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Semester at the help desk

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  • Semester at the help desk

    I was a "Lab Consultant" for a semester when I was in college. Fall 1998. That meant at the computer labs where students would go to print papers, do homework, and browse the web I would sit behind a desk and be general purpose tech support/help desk guy.

    It's been a while, but here were the biggest moments of that brief and horrifying tour of duty.

    1. I hit print. . .
    The computer lab I worked at was at the edge of campus, near a main city street with lots of stores, restaurants, and apartments. A student comes in, asking where the printer is, because she just printed out her homework. I show her the new printer that was just installed.

    Because of abuse of the old policy (there used to be no limit or charge for printing), you now had to pay 5 cents per page and swipe your student ID to pay for it. You'd swipe your ID, select your print job on the print server, and click it to make it print.

    I walked her through this process. She said none of the pending jobs there looked like they were hers. She said she had a 10 page report, sent about 10 minutes ago, none of the handful of jobs sitting there met that criteria.

    Curious. So, I asked to see the computer she was working at so I could look and make sure it was sent to the printer properly. She says okay, and I follow her.

    Right up to the doors of the lab. She was leaving. I asked what was going on. I quickly find out that she lived in the apartments above the Pizza Hut across the street, and just clicked Print on her computer and expected that the paper would come out of the closest printer, wherever that was, which she assumed was here.

    *sigh* I tell her to bring a disk (1998 remember) containing the file to here, and we'll work on printing it. She doesn't understand why she can't print from her apartment. Well, very technically she could try to send it to the IP of the print server. . .but that was WAY beyond her technical capacity.

    She says she'll do it tomorrow, "when I have time". At least tomorrow wouldn't be my shift.

    Postscript: I heard she did come in the next day, doing it right over again, complaining that I didn't know what I was doing because I told her she had to be in the lab to print. The consultant tried to tell her how to print remotely. . .but she thought it was too complicated and said she'd come back another day. She didn't come back, I guess she went to another lab or started pestering her friends.

    2. What do you mean I have to have an account?

    The same way they'd made changes to the printing system, they'd added a requirement to log on to use the lab computers. Previously you could just walk up to one, sit down and use it. They added logon requirements after some bozo went, got himself a hotmail account, and started sending threatening e-mails, including to the President. You can imagine what happened next.

    Well, that semester they made it so you had to have a logon account. The process to get one is you had to go to a workstation set up specifically for creating accounts. You would enter your student ID number, your PIN you used for registering for classes, and then go through some web forms to request the account. It would usually be created in about 1 to 2 hours (depending on how swamped they were at the campus IT department and how long the various scripts took to run.

    Well, I get somebody who comes in, in a huff. He's trying to print out his paper he wrote in his dorm room, due in about 15 minutes, his first major assignment of the semester. He can't figure out why he just can't sit down and print it out.

    I explain to him the logon requirement, and how it had been mentioned repeatedly in the campus paper, and in announcements and flyers around campus, and in PSA bulletins on campus radio (along with the needing to pay to print).

    He rails about how we're going to be responsible if he can't get this printed promptly, he'll tell his professor it was our fault.

    If he wasn't being a jackass, I would have let him print it from my computer, but he was being so verbally abusive that I just told him how to set up an account, and he could log on and print it in a couple of hours.

    3. Um, how do I use the computer?
    Remember, this was 1998, computers were less common. We had a new Freshman come in, she had never used computers before. . .ever. She apparently handwrote all her papers in High School, had never been on the internet, had overall zero computer skills. She COULD type, because she took typing in high school (taught on electric typewriters).

    She wanted to be hand-held through the entire process of not just creating a logon account, but having every single thing about the computer, internet, word processors and such explained to her. I helped her as much as I could, but I strongly encouraged her to enroll in Computer Science 101 (the very basic intro to computers course for non-CS majors) next semester.

    She got slightly upset when I had to help other patrons, since she apparently got nervous and scared that without somebody beside her, she'd crash the computer or somehow delete the internet or click on the wrong thing and erase her life or something.

    I can only hope that 14 years later, modern college students are more computer savvy.

    4. My defective schedule

    My schedule at this place sucked, a lot.

