Steve Strawitz: Classical violinist and jazz guitarist by night, civil engineer and geologist by schooling, and PC Helps tech support consultant the rest of the time.

When he was a first-grader, PC Helps consultant Steve Strawitz learned to play violin. He was from a musical family – his father was a violinist; his sister, a pianist – so it was expected of him.

"If I am feeling lousy, music is my medicine," says Strawitz, a PC Helps consultant by day and musician by night.

When he hit his teens, however, he decided to switch to something a little more current, a bit louder: the electric guitar, purely because it could be amplified.

Strawitz knows a bit about the contemporary and the classic. He is a PC Helps old-timer, who has been working here since the early days (1995), when e-mail was fancy and remote desktop support was a fantasy.

Back then, consultants had to rely on imagination and expert listening skills to help them figure out what was going on with a caller’s computer. Receiving files to be worked on wasn’t a matter of attaching them to an e-mail; it required the postal service and a few days of waiting. The core skill was improvisation, and it still is today.

When Strawitz talks about music, you cannot slow him down. His tastes range from Rufus and Chaka to Clapton and Hendrix. And then there’s Bach. His eyes light up when he discusses the composer’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin – “some of the greatest music on the planet,” Strawitz says.

After his Hendrix and Clapton phase, Strawitz found jazz by way of George Benson and has been playing it ever since. Today, when he’s not at his day job helping callers with Excel formulas and mail merges, he is busy playing guitar in a trio called Jazz Planet. (He also recently returned to his roots by relearning classical, which he has been studying with a Philadelphia Orchestra violinist. It has inspired him to start another group, one that incorporates both jazz and classical.)

Although the two careers seem disparate, playing jazz — or any style of music — makes perfect sense for a software consultant. Both vocations require persistence, patience and heaps of improvisation.

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Jenny Sweeney Consultant Spotlight Bach, Eric Clapton, Help Desk, jazz, Jazz Planet, Jimi Hendrix, Rufus & Chaka, software support, the Philadelphia Orchestra