For many years at Planned Parenthood, I was the go-to girl for fixing tech things when you were too lazy to go to IT. Things like: the printer's broken, or can you make this into a PDF, or how do I upload my vacation photos into Facebook, or my computer hates me and nothing's working.
Now, if you know me, you know that I'm certainly no technological genius, far from it. Almost everyday I complain that some piece of equipment doesn't work because "it hates me." Just between you and me, I also don’t really know how to work a VCR—I was the only student not to rush up to the AV cart when the professor couldn’t make the video work. But I like to think that’s abstaining from that knowledge, not a real deficit: I could learn it if I wanted to, okay? And now I have DVR, which is so much better anyway, and I can make that work.
But now I work at a tech company, a small-ish one, and I pretty much should be able to solve my problems myself. For the first few weeks, I would bug the developers: I can't print, my iCal doesn't work, my phone is broken, then I realized that they were just being nice, and that helping me with my boring problems wasn't really their job. So I worked fast to learn a few tricks.
- Turn if off, and then turn it on. I know this is the oldest trick in the book (well, after "is it plugged in?" but I figure if you're reading this blog, you've got that one already). It works for 90% of my problems. It might be the copier (turn it off, turn it on, and it prints) Firefox (quit, restart, and it navigates to URLs in the search bar) or my iPhone (turn it off, turn it on, and it's unfrozen). Sounds dumb, but it works. Like a charm.
- Ask the internet. There are so many smart people in the world. You may not think this when you are trying to get out of the subway and someone is standing in the doorway, blocking you, as if on purpose (fresh in my mind from this morning), but it's true. Eight percent of my remaining problems are answered in this way. I just type my question into Google, as if asking a trusted friend, and it spits back 50 answers. Usually, it turns out that several people have had the same problem, and several people have offered answers. The only trick here is to find an answer in your language.
For instance, my iPhone stopped sending photos to Flickr out of the blue a few weeks ago, and I finally decided to investigate. I asked Google: "iphone stopped sending photos" and first got this: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=362284. Halfway into the question, I realized that this was above my head. I browsed the Flickr help on the topic (comments such as "It keeps telling me there is no NDIS or something." are much more my level), and then it hit me: this did not happen "out of the blue," it was after I restored my phone to factory settings when it last stopped working (see trick #1: Turn off, turn on). I went in and fixed my email settings and woohoo! Mystery solved, problem fixed.
- Ask yourself: "might I have caused this problem?" Like my not-so-out-of-the-blue iPhone problem, many of my technology malfunctions have in fact been caused by me. (Oops.) If something has mysteriously stopped working, spend a little time thinking if you did anything involving this device right before it stopped working. Usually: you did.
- Call/email support. The next one percent of problems are solved in this way. The Apple support guy will walk you through uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes, Cablevision will remotely restart your cable box, and Bank of America may or may not take your advice. But, no matter what the outcome, it is their job to help you. Your colleagues will thank you, I promise.
These pretty much solve your problems. If your problem persists after all of these things (1% of problems), then you can probably feel okay bugging your colleagues. Oh, and then there are a smattering of other tips I've picked up:
- Your colleague swears they fixed something on the website but it still looks the same to you: Hard Refresh. Hold down shift as you refresh the page.
- You cannot connect to your printer or networked computers: Check to make sure you're on the right wifi network. See? You're probably on your neighbor's, and they're not connected to your printer.
- Everything gets very slow: Quit some applications and give it a second. This one is hard for me, and I usually have to force myself to get up and do something to let my computer work, un-pestered by me.
- Twitter isn't working: It's probably down. Check: http://istwitterdown.com/
- Any other website isn't working: Maybe it's down. Check: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/[insert your site here]
- I have no idea what that is: Wikipedia or Powerset (new fave, thanks Bakula!) will have your answer. Very very helpful in conferences—what is that word/abbreviation everyone's using? Oh, right. Yeah, I knew that. (Note: this is how I taught myself any HTML that I know: "bulleted list HTML")
That's it! Now you can be your own tech support.
P.S. I also partly wrote this post for my friends in other jobs who complain about the learned helplessness their colleagues display when faced with technology. This post is for you, to send to them.
