Elation

I had to pop to my office today to check and ship 2 broken servers back to Germany for repair. If one of the servers in use by my customer dies, I have some spares I can reconfigure and send out to replace it. Once I get the broken one back from them, I have to sanity check the issue and send them back to Europe and we are provided with replacements.

Once I have checked, boxed up and prepared the documentation for shipping them, I got our facilities person to book them in with DHL and I left them ready for collection later today. I was in the office for less than 2 hours, but I left with a spring in my step, happy that I had completed a task, but also happy that I was away from home, mixing with other people.

My office isn’t used by many staff these days. Covid killed the routine for us all, but it is still nice to see friendly faces, chat a bit of banter, have a coffee from the posh office machine and partake one of the leftover danishes from yesterday. Each Wednesday, they started ordering breakfast to the office as a way to tempt people back; it didn’t work.

The satisfaction I felt as I left is something of a seldom experience these days. I usually get it when I am required to physically go somewhere and fix something for someone. If the fix was successful, I leave feeling elated, much more so than if I had done it remotely over the phone or via email - no matter how thankful the customers are.

The last time I remember the same feeling was when someone asked me to go to their office to look at an IT issue for them. I fixed that issue and also looked at a printer problem they had too, which I also fixed. I almost skipped the car on the way out, after they lavished me with praise.

Or the time a department asked me to see if I could make sense of some calculation errors they had in one of their massive (vastly overcomplicated) spreadsheets (should have been a database). The cells were not adding up as they expected and they had previously handed it off to a team in Slovakia to fix, which it took them 3 months to do, badly. I was able to fix it up in less than 10 minutes. They almost couldn’t believe how quickly I had done it and came to me thereafter for any help with it when it went wrong again.

It’s a nice feeling to have and something I don’t usually feel, despite doing everything for everyone, all at once.