Have You Turned It Off And On Again?

In the days when I had occasion to phone our IT Help Desk at work, I would inevitably start - after indicating the general area of my problem - by telling whoever I was speaking to, "Yes, I've turned it off and on again, yes someone else has tried to log in on  my machine and yes, I've tried to login in on a different machine." This circumvented the first three questions asked by virtually all IT Help Desks everywhere and usually meant that my problem would get referred up the line, because in a disproportionate number of cases, if the answer to the first question was No, then rebooting the machine would resolve the problem on many occasions, and the answers to the next two questions would help identify the seat of the problem: user profile, hardware trouble or software glitch.

One of the problems faced by anyone with a user on the other end of the phone and being expected to fix their problems, is actually understanding the problem. For many years I worked in an IT department but I'm not a programmer, I was a user representative, so I understood what the users were trying to do but rarely how the system they were using actually worked - well, not the nuts and bolts, just the general principles - and the major problem I had was that when a user described some behaviour that was unexpected, I could rarely recreate the issue, which was usually the first step in trying to either explain what they were doing wrong or identifying that there was actually a real defect. Sometimes, if the user was located in the same building, I would go and visit them and see what they were trying to do - not that that always helped, because sometimes the behaviour of the system was inexplicable and not something I had encountered during testing. Fortunately there was usually a workaround of some kind, but sometimes there would be a defect that meant a fix was required, usually because the scenario they had created was not the sort of thing that the design had catered for or which had not been encountered during testing.

As the person at the end of the phone when users called with a problem, my busiest times were often on the Monday after a weekend when there had been a software release. On occasions, particularly in the early days when the system was new, there were genuine problems, but more often than not issues stemmed from the fact that the users were either unaware of the changes, didn't understand them or simply didn't like them. This, despite my best efforts in issuing release notes detailing the changes, which were either not cascaded to the users or not read by them if they were. Dealing with people who didn't like the changes was probably trickiest, because while you cannot please all of the people all of the time, there were always people you couldn't please even some of the time. Best  to develop a thick skin and not to take it personally.

If anything, my experiences in dealing with user problems has made me a bit more tolerant when I have to throw myself on the mercy of technicians to fix problems at home. In recent years I have been indebted to Apple (twice), Microsoft, and TomTom help desks. Apple once released an update to iTunes that rendered the application unusable. Checking out user forums (often a great source of fixes) led me to the conclusion that this was a tricky problem. And so it proved, as an Apple technician spent an hour with me uninstalling iTunes (which had to be done in a very specific way, uninstalling elements in a particular order) and installing a previous version of the software. Then more recently they helped us transfer iTunes to a new PC - not an onerous task in theory, but not so easy if you want to keep your playlists. A Microsoft technician spent the best part of an hour resolving an issue we had with Internet Explorer and after an upgrade banjaxed my sat-nav, I spent another hour with a TomTom technician resolving that little problem.

Recently, my internet service provider (ISP) have had some serious issues with their webmail. Fortunately most of my email traffic is through Gmail; my webmail through my ISP is legacy stuff that is too much hassle to switch, so I've not been unduly inconvenienced, particularly since although webmail kept coming up as unavailable or displaying server error on my PC, it was working okay - if slowly - on my iPad. But reading the ISP's user forum it is clear that some customers have been seriously inconvenience, causing them frustration and no little anger. Some users obviously recognised that the ISP were working on the problem and that it really is in the company's interests to get it up and running properly as quickly as possible, but from my experience sometimes easier to fix the problem than it is to identify what the problem is in the first place. If I have any issue with how my ISP handled the matter it would be with their communication, which was intermittent and sometimes vague. The fact is that we are now all so reliant on technology, particularly our computers, the internet and email - both for work and in our personal lives - that any outages become serious problems and it isn't just how quickly and efficiently our providers resolve these that matters, it is how well they communicate to us what they are doing to fix the problem and what the likely timescale is for that fix. Not that they always know, of course: as I say, sometimes the time it takes to fix depends on the problem, and if you can't identify the problem, telling people how long it will take to resolve it is nigh on impossible.

Seen too much of this message on my email recently.

Ironically, producing this week's blog has not been without its technical issues. After writing about four-hundred words, Microsoft Word stopped responding. After ending it through task manager, the same problem occurred, then my laptop refused to open the document as it steadfastly refused to find not only the file, but the drive it is stored on. And when the document opened, naturally some of what I had written had been lost. Given the title of this blog, I don't suppose you will need too many guesses to work out how I fixed the problem!

However, in another instance of something not working this week, my Panasonic HDD recorder has "lost" all of the programmes I have recorded on it (and some go back a while and are cherished old favourites that get watched over and again)and no amount of powering off and back on again is having any effect. Looks like that's one problem solved only by trashing the thing!