Not many people are cut from the IT cloth, but I believe that the hurdles most people face when dealing with computer problems are largely psychological. There is something about computers that seems like it should require some insight more mystical than Google to solve. Now I’m not saying that the average person will feel confident in setting up an LDAP server, but there are a lot of small maintenance tasks that everyone has to go through just to bring these silicon beasts to heel. Nearly every day I’m faced with questions that leave the users looking sheepish over the simple tasks that just took me a minute to do.

On the other side of that coin, IT people sometimes take what is an easy problem and try to solve it through more arcane processes when a “normal” person would easily solve it. While solving a simple problem earlier I was handed one of the wireless handset phones our users carry with them. After a bit of confusion we decided it was one that didn’t belong to anyone present at the moment, so I took it and said I’d find the proper owner. I looked at the number on the phone’s display and compared it to the dead tree directory list on my desk, but failed to find the owner. My next thought was to log into the cisco administration server for the phones, and I proceeded to try to find the number there. Strike two. finally I looked up the phone’s IP address on the handset and started to look up IP’s on the server. It was only then I realized all I needed to do was call my desk phone from the handset and look at the caller ID for the owners name.

So, next time you see your IT guy struggling with some simple task please remember, he’s probably looking for the most difficult way to accomplish his goal.