Vlad Mazek

I’ve been, in one shape or form, involved in technical support throughout my professional career. While nothing will ever quite come close to the days at CyberGate where we had to walk people through creating Winsock connection scripts, there are times where a tech support can just make your day. Usually you’re trying to help someone and you overhear things in the background (usually dogs, spouses, kids, farm equipment, etc) and then some.

I work with a lot of partners that do on-site stuff and are usually not at liberty to talk to me in front of the client, esp if they are calling for help; So I tend to get a lot of callbacks from the road “I couldn’t talk about that in front of that moron, you’ll never believe what happened.” – and its particularly awesome when these guys have a great day:

Sean: Yeah, looks like they just lost their DNS servers (sound of a train in the background)

Vlad: Yep – and get away from the railroad.

Sean: I was trying to jump under it but I just missed it.

Never underestimate the cynicism in our industry. Or stupidity – last night we’re talking about the presentations for SBS Migration conference next week.

Jeff: Just keep in mind that if you’re putting together presentations that about 20% of the screen will be blocked off.

Vlad: Which 20%?

Talk about a here’s your sign (I’m stupid) moment. I’ve spoken and presented in some funky venues in my time where literally every aspect of the screen was blocked off. People put these darn things in the way of the door, there is a window directly opposite the screen, sometimes they are on the side so the front row blocks the piece of the screen. Go figure. But when I was explained that it was the 20% of the screen last night I felt like beating myself with the phone.

Embarrasing, yes. But at the very least I’m not calling people for tech support and trigger a porn movie half way through it. “Darn Internet popups”.. Yeaaaaaaaaaah. Sure. Those ALWAYS pop up when you go to Microsoft.com for a service pack download. Perverts.