It was about two years ago, and there was a particularly terrible car wreck near PC Helps’ offices in Bala Cynwyd, a suburban town on Philadelphia’s city limits. Someone hit a pole (or something like that) and our entire office building had no Internet or external e-mail.

As a tech support consultant, I rely on Internet access for many things, including, most importantly, remotely connecting to my customers’ machines and being able to search for information about the problems they are having.

(For the record: Our other office in Ohio was not affected, so our customers were fine.)

For a good part of the morning, I had to provide tech support using some innate intelligence I didn’t think I had.

After the initial shock of not being able to see my customers’ desktops and find external knowledgebase articles, I righted myself and successfully made it through the calls.

But the experience stuck with me, and, at the time, got me thinking about how PC Helps functioned almost 20 years ago, when it first switched on its phone lines. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Help Desk, Rants FedEx, floppy disk, Internet, iPad, Mobile Devices

In a recent TechRepublic piece, writer Jeff Dray lists his top 10 favorite help desk calls. All of Dray’s faves include callers asking “stupid” questions — stupid, that is, to someone who works in tech for a living. Instead of being funny, the piece is haughty, and illuminates the contempt many help desk techs have for their “customers.” Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Rants cpa, Help Desk, Internet, Jeff Dray, passwords, TechRepublic, trapeze