Where Stand-Up Comics Meet Help Desks

If you work in IT, a sense of humor is essential. After all, if you can’t laugh at the end user who gets up and closes his office window when you’re walking him through a fix and tell him to close Windows, you’re going to have a hard time.

The only cure for some end users is Happy Hour.

What’s more, IT is not the easiest job to explain to other people. You may spend three days helping hapless people change passwords and make the printer work, and then you might spend time working on a complex network upgrade, followed by a day of training everyone on a new software package. There are times in the IT professional’s work life when the phrase “You have to laugh so as not to cry” is apt. Not everyone understands what an IT professional’s job involves, but everyone has their own ideas about it, as you may have seen in the “What I Really Do” meme. Here are a few ways that “civilians” imagine the IT worker’s life.

What Society Thinks You Do

A person may call a tech help line once in their life and think that they know exactly what every IT help desk worker in the world is like. Too bad you can’t troll them like these service desk workers do.

What Happy End Users Think You Do

Don’t lie: it’s a great feeling when you fix a problem that someone was sure was hopeless, especially when you hear them rave about it to someone else. “This is Mike from IT, and he is an absolute genius! I mean, he just, like, ran his hand over it and fixed it!” Feels good, man.

What Your Mom Thinks You Do
The great thing about Moms is they don’t care if you spend most of your days telling people to try turning it off and back on again. No: her kid has a job “in computers” and that’s enough to make her proud for a lifetime. She probably sees you as something like this.

What Some Friends Think You Do

It’s a good thing Moms think you’re geniuses, because some of your friends probably have their own opinions on what techies are like.

Of course, it’s all fun and games when friends poke fun at friends who may have nerdish tendencies, until any electronic item of any description in their home breaks down. Then you’re the best friend they ever had, like EVAR.

What You Really Do

Of course, the reality is somewhere in the midst of the extremes. Sometimes you really do pull off some amazing fixes, saving companies incalculable time, money, and hassles. And most of you aren’t above the occasional mild trolling, particularly on a Friday afternoon before a holiday Monday. IT is demanding, frustrating, occasionally hilarious, and rewarding.

At Samanage, we understand IT service desks and we offer cloud service desk software that serves you, not the other way around. With great features like knowledge base building, mobile apps, and a self-service portal, you’ll spend more time actually resolving issues and less time on administrative and repetitive help desk tasks. At Samanage, we haven’t found the cure for clueless end users yet, but if we do, you can bet it will be in the next automatic update.

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Photo Credit: Phaitoon / freedigitalphotos.net