Work. You could call it that. I work at the University of Alabama Office of Information Technology's Computer Help Desk. The HelpDesk. Don't spell it with a space.
Nine hours a week - more or less - I help people.
I help people?
"Hi, I'm having a problem with my e-mail..."
"...Hm, well, I bet I know exactly what your problem is. Could I have your bama user name?"
"Oh, okay! It's ... jqpublic."
"Alright, thank you very much. ... Yes, it shows here that you've passed the soft limit of your disk space. See, the way the account systems are setup on bama, everyone is allocated 50 megabytes of space. Once you hit this, you won't receive e-mail messages or be able to delete the ones you already have."
"Ohh..."
"Right. What I can do now, or rather, I actually just did, was increase your quota, for a length of 2 days, from 50 to 60 megabytes."
"I see...."
"This will allow you to move messages into your deleted items folder again, and afterwards execute the Empty Trash function - the button is located just in the top left-hand corner of the WebMail interface."
"Right, right..."
"Basically all we can advised to keep this from happening again would be you deleting any messages you don't want to keep, and to keep an eye out for messages with especially large attachments, such as pictures or documents."
"Oh okay!"
"And that should take care of everything."
"Well thank you very much!"
"You're very welcome. Have a nice day."
"Bye.."
"Good-bye."
Did I just help someone?
Sometimes I get the impression that the people who call wish they could have the last two minutes of their life back. All they wanted was for me to do whatever was needed for their e-mail to work again, and then get back to whatever it was they were doing. These people probably aren't the majority, but they are there. I don't expect anyone to be thankful or impatient or understanding or ignorant, I really have no expectation anywhere on the spectrum. I just assume they want help...they might not even need it. But why else come, save wanting help? So I do. And I always let them know they are welcome. And I do hope they have a nice day, because why shouldn't they?
Sometime last week, or at least I believe it was last week, I learned what a work-day felt like.
Wake up at 6:56. Get up at 7:04. Clothe, pack, comb, walk out the door, walk to Gordon Palmer Hall, take over for Mark, close Firefox, open Safari, open Remedy, open Adium, wait for a phone call, perform a quota jack, wake up, tell a faculty member to reconnect their monitor themselves before calling PC Support, don't forward a caller to Mr. Merritt, walk to class, discuss the recent news, listen to topics concerning American sub-cultures, make a pertinent comment, listen more, walk to class, discern the method of using Lagrange multipliers to find sets of normal vectors, work a few problems along with Dr. Wang (that's "wong" like wrong, not "wang" like tang), walk downstairs, and help the hours away until 4:45. 4:45 rolls around and it's Make Busy time. The doors lock themselves and the University shuts itself down at 4:45. It's a wonder to behold, really. Then I walk home.
And the day is over, isn't it?
That's a work day, I realized, and I don't mind it. I wouldn't mind doing that, coming home, having my meal for the day, catching up on the news, doing my homework, talking to my family and/or my lady for a spell, then resting to do it over again. So maybe if I can do that now, I'll be able to do more then, whenever then ends up being, and whatever the days consist of then, and whoever I'm working with then, and whoever I have with me then.
Maybe.
I am studying to be an engineer. I first discovered I was happy I made that decision when I read through the engineering code of ethics prior to finals last semester. I learned what it was all about by learning what we have to keep up with, what our responsibilities are. We help people. We help a lot of people at once.
"..."
"UA HelpDesk, this is Joseph."
Stay Woke
4 years ago
