Some days at work are better than other days. Today, for instance, was pretty good. An older (retired) gentleman came in and wanted to know how to burn a CD. He’d bought a computer with a CD burner from us a year ago, but had never gotten around to figuring out how to get it to work. I sat down with him on a computer and showed him, step by step, how to do it. He said, “Oh, that’s so easy!” when I was done. It is pretty easy, but I was glad I had gone slow enough and explained things well enough that it all clicked in his mind. I enjoy helping people. I enjoy teaching people. I enjoy teaching people computers. And other stuff.

I took a tech support call today because my two techie coworkers were on a smoke break. I don’t normally take the calls, since they have much better technical skills than I do, but I was the only one there this time. It was one of our regular customers, a man whose business gets all their computers from us. One of his employees decided to open up the computer and poke around. He pulled a bunch of wires out, but he had put them back incorrectly and the computer wouldn’t work right anymore. He asked me to direct him in putting them back in correctly. I was kind of at a loss, since I couldn’t see inside his computer, and it was an older model we don’t carry anymore (so I couldn’t grab one off the shelf to look at). I asked him to read the labels on the plugs the wires go into. “I can’t see them; the printing’s too small and I don’t have my glasses!” I rolled my eyes. What kind of miracle worker did he think I was? “Well, the positive wire is the colored wire and the negative wire is the white wire. Usually. On most computers, all the negative wires go in the same direction . . .” I directed him for a while, trying to stall until the other guys got back from their smoke break. “Hey! It’s working now!” I heard from the other end of the line. I was startled and a bit at a loss. “Uh . . . It does? Are you sure?” “Yep. It works fine. Thanks. Bye.” “Uh, well, feel free to call us back if you have any more problems . . .” >click<. I think I solved that one as much by luck as anything else. But I’m not picky. I’ll take what I can get.

Maybe as I learn more and get better, I’ll be able to take more tech support calls and solve more problems successfully. I mean, I took tech support calls in college, but they were along the lines of, “I pressed a button and my paper disappeared! Where did it go?” Which is a lot easier than trying to direct someone in rewiring their computer over the telephone.