Just submitted an End User Stories to the APC magazine

APC (Australian Personal Computer) is the ONLY computer magazine that I buy every month They have a section in the magazine that is dedicated to people’s End User Stories. If your story got published, you will get a Microsoft Mouse for FREE! This month (Oct) they are giving away the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse 6000 worth 99.95!!! Since I have had a bit of experience on the helpdesk this semester, I think I should give it a go by sending them the story below…hope they will use it

My name is David and I was doing an internship on the ITS helpdesk @ the University of Otago this semester. My job is to setup the wireless on student’s laptop, and if they got any problems getting online / using any of the software that we provided, we will try our best to solve the problem before passing them onto the second level support (might cost a bit of money).

One morning I had a girl coming to the helpdesk and asking me to help her to get her notebook on our wireless network …I said sure, no problem. Since she was using Windows XP on her laptop and she doesn’t have the WPA2 patch installed, I have to go through the process of patching her system before I can configure anything. After the system was patched and restarted, I’ve found that the WPA2 option was still not there!!! Oh great…its time to play ” Finding (Wireless) Drivers” again. Since her wireless card’ was a bit “unique“, we didn’t have her driver on our ftp, so I have to use Google and search for it myself…and if you have done some tech support before, you will know how long it will take to find the right driver for a ” unique” device. After 10 mins of Googling (lucky me, I could have spend more), I finally found the right wireless driver for her laptop. As I was doing this, there was already a queue of people behind the desk, but I couldn’t really leave her because she has been standing here for quite some time already. After I’ve upgraded her wireless driver, everything was working fine, the WPA2 option now appears! So I kindly asked her to type in her user name and password in the dialog box so she could get authenticated. She looked at me and ask me where could she find her user name and password? (I can see some funny reactions from the people behind her…) I got out my Student ID Card and told her that you can find your user name on the card. What she said next was something that I’ve never thought of before …she told me she is not a student here!!! She got told by someone (thanks man, you’ve made my day) that she could get FREE wireless in the Central Library. I couldn’t speak a word for 10 seconds -_- …so as the people behind her!!! I told her that the wireless is for students and staff ONLY and you should go to Starbucks for the wireless instead.

After this incident, I got into the habit (for a few days) of asking people whether they are students …