You've just arrived at work on a Monday morning after a long weekend and you haven't had your coffee yet. You land your laptop on its dock and take your seat, waiting for the familiar image of your desktop wallpaper to greet you.
And you wait.
But it doesn't appear. 'What is this?' you grumble to yourself and check your clock only to realize that you are late for your meeting and need to get into your email to find out where it is.
%$#@!
You panic.
You call the help desk.
And it must be your lucky morning because one of the IT guys arrives at your desk within a minute. He walks over to the laptop dock, presses down on the laptop lid and you hear a dull "clack." Your desktop appears on your monitor at last.
"Your laptop wasn't fully docked," he says with more patience than the situation deserves and walks away.
"Oops! I'm sorry!" you call after him. "I just assumed something was really wrong!"
Thank goodness this has never happened to anyone you know (cough) because this is a prime example of how not to stay on your help desk's good side. The problem was easily fixed, the panic was completely avoidable and the employee didn't do one iota of troubleshooting before calling in a pro.
You might think that in this day and age, nobody would be this dense or unthinking in the handling of their employee-assigned PC workstation, yet IT pros will tell you that it happens all the time. And while they may try their best to stay patient and friendly with the workers they were hired to assist, they can only reset a forgotten password so many times before greeting a call from the repeat offender with some eye-rolling.
eWEEK spoke to a range of IT professionals about what they considered the bare-bones computer tasks that every employee should be able to perform—aspects of daily work they'd consider almost inexcusable to request frequent help with.
Almost, they said, insisting that they didn't mind helping workers, as long as the workers would try to help themselves first.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Five Ways to Stay in Your Help Desk's Good Graces
