Categories: uncategorized
Date: 10 January 2006 16:43:39
This happens frequently. A user has phoned in, or emailed in, with a problem, and you've decided that the best way to help them fix it is to go out to see them. While you're there, they ask "while you're here ...", or somebody else asks "while you're here ..." Usually it's something that's been bothering them, but they haven't felt that it was important enough to make a phone call or send an email. While you're there, however, can you just take a look, or listen, or advise? Usually, I do try, at least to listen to the question, and possibly to have a go at answering it. There is a school of thought which says that it is better to educate people that if they want to ask a question, there are right ways of doing it, and cornering an unfortunate support person while he happens to be in your office isn't one of them. On the other hand, though, sometimes it is good just to try to sort the problem or answer the question there and then, because it suits everyone to get it sorted.
In this case, I'd reached an impasse while trying to solve the original problem which was why I was there. I was going to have to come back to my office, and ask a guru what to do. Then she asked, "while you're here ...", and I listened, and thought, "yes, this is a good question; I wish I had a good answer," and proceeded to try to give her an answer. As I did so, I discovered that her home space (everybody has some space on a server somewhere to store some data) was full. Gradually, light dawned, and I realised that this was why she was having the problem I had been unable to solve. In this case, serendipitously (I so wanted to write that), it was the right thing to do to stay and listen.
Apologies if the foregoing is a bit geeky; it's a personal story as well as a technical one. And since nowadays I tend to write this blog about this time in the afternoon, when my mind tends to be full of work-related stuff (I gather from Ian's blog that this is the correct technical term), then a fair amount of what you're going to get will be work-related.
So, frantically changing gear, I also wanted to say that if any of you are following my Bible in a Year blog, you may be glad to know that I have opened up the comments, so that you don't have to have a Blogger account to leave some feedback.