Editor’s Note: I wrote this back in college, when I was working at The Daily Helmsman. Quite wisely, my editor didn’t publish it, but he just emailed me a copy of it he found on his laptop. I couldn’t pass up the chance to share it.
Dear IT Helpdesk,
You don’t know me. You probably don’t recognize my name, so I’ll start by introducing myself.
My name is Stephen Hackett. I am a student here at the U of M, and for the last 3 1/2 years, I have designed the pages of The Daily Helmsman.
My job basically entails taking our reporter’s stories, accompanying photos and graphics and putting them together using some fancy page layout software.
It’s really not too bad.
The printer in our newsroom, as you can imagine, is one of the most vital pieces of equipment we own. When it doesn’t work, everything here screeches to a halt.
I walked into the newsroom Tuesday morning to check on things, only to get bombarded by the advertising design team about why they can’t print to the HP 5000, which is the only printer in the room that prints 11 x 17 pages. Instead of printing their ads, the printer simply sat there, showing an error code.
In the middle of our conversation, our ad manager informed me he had called 8888 for help.
My heart stopped.
We have had run-ins with IT people before, and the staff (myself included) is usually blamed with whatever is wrong, and are treated like small children.
But I try to be a pretty positive person most of the time, so I decided it was time for me to give you guys a break.
So, about 45 minutes later, 3 guys show up to “work on the printer,” but instead of looking at the printer, they went straight to one of the Macs in the newsroom.
For this particular letter, I will not touch on your incredible lack of support for — or the knowledge of — the Mac platform, which major fields (like journalism or art) use the Mac everyday. Even our internal IT guy looks confused when he sees an Apple computer, and I can usually fix things around here myself much faster.
But this letter is not about that.
After fiddling with the printer preferences (to a point where we had to re-enter them later), the group of 3 guys (they always come in packs) go to the printer and unplug it, then plug it back in.
After printing a successful test page, they declare it fixed, and leave.
Less than 30 minutes later, the error code popped back up, and this time, the simple powering-down-the-machine remedy did not work.
At this point, we simply reset the computers to print to another printer for the time being, and we all went about our day.
That evening, when it came time for me to print our pages, we had to use the broken printer again, so I could print the pages at full-size.
As expected, the printer worked for a little while, then the error code popped back up on the display.
After several minutes of cursing from the editorial staff, I decided to take a stab at it.
I went to hp.com, clicked on support and typed the error code into the search field.
After searching for about 2 minutes, I came across a solution for the exact problem we were having.
The fix involved moving the JetDirect card from slot 1 to slot 2. A few turns of a screwdriver later, the issue was fixed.
Total time: 10 minutes.
Helpdesk, tell me why that was so hard that your 3 IT guys couldn’t figure it out. A quick search online for the error code would have produced the same results I got, but instead your guys poked around settings (and actually messed them up from what they were)and unplugged the printer.
Assuming you know everything is a horrible idea. Technology rapidly changes, and anyone who is to prideful (or too dumb) to realize this and use tools like support pages have no business fixing other people’s equipment.
I’m not looking for a job, but if you hired me, I would expect to make 3 times what one of those guys make.
Stephen M. Hackett
News Editor, The Daily Helmsman