As I was chatting with my friend Mike the other day, we were swapping stories about the perks we have enjoyed by helping someone with a computer problem. Mike told me how he came to meet the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin several years ago.
By sheer accident, Mike discovered a bad page on the Australia Zoo website. He emailed the site’s webmaster to let him know of the problem. The webmaster wrote back to say it was a suspect Java problem. Since Mike knows Java, he offered to help debug it. Long story short, Mike solved the problem and the grateful webmaster offered to introduce Mike and his family to Steve Irwin if they ever ventured to . Well, they did make that trip, and the webmaster made good on his word. Soon Mike’s whole family had some quality one-on-one with the Crocodile Hunter himself. And better yet, Mike’s daughter spent the rest of her vacation “working” at Australia Zoo, greeting guests and helping with the baby animals. All for debugging a bit of code as a favor to a fellow techie.
I have my own “grateful user” story from my days as a help desk consultant at Johnson Space Center. A NASA employee called the help desk looking for someone to help him with a dBase question. My colleague Sherry took the call and got him through the problem. The guy then said he needed some help with his email, so I stepped in on that one. Afterward, the guy told Sherry and me that he operated the space shuttle simulator, and that he would let us “fly” it on the weekend if we wanted to. Heck, yeah, we wanted to! We arranged to spend a Saturday in the simulator, which was very cool. Sadly, I learned that I am a much better help desk consultant than a shuttle pilot, as I “crashed” my simulated mission somewhere over Africa.
There are lots of people who think that anyone who can solve a computer issue is practically a god. They’ll give you the keys to the kingdom if you can get them out of hot water. So what’s your “best perk” story? What have grateful users offered you in return for your professional services? What very cool things did you get to do because you are a computer geek?
