Don’t be a Ted

Every IT department has a Ted. Ted is a decent tech. He does the work he *has* to do but sometimes must be pushed a little to do the other work. Yesterday was one of those days that Ted needed a push. Unfortunately, the pushing got old so I ended up fixing a problem myself.

One of the executives, Sarah, had a problem with her Outlook Web Access. She could connect to the web interface and read her messages but she couldn’t send any messages. Every time she tried to send an email, Internet Explorer 7 would crash. This problem had been going on for almost 3 weeks. Ted couldn’t find why IE7 crashed so he installed Firefox. Problem solved on his end.

Well, Sarah could send emails but she couldn’t change font settings (e.g. bold, font size) using Firefox. She wanted to use IE but all of her request for help fell on Ted’s deaf ears. The frustration got to the point yesterday that she finally came down to the desk/cubicle where Ted sits in order to ask him to come fix her problem. For some unknown reason, Ted was throwing out one excuse after another for why he couldn’t come today. I could tell Sarah was getting upset so I told her I’d come and look at the problem.

Sarah pulled up OWA using IE and showed me how it would crash when sending an email. I had never seen that problem before so I did a Google search. The second or third result gave me the steps to correct the issue. All I had to do was uninstall Outlook Web Access S/MIME Control. I had Sarah send me a test email just to be sure it was working. The email went through and she was really happy. Three weeks of Sarah’s problem being ignored was fixed by doing a two minute Google search.

Why Ted didn’t really try to fix the issue is a mystery. Even when I asked him about it, I one lame answer after another. He did tell me that I did a good job. Thanks Ted.

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week. – Robert Frost

13.May.08 Software

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2 Responses to “Don’t be a Ted”

  1. fullmetalashaman | May 14th, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    He probably didn’t want her to block, THE SERIES OF TUBES!!!

    (come on, I am not the only one who made the connection :-) )

  2. mvmn | November 30th, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    Well, I can actually understand this guy. If he missed the S/MIME Control advice somehow (either by using wrong keywords for googling the problem or for any other reason) then there was nothing else he could do about this – you can’t just fix a bug in IE on your own.
    So using other browser seems like ok solution to me.

    Ofcourse I agree he should’ve found the solution in Google same way you did it, but a “bad googling luck” may happen to a person. You can’t really call this “not trying to fix the issue”.

    “Sarah could send emails but she couldn’t change font settings (e.g. bold, font size) using Firefox”
    So OWA doesn’t have normal cross-browser support? Funny. Is it Ted’s fault? (-;
    Either way, were those font setting of that much importance they made Sarah so frustrated? Maybe she shold’ve tried Opera then? (-:

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