The sad fact is that most of us byte-bashers are at the mercy of others, at least some of the time. Unless you are in a strictly one-person shop, your hardware and software configuration is set up and maintained by those essential folks we call by the names of “Tech Support Guys”, “System Admins”, or sometimes, “those %@#! guys on the third floor.”
Sometimes power corrupts. Anyone who has been around for a while has experienced those tech support guys (TSGs) who delight in telling you why you can’t have what you need, or that you can have it, but not until you fill out form FU-Dev 23A in triplicate, which form is found on the SharePoint site that is always down for maintenance.
But sometimes, power is used for Good. Once in a while you get to work for a company that is either smart or lucky enough to have TSGs that actually care if you get any work done before you qualify for AARP. After years of experience with tech support that ranged from the malicious to the merely random, I have landed in the tech support happy-place.
I am going to name names here. I work for a government contractor in the defense industry. And there I found human aspirin in the form of the two technical support fellows who were primarily responsible for configuring and maintaining our development IT systems. Bert Shaw and Steve Vozza are developers’ aspirin in human form. From my first day there over a year ago, to as recently as yesterday, they have worked with focus, determination, and good cheer to get me what I need to get my work done, and they did it with a speed and efficiency that gives the lie to the phrase “good enough for government work.”
Each of them has a different area of responsibility, though I have never been quite clear on where the lines are and am often asking one for what the other can provide. It doesn’t matter. Whenever I need anything, one or the other of them will look into the problem and keep at it until it is solved. They work late, or come in early, or spend precious hours of their lives listening to the hold music on the vendors’ support lines, and they do not let up until they have fixed, installed, upgraded or located the hardware or software resource I need.
It may seem strange to be posting on something non-technical like this, but in a world where mediocre service has become the norm, I feel that when someone is exceptional, the world should know. And no, you can’t have them. Get your own, if you can find them. And if you do find them, guard them well–a good tech-team will do more for you than all my blogs put together.
Steve, Bert, thanks guys!
–LZM
