Tech support.

One of my clients is a large and well-known non-profit with almost 300 “branches”. While much of the work I do for them is research and marketing related, I was brought in last year to help with the statistical report showing how each branch was doing with funding, membership, diversity and a slew of other things. It was just awful – each filled out an Excel spreadsheet (not of my doing) and I had to combine and analyze (not to mention fix the gross errors) of the lot. It was a disaster. But I did it. (Perhaps Andrew helped a little.)

So when they came back this year, I said yes with the caveat that we design an online survey so the info would be collected in a spreadsheet in an organized (and hopefully accurate) way. So it’s up now. It wasn’t an easy process, and I had to learn an entirely different back-end computer system, but it’s live. Whew.

The phone rings. 7:30 pm. At night. Someone can’t make it work. It’s not right. It’s giving error messages. Fix it. Talk to her. Fix it. Well, this morning I did talk to her. And you know what? It was human error. What a shock. The information was entered incorrectly. But, I put a note up with the survey so no one else would make the same mistake.

And.

We buy salmon from a guy named Avi. Avi goes to Alaska every summer and fishes – processes, packs and freezes the fish. Sound ick, but it’s amazing. He brings it to our house every month, as we order it. (He also smokes his own salmon, which is superb!) So the phone rings and it’s Avi asking for help with Microsoft Outlook. I helped him, of course.

But how did I get to be tech support? I am not a techie. Yes, I’m a little geeky, but does that mean I get to help everyone with their computer problems?

I thought that was Jeff’s job. Or Andrew’s. Or Geeks on Call.