IT Magic
I am sure everyone that has touched a computer more than once at the office has had this experience occur more often than you care to think. You have something that is not working on the computer. You call the technical support people and depending on the size of your organization that may be only one or two people who support the entire myriad of informational technological devices that make up the various electronic services that are used there. Anyway, the problem you report has consistently occurred nineteen times in a row before you even thought about calling.
The technical guy shows up twenty minutes late, still in sunglasses because he just got into the building. Thankfully for you he did stop by the coffee pot on the way to your cubicle, so he is in a better mood then he would be minus coffee period. Unfortunately for you, he sets down the coffee cup, spilling and knowingly leaving his trademark coffee ring on your important paperwork that acts as his personal seal on most paperwork that cross his desk.
He raises up the classes just enough to see your screen and says, “Okay, show me what is happening.” You start with how it occurs every time. You start the process and continue to explain it is not going to work and you do not understand, because it worked yesterday and all the past two months without any problem at all. And you are sure it is not going to work this time, because right when you click this next dialog box it crashes the process. Only this time, it works.
Inside you are grumbling and thinking the IT guy did something back on the server before he came over to fix it and is making you look the fool. In reality, it is the just the magic nature of being in IT. I don’t know if people slow down and pay more attention or if it really is magical, but this plays out for all sorts of IT guys across the world everyday. Ad to this telephone and networking and we are then hitting probably in the rage of millions of times daily that a scene such as the one above occurs.
Recently I have been getting questions about why the satellite didn’t show the name of the song for the Sirius Radio stations like it always used too and could I maybe take a look at it. And before we even did that, Bam! And you now see the song and performing listed, bouncing around the screen just like you should. Another someone complained about their cell phone not doing something right and was wondering if I could look at it only to begin working correctly just before I actually touched it. It happens so often that most IT folks these days just go ahead and take the credit for it despite having done nothing.
Then there are paybacks on nights like mine this eve. All this past week my own combination of DSL and wireless router have periodically conspired to drop my wireless connection. Most of these have just been an annoyance, requiring a short pause and re-synchronization to continue, however most of those evenings I was chatting with someone or another using one of various IM programs. This of course results in my being dropped and having to re-log in. During the interval I am looking like I am not there (legitimately) to other users who I was speaking with. Twice the connection was so bad that I even plugged into the router (and one of those nights, the entire outbound connection was down. So this eve, when all my 20 friends are watching the debate, traveling, or just plain ignoring me and I am left just posting blogs how many times do I get a drop my server? ZERO is the answer. Go figure.
Insufficient fear. See, even librarians have the magic touch - people would be having problems with their Internet access, I'd walk over and BOOM, magically it's fixed. My theory is it's 'cause the machines are scared of me. I threatened each one that it, too, could become a boat anchor, and, TA-DAH, they worked. I also threatened to wack them with chicken feet, or fill their boxes with incense smoke, and that seemed to help...
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