One of our consultants at work.

Our help desk handles many “how to” calls, which often have straightforward solutions. Sometimes, however, the requests that come in require a little more creativity from our consultants.

On a recent call, consultant Bradley Lyman found an ingenious way around a potential hurdle.

Lyman received a call from a customer asking for help copying a YouTube video for a presentation. There was one snag, however; the customer did not have rights to use the video. His presentation, which he was scheduled to show to an auditorium full of people, would be incomplete without a video of a juggler.

The presentation was due, and getting rights would have been a challenge.

Lyman wasted no time, and tapped fellow consultant Jorg Freiberg and team leader Ken Wilson for help. Lyman remembered seeing Freiberg juggling on his breaks and knew that Wilson had just bought a new iPhone with a video camera. The result was a copyright-free juggling video, which was produced and delivered to the customer in under an hour. File that under “Above and Beyond.” (Jen Darr)

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Jenny Sweeney Consultant Spotlight, Customer Service above and beyond, iPhone, juggling, PowerPoint, YouTube

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. Read more…

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

Lesley Klein: Onetime social worker, avid knitter and crocheter, card-carrying member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and PC Helps Software Support Tech

In her free time, PC Helps software consultant Lesley Klein, 33, likes to knit and crochet, but not with the usual materials. Instead of yarn, she incorporates everyday bits and pieces like Saran Wrap and cassette tape into her vibrant, unconventional hats and scarves.

Consultant Lesley Klein, wearing one of her hand-knitted hats.

She has a knack for thinking outside of the box.

“I don’t even know what the box is,” she laughs. “I don’t know where that box is.”

It’s more than that, though. Klein has a talent for finding creative solutions for whatever is thrown her way. That’s a plus, especially for her day job at PC Helps.

As a software support consultant, Klein helps callers with a range of software issues, from making sense of broken Access queries to taming unruly Outlook mailboxes.

Although she “absolutely hates” numbers, her favorite application is Excel. “I am routinely amazed at some of the formulas people here put together,” she says of her fellow consultants. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Consultant Spotlight Broadway, crochet, Greenwich Village, knitting, naalbinding, Northeast Philadelphia, Ohio, Saran Wrap, social work, Society for Creative Anachronism, sprang, University of Cincinnati, Visiting Neighbors

The three baseball-sized foil balls sitting on consultant Pete Schechner’s desk are not part of a science experiment.

“I gathered up the foil because part of me feels bad throwing it away,” he explains. He also created them for juggling, which he sometimes does in between calls.

PC Helps consultant Pete Schechner.

Schechner, 57, knows a thing or two about juggling. During the day, he works at PC Helps as a software consultant, mostly speaking in English, and occasionally in his native language, German (he was born in Berlin, and moved to Philadelphia when he was 10). He spends the rest of his time volunteering as vice president of a suburban Philadelphia youth intramural soccer club and supervising hundreds of volunteers as chair of Philadelphia Folk Festival camping committee.

It’s a lot of juggling, for sure. But all three of his hats have one requirement in common: excellent customer service skills.

Schechner began working at PC Helps three years ago. Like his fellow consultants, he helps customers archive their e-mail, create pivot tables, write formulas and everything in between. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Consultant Spotlight Berlin, camping, Germany, Help Desk, Old Pool Farm, Philadelphia Folk Fest, Schwenksville, soccer, software support, volunteering