Wednesday 10th

One of the software support team has called in sick. Apparently he'd been trying to drive his car while reading a science fiction novel, and he drove it through a wall. I suppose that means I'll have to deal with some of the support calls myself today. I load up the call tracking database and take a look at the queue. Two hundred and fifty five calls, most of them late, and some of them waiting since last year. In other words pretty average.

I take a look at the first one. It's a request for a back up device. I call the user and ask what kind of device he wants. He doesn't know. Perfect. Time for some fun. I switch the phone output to the loudspeaker so the others around can have a good laugh.

"So what do you want to back up?"
"My hard disk. It's quite big and there are a lot of important files on it."
"OK. Are you looking for a read only, write once, or erasable type of device?"
"Um, well I don't want my data erased, and I'll probably want to write more than once, so I suppose that leaves read only."
"If it's read only you won't be able to write to it, so it won't be much good for back up will it?"
"Oh, I see. Yes, sorry."
"All right. What sort of data transfer rate do you want?"
"What sort is there?"
"You tell me."
"Sort of average?"
"How many kilobits per second exactly?"
"Well, I should think... four?"
"FOUR?"
"No, I mean, ten million."
"TEN MILLION?"
"No, no. Twenty. Six hundred. Two thousand."
"Two thousand? OK. What horizontal refresh rate would you like?"
"Um, about sixty?"
"Sorry, trick question. You only get horizontal refresh rates with monitors."
"Yes, of course. Silly me."
"Now do you want a tape cartridge, DAT or disk device? Do you want a magnetic, magneto-optical or floptical storage medium? Do you need an IDE, SCSI or parallel port connector? Do you require the device to support DOS formatted volumes?"
"Er, maybe I should just back up my data onto floppy disks."
"But you said you had a large hard disk and that the files were important."
"Did I? No, really, the disk is quite small. Tiny in fact. And the data doesn't really matter. I think floppies will do fine."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, quite sure. I'm terribly sorry to have bothered you."
"So, can I close the call?"
"Yes, please do. Thanks very much for your help. Great."
"And will you fill in one of our customer response forms and say how good the service has been?"
"Be delighted to. Absolutely. No problem."
"Bye then."
"Bye."

Another satisfied customer.

As soon as I replace the phone it rings again. It's Hitler's (the Chairman's) secretary to say that his Executive Information System isn't working and would it be convenient for me to go and fix it sometime in the next 60 seconds? I agree that it would. He's not in his office when I arrive, so I go in and attend to the computer. No sweat, it's just the power cable to the monitor that's come loose. I plug it back in and it's all fine. In fact it's still showing the last screen that the Chairman was working on: the one with the summary financial data on the company's potential bid targets. I make a few notes before quitting the system. After all, it's never too soon to start planning for retirement. On the way out I espy a large pad of the Chairman's headed note paper. I help myself to a couple of sheets; you never know when I might need a reference.

I leave with a warm feeling of satisfaction. It's always a pleasure to help the Chairman.