A Temporary Problem
I was thrust a laptop by an angry executive early this morning with him complaining that his laptop had locked up again. Normally we have a ticketing system in place for any and all tech issues. However, when an exec wants something he bypasses the system, because he can.
So I go through the normal routine of diagnosis and through my efforts I see that the issue is simply bad memory. I replace the memory and take the unit back to the exec. That’s when it went from annoying to infuriating. He tells me he refuses to take the unit unless I have made 100 percent sure that everything that was wrong with it is fixed.
Internally I wanted to punch this man, but I held it in and simply asked him what other issues he was having and pulled out a notepad. He ran through a load of issues that all screamed “just clean out your applications” to me and I took his unit back to my desk.
After going through and cleaning out installed programs used literally once and never again and cleaning out junk data, I found that a folder in his roaming was reading 12GB, but was hidden. I log in with my credentials and enable viewing hidden or protected files and I see that the hidden folder was from 2014.
Basically, it was just a bunch of pictures and looked to be a temporary folder created by one of the old programs I removed. Some kind of picture manager or some such. Normally when we see personal pictures on the machine, we are supposed to delete them immediately. Now, no one EVER does this as we are not that big of jerks in the IT dept. Plus this guy was an exec, so I decided to just move the pictures to his desktop under a folder I created called Old Pics.
I took the laptop to him and informed him of the pictures, telling him I left it up to him if he wanted them deleted or not. He thanked me for my time and I went back to work. This ended up having an enormous effect. About an hour later him and his wife, who had come up to join him for lunch, came over to my desk. He seemed very happy and she was crying.
Now normally when I have nothing to do and a boss comes over, I stand up to greet them. Just the way I was raised, I guess. I was not prepared for what followed and was totally shocked by the outcome. The lady wanted to thank me for finding the pictures and the exec reached out to shake my hand, thanking me profusely before pulling me into a hug in front of the entire IT department.
I awkwardly hugged him back and he let me go, embarrassed. My eyes are wide, flabbergasted and totally unprepared for this, extremely out-of-character moment from this guy. Barely able to hold back the tears, his wife tells me that the pictures I recovered were thought to be lost. In 2012, their four-year-old son had passed of leukemia and the pictures I recovered were taken right before his diagnosis at three years of age.
Because of a house fire a few years ago, they thought they lost every last photo of their son. Apparently those were the photos I had recovered. His wife reached out to hug me and everyone in the IT department stared at their screens hard with puffy eyes as we were all not expecting this kind of emotional event today.
My boss came out of his office to personally thank me and forwarded an email chain to me ahead of a company-wide email that the CEO sent out basically retelling the tale while naming me personally. He threw in words about striving for excellence and the unexpected results of everyday excellence.
I had to turn off my Skype for business as the attaboys kept coming in one after the other. My boss told me to take my lunch early since the flood of messages was making it hard to do my job.