas Day, for my first day off in over five weeks.