...or one of them, anyway, is that the people I have to help are self-selecting. To see what I mean, consider three completely hypothetical professors:

Professor "A" considers her (or his) access to my Unix systems to be a privilege. She mostly knows how to do what she wants, even though it's pretty far removed from her nominal field of study. She has never yet asked me a question that could be answered by the first link of a Google search on the same question. It's not that she doesn't use the system, because she correctly identifies the situations that do require my attention and reports them. She's just pretty self-reliant and needs little maintenance.

Professor "B" knows very little about computers, at least my kind, and does not always have a well formed idea of what he (or she) wants. He knows this is the case, and describes his problems in terms of what he wants the system to do, and will usually take my advice as to what is the easiest way to do it. When I solve a problem or show him how to do something, it usually stays solved and I rarely have to show him how to do the same thing again. So this is more work than I have to do for Professor "A," but it's not unpleasant and it leaves me feeling like I did something worthwhile.

Professor "C" knows a fair number of things about Unix that are correct, and a good deal more that are outdated or just wrong. He (or she) tends to frame his requests in terms such as, "I need a Slugworth Bubblegum server installed before my class tomorrow morning." If I suggest a Wonka bubblegum server instead, he will invariably say that it would be too hard, and too inconvenient, since he couldn't possibly learn to use a Wonka server before his class tomorrow, and anyway he already knows that Slugworth servers are the best. He does not read much of the email I send, and hence will sometimes ask me the same thing three or four times in a month. He might know the difference between a problem that belongs to the system administrator and a problem that doesn't, but will not hesitate to give me any assignment that I can do, without regard to whether I should do it.

Now, in my current job, I work for about 30 to 40 professors, and I would guess that about 25% of them are "A"s, 50% are "B"s and the last 25% are "C"s. But because of the characteristics I just described, I end up spending most of my time on projects for the Cs. Not only does this make me cranky, it's unfair to the As and Bs.

For example, a certain Professor A spent quite a bit of time recently trying to sort out a messy application problem. I wouldn't have known offhand how to fix it, but I could probably have saved her several hours if she had asked sooner. I would not have minded this at all, since as an "A," she gets less than her fair share of my attention to begin with, and I know that the cost to benefit ratio of spending my time is quite good.

Professor B is punished in a different way, which is that when he asks if I have time to do something, I say no, and that's that.

As for the Cs, I have found no way to deal with them, other than to give them what they ask for (not necessarily what they want), and to teergrube silly requests so that they don't take up the whole week.

I have spent a tremendous amount of time learning what I know about systems and programming, but the people that would actually benefit from that experience don't ask. People that are only interested in a Band Aid for their skinned-knee-of-the-day, on the other hand, bother me all the time. They make me want to stab my eyes out with a fork. That's what help desks are for, not me.

16 Nov 2005 01:54 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments