Make The Call

Does your job bleed over into your personal life?

Wait, maybe I mean: Does other peoples' personal lives bleed over into your job? I don't mean on a relational level, because that is inevitable. I mean like people bring you their mundane tasks because somehow they feel that you can run their life better than they can.

Now, I am not a network administrator and I am not employed by Best Buy on the Geek Squad, but I did live in a men's dorm in college. And if you lived in a men's dorm in college you played video games, and if you had any friends you played video games over a network. So unless you wanted to be the whiny guy, you learned a small small small small bit of information about setting up a network to play video games. Plus, because I like computers I have put a lot of time in learning the software that I use. So then this is what happens...

A lady I know just switched over to ComCast internet. And because I can click "next" on the windows network setup wizard at my work, my boss says, "oh, you should talk to Luc he is great with computers. I'm SURE that he wouldn't mind coming out to your house and fixing that." How did I just become tech support for ComCast? They employ people at ComCast to come out to your house and fix things. Dell, BestBuy, everyone has people to do that. Or God forbid you might take a class and learn a little bit about that $2,000 appliance you just bought just to check your e-mail.

Now I'm going to go and try to fix it, because I happen to care about this woman, but I just don't get this practice. I watch people who, rather than make one phone call for an appointment, try to corner doctors, dentists, physical therapists, computer techs, and other professionals during their time off to ask them questions or show them where it hurts. As if a dentist is going to say, "Oh yeah I can just come over to your house later and pull that tooth with some string and a doorknob." And I know the thought is to save some money, but do they realize that the money they are saving is coming out of the pocket of the person they are trying to ask for help?

And in cases like mine, people would rather ask someone they know (who is unqualified) than ask a stranger who is a specialist. In this case, she wouldn't even have to pay for tech support.

Does this happen to you or are you lucky enough to have a job where this doesn't come up? I just think of my friend who is studying ancient Greek. When does that come up?