The other side of tech support

I hate it when the computers at work crash or freeze or do something catastrophic and then display an error message saying “Something unexpected has happened. Contact your system administrator.”

I hate it because I AM the system administrator and most of the time I have no idea what went wrong or how to fix it. Microsoft screws up and leaves me holding the bag.

I’m going to be frank here: I’m not a very good system administrator. I only got that part of my job because the previous system administrator committed suicide and somebody had to do it.

“Susan,” they said, “You like computers. You should be the system administrator.”

I admit to having felt slightly flattered, even though I realized it wasn’t a compliment.

And so I became the system administrator. I do the routine server maintenance and backups, set up new users, stuff like that. The part I hate is tech support. I feel like I’m somehow to blame for everything from software bugs to hardware failures to spam. I stare at somebody else’s vague or cryptic error message and think it ought to mean something to me. I try to look like I have a clue while the desperate user watches over my shoulder and tells me how vitally important that missing or corrupt file is to the future of the organization and asks me what I’m doing and why I’m doing it and whether it will work. (”Of course not,” I’m tempted to say, “I’m just faking it.”)

The computers are most likely to fail when I’m busy with the rest of my job, so I have to interrupt what I’m doing to try to do something I don’t know how to do.

Sometimes the problem goes away just because I’m looking at it. “It probably won’t do it now that you’re here,” the person says. And then the computer just magically fixes itself under my watchful eye. I don’t even have to touch it. I like it when that happens.

But that’s not what usually happens. So I advise the user to reboot the computer. Fortunately this fixes most computer problems. If it works, they almost always ask why the problem happened in the first place. I wish they wouldn’t ask, because I don’t know. I’m just grateful it’s behind us now. Sometimes I make something up: “The T-double-X-44-hotwire collided with an empty spool at 18G,” I say, “But I fixed it.”

When a reboot doesn’t work, I’m usually as mystified as the next person. So I sit down and click stuff and feel like a fraud. If it’s a new employee I feel compelled to justify my incompetence by telling them I studied criminology. It’s lame, I know, but I don’t want them thinking I was actually trained in system administration…I want them to know there’s a valid reason why I suck at it. (I don’t know why, but I always have this feeling that new employees know more about computers than I do. This feeling persists until they show up at my cubicle with a computer problem like this: “It’s making a noise like an airplane and it smells like diesel fuel.”)

If a reboot doesn’t work, I sometimes pat the computer and say encouraging things to it. If nobody’s looking, I hug it. I know that’s ludicrous, but you’d be surprised how often it works (not often, actually, but don’t you think it’s surprising that it ever works?).

If none of these methods work, I’ll google the error message, assuming it contains something more useful than “contact your system administrator.” This usually leads to hundreds of thousands of possible solutions like changing video cards, installing new drivers, and formatting the hard drive and reinstalling everything. These are not the solutions I want to hear, especially since they’re all just possible solutions aimed at ruling out possible causes, so I keep looking till I find one I like, or until the employee gives up on me.

I saw this on the Dilbert site a few days ago. I think I’m going to add it to my bag of tech support tricks.