Whenever certain employees at a Kalamazoo, Mich., credit union are tormented by a computer-printer-fax-copier problem, they give their colleague Dennis Christensen a call.
Never mind that his real job is marketing and facilities management. As many as 20 times a week, his phone rings with another request to extract some hyperventilating, bruised soul from the technological thickets.
It isn’t easy being the office geek, particularly when you’re just a civilian guru, an unauthorized non-member of the company’s technical team.
Christensen, a merry 49-year-old, seems to accept his lot.
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“It’s a thankless job,” Christensen jokes. “Meanwhile, my platter is full, and I’m busy shirking my responsibilities.”
There is a feeling of chivalry in coming to the rescue–unraveling a technical stumper and greasing the corporate machine, even if the gratitude can seem a little hollow (“You’re the best!”).
But these freelancers are caught between the help desk on one hand, which many think is so secretive, remote and bureaucratic that it might as well be the NSA, and needy front-line workers who aren’t always schooled in the black art of Microsoft error messages. (Help-desk jokes about clueless customers today have nearly attained screw-in-a-lightbulb joke status.)
Add to that a glaring supervisor wondering when these novice techies will get to their own duties.
“They win the acclaim of their co-workers but the enmity of their bosses,” says Gil Gordon, a consultant who helps companies with telecommuting. “Instead of getting a pat on the back, they get a kick in the rear.”
A survey of 800 companies showed their help desks received an average of 10,050 pleas each month last year, according to the trade association Help Desk Institute.
The survey found 65 percent of the problems were resolved on first contact. Though there’s room for improvement, HDI says, that’s a pretty good success rate.
Still, that gets you a D grade in school–which speaks to the complexity of the technology they are supporting. People hung up before their problem was fixed about 560 times a month, the survey showed.
Amateur tech maven Denton Moore, an environmental manager in Indiana, says he gets called because people can’t wait for the help desk. “If a hard drive crashes, it takes two days for them to come here and say, ‘Oh, it crashed,’ ” he says.
Moore doesn’t want to ruffle any tech staffers, so he does it on the sly.
“They get kind of territorial,” he says. Of course, that has put him in the position of answering doozies such as why a colleague’s PC didn’t work during a power outage.