CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [18]
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NOTE Techno-babble is the use of (often nonsensical) jargon and technical terms to intimidate and silence a challenge to a technical issue.
A computer tech must bring integrity to the job, just like any other service professional. Anything said to you and anything you see, you should treat as a personal confidence, not to be repeated to customers, coworkers, or bosses. Here’s Mike’s Rule of Confidentiality: “Unless it’s a felony or an imminent physical danger, you didn’t see nothin’.”
There is an exception to this rule. Sometimes you need to separate paying customers from in-house users. A paying customer is someone who doesn’t work for your company, who is paying for your services. An in-house user is someone who works for the same company you do and is not directly paying for your services. It’s often your job (but not always) to police in-house IT policies. Here’s a great example. If you are at a customer’s site and you see a post-it note with a password on a user’s monitor, you say nothing. If you are in-house and you see the same thing, you probably need to speak to the user about the dangers of exposing passwords.
You have a lot of power when you sit in front of someone’s computer. You can readily read private e-mail, discover Web sites surfed, and more. With a click of the Start button, you can know the last five programs the user ran, including Word and Solitaire, and the last few documents the user worked on. Don’t do this; you really don’t want to know. Plus, if you are caught violating a customer’s privacy, not only will you lose credibility and respect, you could also lose your job.
Passwords are a big issue for techs. We have to reboot computers and access shares and other jobs that require passwords. The rule here is to avoid learning other folks’ passwords at all costs (Figure 2-3). If you know a password to access a mission-critical machine and that machine ends up compromised or with data missing, who might be blamed? You, that’s who, so avoid learning passwords! If you only need a password once, let the user type it in for you. If you anticipate accessing something multiple times (the more usual situation), ask the user to change the password temporarily.
Figure 2-3 Don’t do this!
It’s funny, but people assume ownership of things they use at work. John in accounting doesn’t call the computer he uses anything but “my PC.” The phone on Susie’s desk isn’t the company phone, it’s “Susie’s phone.” Regardless of the logic or illogic involved with this sense of ownership, a tech needs to respect that feeling. You’ll never go wrong if you follow the Ethic of Reciprocity, also known as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In a tech’s life, this can translate as “treat people’s things as you would have other people treat yours.” Don’t use or touch anything—keyboard, printer, laptop, monitor, mouse, phone, pen, paper, or cube toy—without first asking permission. Follow this rule at all times, even when the customer isn’t looking.
Dependability/Responsibility
Dependability and responsibility are another pair of traits that, while they don’t mean the same thing, often go together. A responsible person is answerable for the acts she does. A dependable person can be counted on to perform those acts. Again, the freedom of the typical IT person’s job makes dependability and responsibility utterly critical.
The single biggest dependability issue for an IT technician is to show up for job appointments and to show up on time. It seems to me we now live in a society where not showing up and not