    I probably shouldn't have even been hired, but they let every employee with seniority basically write their own schedules. The place was open from 7 AM until 10 PM for 6 days a week (closed Sunday). Scheduling was in 15 minute blocks. Everybody who was already there had carved out their own schedule. There were supposed to be 2 consultants on duty at all times, but they had occasional gaps in there where there was only one on duty. 15 minutes here. 30 minutes there. It all added up to 12 hours and 15 minutes a week.

    The minimum amount of hours you could be scheduled for was 12 hours a week. Thus, they could justify to their bosses bringing on 1 more worker to fill that 12 hour gap.

    I ended up with a schedule that was a patchwork nightmare. 7:30 to 8:00, then 9:15 to 9:30, then 4:00 to 5:00, then 8:45 to 9:00 one day, and so on. This schedule did conflict with my classes some, so I had to change my schedule around to accommodate my on-campus job.

    The longest single shift I ever had was a 2 hour block in the evening, from 8 PM to 10 PM on Wednesday. I would have different co-workers almost every shift.

    5. My Absent Co-Worker
    On that 2-hour shift on Wednesday nights, the person I was supposed to work with would leave as soon as I would show up, and go to the Pizza Hut across the street and eat dinner, and then just do who-knows-what and come back right before closing to help close the place down. Basically he'd leave work, while on the clock, go eat and slack off, then show up to log out of his computer.

    Attempts to report this behavior to the supervisor (only there Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 4 PM) were met with anger and scorn. He was a Senior, he'd been at that school for 5 years, he'd been working for him for 4 years, and was trusted and well liked, and I was a new guy who had just been hired a couple of weeks earlier. I was treated like I was dirt for daring to say he was walking off the job.

    It was a lot of why I quit, that and the lousy schedule (which was going to be equally lousy the next semester, since they used the same seniority system for scheduling, meaning I would get the 12 hours nobody else wanted).

  • #2
    2. What do you mean I have to have an account?
    thankfully my college had that one sorted out - everyone had an account generated automatically. in fact i'm betting mine is still active even though i've been gone for 2 years, simply cos it means i can check my scores etc. if i remembered what my login name was that is

    1 & 3
    I've dealt with people like that. it's never fun. unless you consider to be a joy.
    my own personal hell when it comes to noobs using computers and wordprocessing is ... when they don't know the difference between a comma and an apostrophe; some I'm sure just can't find it on the keyboard while others just didn't know there was a difference at all. But ugh... seeing something like this My mother,s car is in the shop. The mechanic said, ,,It,ll cost you $400 to get it fixed.,, ... makes my skin crawl.

    4 & 5
    that indeed sounds sucky. and i for one don't think "being a senior" means jack shit when it comes to honesty. really he's just a thief. makes me wonder if there was someone else who could have taken his hours and actually done the work required vs him sucking down free pay.
    Last edited by PepperElf; 12-10-2012, 05:49 PM.

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    • #3
      Quoth silverstaff View Post
      3. Um, how do I use the computer?
      Remember, this was 1998, computers were less common. We had a new Freshman come in, she had never used computers before. . .ever. She apparently handwrote all her papers in High School, had never been on the internet, had overall zero computer skills. She COULD type, because she took typing in high school (taught on electric typewriters).
      I remember back in college, we went to the first group lab, and some girl started complaining "my password isn't displaying when I type it, all I see is a bunch of stars!"



      This was the first required course. For Computer Science majors. Are you meaning to tell me this is a new concept for you? How did you pick this major, out of a hat??? OMG, change majors, now!

      No, wait, don't. I can use you to bring the grading curve down

      {OK, maybe this wasn't common knowledge back when the earth was still cooling, when I was in college, in 198mumble. Oh wait, it was, because everyone else in the room was all at her.}
      Last edited by vikingchyk; 12-14-2012, 07:00 PM. Reason: wrong bracket for /QUOTE ;)
      Smile, or I'll smack you silly!
      At what age does a vampire become a crazy old bat? :[

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      • #4
        Decades ago

        Number# 3:

        When I went to College for Data Processing we started with a class of over thirty students. By Christmas almost half had changed their major, the end of year 1 we were down to ten students. At the end of the three year course there were only five(5) of us.

