Don't go making phoney calls...

The good news is that I'm going to be making a ton of overtime the next couple weeks. The bad news is I'm actually going to have to work for it, by answering phones at our helpdesk at the college I work for.

When I started here, I started at helpdesk, working nights. It seems that everyone starts either at helpdesk or doing night lab and classroom support at one of our satellite graduate campuses. When a position somewhere else opens - desktop support, day/main campus lab and classroom support, system engineer - someone moves up off one of those areas and fresh meat moves into helpdesk.

I don't like helpdesk. Every time the phone rings, I worry that the person will either have a problem I can't solve, or yell at me.

But for some reason people seem to think I'm good at helpdesk - I've had managers tell me I did a good job, and users calling in tell me that they were glad they got me. There are a couple possible reasons for this:
- I suck, but everyone else sucks as much or more. In the land of the the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
- I'm actually good at something, which I have trouble believing. But I think what part of it is is that I'm not as technical as some other people in IT. Unlike some of my coworkers, I haven't been building computers from scratch since the age of 9. My parents didn't get a real computer with internet access and Winders until the late 90's. Most of my computer knowledge is self-taught or taught from on-the-job. So I tend to be untechnical enough that I can break things down for people (look for the little picture in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen by the clock). At the same time, I've done enough desktop support that I can solve many of the basic problems, and I've done a little system administration, so I can solve basic problems with that kind of stuff too (ie shared drives, lack of access to printers).

But I haven't done much helpdesk lately, so I'm going to be rusty, plus our policies and procedures have probably changed since the last time I answered phones. The other interesting factor this year is students coming to campus with Vista, which I'm not exactly a pro at - I have a Vista machine on my desk at work (which has started blue-screening on a regular basis for no apparent reason), but I'm not exactly a pro with it.

On the other hand, I'm working two nights this week, plus all 3 days over labor day weekend - and presumably a few nights the next couple weeks after that. So I'm going to be tired, pissed off, and have no free time starting Monday. On the plus side, I'll also be much closer to getting my truck paid off...