Training Pays Off

Day before yesterday morning an email landed in my inbox, inviting me and nine other techs to a two-hour “vitality training” (sc. Continuing Ed) course on printers.  The whole thing was thrown together in an impromptu way, as our service level was too high (yes, it’s possible to be Officially Too Good) and taking ten techs out of the queue four a couple of hours would drop it down a bit.

I didn’t object much at all.  Printers are one of the more vexed things we support, ’cos they have so many moving parts and can have so many more things go wrong with them.  (It’s a little like the difference between breeding pedigree swamp dragons rather than pedigree dogs.)  More printer training is one request we always see in level-one technician surveys.  Unfortunately, because the class was thrown together on just a few hours’ notice, the trainer didn’t have time to prepare properly so it wasn’t as good as it might have been.  Still, he gave us a basic understanding of xerography, talked about causes of common print-quality problems, and showed us links to some much better training information we make available to our service providers.

Today yesterday’s training paid off.  A customer called in with a networked color laser printer, complaining that if anyone printed more than about ten pages, the subsequent pages had a washed-out streak running down the center of the page and the toner smeared when she picked up a page.  The customer didn’t want to troubleshoot by pulling and swapping parts (the contract says they have to if we ask them, but we don’t HAVE to ask them).  She was on about “can’t you send someone out to diagnose it?”  (No, dear, we can’t.  We don’t have people who do that.  Our contracted repair technicians only get trained in replacing broken hardware.)  I went right to the training links from yesterday, looked up the print-quality cause sheet, and worked out pretty fast that either the fuser wasn’t heating up or the fuser’s power supply wasn’t supplying enough juice to heat it up properly.  Given that and the customer’s reluctance to dig into the machinery, I decided that replacing the fuser and the power supply both was the best call.  I checked my conclusions with the guy in the next cube, who used to work in a dedicated printer support queue, and he said I was right on, so I set up a service call for Monday.  Time the call could have taken if I’d had to flounder around:  probably 40 minutes.  Time the call actually took ’cos I knew what to do and where to look:  22 minutes.

After I got off the call, I took a few minutes and wrote an email to the trainer, his boss (the Tulip, my former boss), the Tulip’s grandboss, Smiley, and his boss, saying in so many words that the class had paid off for me the very next day, and I wanted them to know it had helped me.  I figure if they can give me the resources I’ve asked for, I ought to say thank you when it does what it should and makes me look like the Guy Who Knows to a customer.

Dumbo explodes the exhaust box.  Fnord.