Don R. Crawley's Most Recent Posts

It's happened to all of us at one time or another. We've just met someone, he or she finds out that we work with computers, and those feared words come out, "Oh, you work with computers. Maybe you can help me."

I have a friend who is working on a new hardware deployment for a large bank. He ran into a couple hiccups with the site-to-site VPN and called me for my opinion. After reviewing his configuration and not seeing any obvious problems, I suggested he confirm that the hardware is working correctly. He did the usual stuff such as swapping out cables, but still no love.

The tragedy of the earthquake in Japan and the resulting tsunami serve as stark reminders of the importance of disaster planning and preparedness.  As IT people, we understand the importance of disaster preparedness, but how do you convince reluctant management to support it in the budget?

In a recent Cisco ASA workshop, one of my students bemoaned a call he placed to tech support.  His company is a big client of a well-known security software vendor.  He wasn't able to find the answer he needed in their documentation, so he called their help desk.  The rep he spoke with berated him for not looking up the solution in the documentation and condescendingly pointed him toward the document with the answer.  (There's never an excuse to treat another human being disrespectfully.)  Frankly, most of the IT people I know would prefer anything over calling tech support.

Opportunities for public speaking can be career builders or career killers. You've probably heard the statistics that say people are more afraid of public speaking than death, and you may be one of them. But did you realize that non-technical audience members may be even more afraid than you are. They are often bombarded with technical information they are asked to understand, but may not feel competent to grasp. As technologists, we're in a unique position to far exceed our audience's expectation when we step to the podium. INSIDER (registration required)

I got my first certification in the 90s on Windows 98. I did it solely because I was tired of hemming and hawing when my clients asked if I was certified. After all, I'd been working and playing with technology in various forms since the 1960s. I didn't need to prove myself to anyone and besides, all certification would prove is that I had good test-taking skills. I was surprised, however, after going through the preparation and testing process, at how much I learned on subjects not directly related to Windows 98.

From the office worker who insisted on using refrigerator magnets to attach floppy disks to the side of his computer to a high-priced attorney who demanded the IT guy come to his office to move the keyboard on his desk, we've all dealt with our share of difficult end-users. Sometimes, they're difficult because they're digitally-challenged, other times they're difficult because they're jerks. Regardless, the successful IT person figures out a way to deal with them successfully and without bloodshed.

There are two kinds of wandering: wandering aimlessly and wandering with a purpose. Although it might seem like a contradiction in terms, wandering with a purpose is at the core of a 1980s management concept called Management by Wandering Around that has some serious benefits for IT staff. INSIDER (registration required)

We don't normally associate the term "emo" with IT. In fact, emo is usually associated with a genre of emotionally-charged music listened to by unsmiling teenagers wearing lots of black. As IT pros, however, we sometimes have to deal with end-users who are under pressure to accomplish a task right when some component of IT/IS fails. Like the emo teenager, that end-user is probably not smiling and very much emotionally-charged. It's at times like that emotion and technology intersect. It's also at that moment when our emotional intelligence skills can make the difference between a successful outcome or a disaster.

Can a water cooler kill your career?  Possibly.  The office water cooler, hallways, and coffee machine are places where either your advocates congregate or where detractors launch career-sinking torpedoes.  These are the places where your colleagues in the office (superiors, peers, and subordinates) talk about you behind your back.  Your colleagues can be your advocates or your detractors, depending on how they feel about you.

Our jobs, although technical by definition, are really about how we solve human problems in the workplace. The art of what we do lies in how we develop creative, technical solutions to workplace challenges. We're artists and, instead of paints or clay, our palettes consist of code, scripts, cables, servers, and routers. Oh, and an ability to communicate in meaningful ways with our users. This blog is about the human side of technologists' jobs.