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        • #5
          Oh I feel your pain, some 20 years ago I was working in the computing center of my university, more than once we had some humanity major come in with a stack of handwritten paper.
          hm: I need to type this!
          me: Here are the computers, you know how to use them?
          hm: erm... no...
          me: *groan* When's the paper due?
          hm: Tomorrow!
          me: Go and ask your professor for an extension...
          hm: but... but... I heard it's so easy and fast to type on the computer... *whine* *bitch*

          I had this dialog more than once, sometimes they even wanted us to do the typing... yeah right!
          No trees were killed in the posting of this message.

          However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

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          • #6
            Quoth vikingchyk View Post
            I remember back in college, we went to the first group lab, and some girl started complaining "my password isn't displaying when I type it, all I see is a bunch of stars!"



            This was the first required course. For Computer Science majors. Are you meaning to tell me this is a new concept for you? How did you pick this major, out of a hat??? OMG, change majors, now!

            No, wait, don't. I can use you to bring the grading curve down

            {OK, maybe this wasn't common knowledge back when the earth was still cooling, when I was in college, in 198mumble. Oh wait, it was, because everyone else in the room was all at her.}
            Devil's advocate: perhaps she had only used an 8-bit home computer (or even an IBM PC or a Mac) before then. They didn't come with logins and passwords, because they were intended to be single-user machines - using what I like to call the floppy-disk security model (you carry the disk with you, nobody else can tamper with it). And they're a perfectly good way to learn about how computers work, especially since they tended to come with a programming language installed (well, not the Mac) and halfway reasonable documentation.

            You were only likely to be familiar with non-echoed passwords if you had used a remote system (a BBS, or Prestel or Compuserve) or a larger (mainframe or mini) computer before. UNIX-based workstations, such as the Sun4 (based on 68030+68882) may have existed but were too expensive for most people just starting.

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            • #7
              For #5, you should have logged him out as soon as he left.

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              • #8
                Couldn't you have taken timetamped photos of #5 leaving as proof?

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                • #9
                  I'll never forget my time as the PC lab assistant, around the same time as yours, 1993-1997. Here's a gem from my stint:

                  It's on my hard disk.

                  Guy comes into the lab, sits down at a PC. After several minutes of frantic searching, he comes to me saying he can't find his file he saved to his hard disk.

                  Naturally, assuming he's thinking the hard drive of the machine, I asked if this was the machine he had been using. He confirms that it was. So I ask if he recalls the filename, he does. So I search. Nothing. I ask him again if this was the machine he was using, he says that it was.

                  I can't recall the next set of questions exactly, but I was able to determine that what he was referring to as his 'hard disk' was the 3 1/2" floppy disk he had with him when he saved it. .

                  Did he have it with him? Nope. Then he asks, "Do I need it to retrieve my file?"

                  Yes. Yes you do. So he goes to get it, but didn't come back during my shift. That one blew my mind for a while.
                  A fact of life: After Monday and Tuesday, even the calendar says W T F.....

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                  • #10
                    Quoth Silent-Hunter View Post
                    Couldn't you have taken timetamped photos of #5 leaving as proof?
                    How?

                    This was 1998. I didn't own a cameraphone, or even a cell phone. I didn't get my first cell phone until 2000, and didn't own a cameraphone until 2007. I didn't own a film camera, and saw a digital camera for the first time that fall.

                    Might be easier to prove now, but 15 years ago, it would have been a lot tougher.

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                    • #11
                      Quoth earl colby pottinger View Post
                      Number# 3:

                      When I went to College for Data Processing we started with a class of over thirty students. By Christmas almost half had changed their major, the end of year 1 we were down to ten students. At the end of the three year course there were only five(5) of us.
                      Back in the late 1990's I had a similar experience.

                      I went to a "vo-tech" school of sorts to learn a little programming. It was essentially a "crash course" that was 10 months long. Our class started out with about 30 people. We ended up with three.
                      Skilled programmers aren't cheap. Cheap programmers aren't skilled.

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