The Raging Tech

Terrible Tuesdays

Good grief. Exam week for college students apparently makes everyone grumpy and annoying. At first I thought, maybe I’m not being polite enough, so I tried harder on the phones today.

Then I heard other people in the call center dealing with angry clients, too. Apparently during exam week, everything is an emergency, and everyone’s computer is broken, and everyone needs it fixed now or sooner.

Couple this with an onslaught of completely retarded problems, like previously mentioned e-mail account issues and students who can’t follow directions.

To add insult to injury, the students still continue to queue up in the entrance way that is shared between student parking and faculty & staff parking, thereby blocking my car from leaving for lunch and making me wait, honking and angry, to get back into the faculty & staff parking after lunch, and making me late. They just sit there, waiting on someone to leave, so they can get into a parking space, instead of moving along and looking for parking elsewhere.

At least there’s an end-of-the-year party I’m invited to tonight. Maybe I’ll push one of them off the deck and into the river. That’ll make me feel better.

Make Headers Stay Across Pages on Tables in Word

A quick Microsoft Word tip: if you’re working with a table you’ve created in Word, and your table spans multiple pages, it can be annoying to flip back and forth to remember what each column represents. Ideally, you’d like to be able to keep the column headers on the table in Word across each page, much like splitting a worksheet in Excel.

Here’s how that works in Office 2003:

1. Highlight the first row of your table, or whichever row contains your headers.
2. Right-click on one of the highlighted cells.
3. Select “Table Properties.”
4. Select the “Row” tab.
5. Check “Repeat as header row at the top of each page.”
6. Click OK.

Now, each page your table spans should have your headers conveniently located at the top of the page.

Got other Microsoft Office problems? Leave a comment and it could be featured here on The Raging Tech.

The Rage You’ve Been Missing

So it was mentioned that I don’t do a lot of raging on here about crazy incidents with customers. I’ll give you a good one that’s been happening a lot lately:

Our university went with Windows Live Mail to outsource our student e-mail service last semester. Students were given until April 15th when the server went off-line to setup their new e-mail accounts and forward any old messages out, and notify other people of their address change.

A week or so ago, the Provost sent out an e-mail telling the students to setup their accounts or they would “be out of compliance.” This scared a lot of people into setting up their e-mail accounts. Some, however, could not follow the included directions, or could not be bothered to read them. So they’d call us. The call would go like this:

Caller: Um, hi. I need to setup my [University Student E-mail] account. It’s asking me for my current password, but I’ve never set a password!

Me: Yeah, no problem. The directions in your letter should’ve told you to use your current [Student Portal system] password as the default password.

At this point, it is important information to know that the setup screen asking you to change your password is within the Student Portal system, which they must first login to in order to see the setup screen.

Caller: Yeah, but, I don’t KNOW my [Student Portal system] password. Can you reset it?

Me: Well, I could, but can you see the setup screen?

Caller: Well, yeah, duh. It’s right in front of me asking me to change this password I don’t know.

Me: Where did you go to get into this screen?

Caller: I logged into [Student Portal system], then clicked on [University Student E-mail].

Me: And did you login using a password?

Caller: Yes - what are you getting at?

Me: If you can see the screen asking you for your current password, which is your [Student Portal system] password, then you must know your password or you wouldn’t be looking at it.

Caller: I see what you did there.

And this is just a small taste of the forehead-slapping fun that is tech support. Look forward to more of this in the future, as I have many stories to tell. I’ve even got a book that I started a while back, it’s about four chapters in currently, but I’ve neglected it for far too long. The Rage is back.

Current Work Projects

I have several things I’m trying to do at work while I’m answering calls and hanging on to my sanity. It’s neat to have something to be put in charge of and take responsibility for.

Project 1: Update the Help Desk Website Copy

Myself and the hourly full-time guy are in charge of updating the Help Desk web site so that it contains more accurate information. They’ve adopted Red DOT as our content management system (CMS), but the content itself is really outdated.

Project 2: Presentation on our Student Self-Service Portal, we’ll call it MySTUFF (fictionalized for anonymity).

Friday our entire team is giving a presentation to the student services group (they handle registration, fee and fine payments, advising, and other student things) on our online portal where students register for classes and pay fees and do all the things the SSG is in charge of handling. The basic premise behind this is we want both our team and their team to be as helpful as possible to new students when they call in this time of year with problems logging in or not having an account yet, or setting up their email.

Project 3: (Personal) Read Rules for Renegades by Christine Comaford-Lynch.

I’ve read the first chapter of this book so far, and it’s pretty engaging. A lot of this book is about self-confidence and defeating the demons within, so to speak, but it’s a good motivational book so far. I want to try and finish it by the end of the week so I can return it and tell my boss if it’s any good.

There you have it, a small glimpse into my work world. Hope you enjoyed it, I’ve got to get back to it.