Bruce Johnson

.NET Developer, speaker and author. In my spare time, parent, chauffeur, and goalie.

Nov 2014

Serendipity

by in Feature Articles on

Given the title, most of you are expecting a story that goes as follows: Boy meets girl. Girl writes phone number inside a book in a used book store. Ten years pass and boy searches for book. Boy finds book and gets girl. But not this time. Instead, Andrew is the source of a story that ranks much higher on the believability scale.

Andrew's father worked for SmallishNicheCo where, like many small companies in the early 1990s, the sum total of IT knowledge was non-existent. Every problem and request was passed to an outsourced help desk, which in the tradition of solid customer service for which IT help desks have become renown, could take up to 3 days to acknowledge receipt much less dispatch a person to solve the problem. If you needed to have the brightness on your monitor adjusted, you were looking at 5-7 days. And that was after passing the gauntlet of questions to ensure the problem was 'real' (Is your computer plugged in? How about your monitor?)