A Frustrated Secretary The secretary was on the phone. Her computer's C...

A Frustrated Secretary

When I worked in Georgia State University Library in 1994, one of my duties as a Library Assistant II was to buy supplies for the Reference Department. Librarians would tell me weekly what supplies they needed. I'd call in the order to Admin and get it approved. Then, I would go to the 4th floor to Admin and get the library's card to charge for the supplies in the department that actually filled the order and carry them back to Admin, return the card, then carry the box down to my desk and distribute the items.

On one of these trips, I had to wait for the secretary, who was on the phone at a desk with her computer's CPU on it, open. I cringed, because lay people don't know to be careful about static electricity, and she was wearing a blousey shirt. So, I went over there and listened. Since it was quiet, I could hear parts of the other end of the conversation. The library apparently had a contract with Dell for tech support. This poor secretary was very upset and pale. The conversation didn't go on long. She was holding a computer card with chips on it that I recognized as computer memory, that is used to expand the RAM. When she hung up, I asked her what was wrong.

"This computer has to be shipped to Dell! I need to get a travel report out by the end of today because the Library Director's going to a convention!"

Ok. I touched a pair of scissors and got ready not to move a foot on the static-y carpet and took the strip of green plastic that held the chips. I tried to plug it in. Immediately, I saw the problem. The plastic was about 1/4" too long. No wonder she couldn't plug it in! Manufacturing defect. Something that fella on the phone couldn't know about without seeing it.

There wasn't any solder on that end. Nothing to get damaged if I could somehow shorten it. The wheels were turning.

I explained what I used to do at Georgia Tech. By this time, her boss and several other folks gathered around. "Have you got any tools? A file, so I can take some of this plastic off?"

"I don't know. Let's take a look!" They had a bottom file cabinet drawer with a very few tools. One was an iron file about a foot long. Perfect!

Needless to say, I explained to our library director that this operation would void the warranty on their brand-new memory. I'd never tried to alter a computer card in all the unusual problems a computer tech comes across, in a job where I was actually supposed to do this kind of thing! But, I gave her my opinion that if I could whittle the plastic part of the card down enough, I could plug the memory in. She approved it.

For the next 45 minutes, I filed. And filed. Blew it off and wiped it carefully off and tried to plug it in. Then I filed some more.

Finally, with many anxious looks from people as they worked, I finally sawed enough off that it fit and made contact! Memory cards in those days had a little lever that had to click in to make the contact. I got the click! I brought up the machine. Success! It came up normally. Apparently it had a bad chip and this was the replacement RAM, not an upgrade. In those days, on a Pentium x386 Windows PC, all the chips had to work or the machine wouldn't boot. There were 4 chips on the card. With glee, I brought it down, put the case together and hefted the thing back under the desk. She had just enough time to get that report out. I knew because I had to come back, supplies in a box under my arm, to return that library charge card. Everyone was grateful and the library director left for the airport. This was a Friday and the staff of Administration got off at 5 pm.

Yes, I was very late getting back to Reference with the supplies, but my boss was happy I was able to help with that. I didn't get in trouble. And, I was also able to leave work on time to get to the daycare.

Later, when the Computer Support Librarian [I think that's the title] left, there was no one to update the CD-ROMs for the library databases. So I volunteered to do this in a secured room every week. I also did a good bit of troubleshooting, from using F-Prot to clean viruses off PCs to trying to bring up the dumb terminals in the clusters of library catalog terminals. They probably missed me a lot when I moved to Tennessee.

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