The Severed Cortex

I know I've been posting crap out here for weeks. The problem is that it's almost fantasy baseball season and for me that means spending all my spare time poring over baseball stats. If you care, I think I have my hitters sorted out, but I clearly need to work on the pitchers. Anyway, that's my excuse.

If there's one thing that I've learned about working in corporate America it's that you always want to show respect towards the Help Desk personnel. They have a rough enough time dealing with all the stupid users in the world without dealing with the pompous stupid users who work in IT. If you show these guys a little respect and understanding, they are always willing to go the extra mile to help you out in a pinch. Case in point, last week. Antra, who works out of her home in Atlanta, had her laptop crash on her on a Saturday. She sent it in to our Baltimore help desk office where one of the staff worked diligently to pull data off the hard drive, which was partially broken, and replace the motherboard, which was shot completely. I made sure his boss knew we really appreciated his hard work on it, and I made sure to send him a $25 gift certificate for busting his hump and getting it shipped back to Antra quickly. Now, from here until the day I'm fired, I'll be able to call that guy up and ask any favor I want anytime. Plus he'll tell his co-workers about his positive experience working with me and my team. All that for just showing a little respect, gratitude, and a measly $25.

I've been doing those kind of simple things for our St. Louis help desk staff ever since I became the manager of our department. Any time I walk over to those guys and ask for anything, they stop what they are doing and help us. In return for being reasonable to work with, the help desk manager made sure I got a nice little Dell GX150 with monitor, keyboard, and mouse. They were just going to recycle them to Dell for pennies on the dollar, anyway. In addition, they put in a bigger hard drive, installed Windows XP Pro, doubled the memory, and installed Microsoft Office 2003. I, in turn, passed my good fortune on to Robert and his sister.

I took it over there last Saturday morning and set it up. Immediately he and his sister were fighting over who got to use it first. I instructed them to share or I'd take it back. They complied. Once Robert had a couple shots at playing a game on it, I told him he had to find me something to eat. We left and decided to go to the St. Louis Mills Mall. Robert wanted Burger King and I got a couple of slices of pizza. I no more than took one bite of pizza and Robert said he had to go to the bathroom. Lesson #1 about kids: Don't load them up on sugar. Check. Learned that lesson months ago. Lesson #2 about kids: Ask them if they need to go to the bathroom before you start anything. Could someone have told me about this one first? I shudder to know what other painful lessons I have yet to learn about kids.

Once we were past the minor bathroom fiasco, which basically ended with me eating 2 slices of Sbarro pizza in about a minute and a half, we went to the NASCAR store and played video games. I only had to pump about four bucks worth of tokens in and that gave Robert enough tickets to trade for some junk; army men, a yo yo, some candy, etc. Next we went to play glow in the dark goofy golf which was kind of fun, albeit pricey; twenty bucks for one round for the two of us. Each hole was a par 3, which is far different than the goofy golf I played ... probably ten years ago. Maybe fifteen? Anyway, on a par 54 course I shot 50. I thought that was pretty good. Robert shot a 90, which I totally rubbed in his face with taunts like, 'Ha, Ha! You Suck!' and 'I totally kicked your butt'. OK, maybe I didn't taunt him, but if he were older I might have considered it. I did taunt him about beating him at PlayStation Tekken 3 a couple of months ago and he didn't care for it. Does that make me too competitive?

After goofy golf I took him to the bookstore where I made him pick out a book for him and his sister. I'm learning that he could care less about gifts for his sister. He picked out a R.L. Stine book and I threw in Sounder for him. I picked out The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963 for his sister. Once again on the way home he clammed up on me, but this time I confronted him as to why. He just said it made him sad to have to leave. I told him he should be thinking about all the things we can do next time instead and that when he was sad it made me sad too. I don't know if that worked or not, but he did say he was not going to be sad anymore. Maybe next time it will be better. Upon arriving at home, he went straight to the computer.