Usually, I pride myself on being able to fix some software problems, or sometimes hardware problems if and only if I’ve seen it before. Take, for example, a recent problem projecting a movie in the Auditorium in the SAC. When the movie was played, I noticed there were black dots crawling up the screen. I predicted this meant the movie would be in black and white when it should have been color, and exactly that happened.
How could anyone know that? Luck, I suppose. Two years ago, I had a TV Tuner in my computer and came across an odd bug where if the settings weren’t right, the exact same problem happened. Back at the SAC, I was unable to offer this fix since the hardware that caused it was not end-user configurable.
Jumping to TLT, I volunteered to attempt a fix for an A/V system in one of the SINC sites while on a shadow shift. While not the same problem as before, the cause was similar (and I only found this out after reporting the problem): a control system not accessible to the end-user (Consultant or Professor) had frozen and required an administrative reboot.
At face value, problems like this make me feel inadequate since I can’t fix them in 5 minutes. However, thinking about it more, I can see some valid reasons for needing the wait time. The first and foremost one is safety of the system: if anyone could configure these low-level components, there would be problems every hour. The problem statement is: “I need a system that lets the end-user switch projector inputs such that (a) the projector will always cool off if necessary, and (b) the end-user can’t break the system.” Thinking from a whole university perspective, I see that the best way to solve that is to use something that works most of the time and is secure, and for the few deeper problems that happen, allow for the extra response time.
I myself take this policy when administrating other computers—the principle of least privilege. It keeps systems secure, and as an on-call admin, that’s one of the best solutions you can have (meaning less support calls).
