You Need A Larger Mouse Mat!

I once worked on a project that quite possibly was one of the best run change/transformation projects I have seen and had the pleasure to work on.

I'll not go into the massively well designed infrastructure and the other technical stuff; suffice it to say it brought tears to this ICT support vetran's eyes.

One of the more interesting areas was the engagement of the user community and how the change would impact them. This is one of the areas that can make or break a project and frankly is not an easy part of a project to manage. However with planning as well as understanding the needs of the user community you can do much to limit any user type issues. In this case an intensive 3 week IT traning course for the users.

However there are always some...

A colleague had a call from user who complained that the mouse would not move across the screen properly. So the usual diagnostics...is the mouse cable plugged all the way in, is there any slack of give in the cable...all questions we have either asked or been asked.

In this case everything was fine so we requested a reboot of the machine. Of course this did not solve the problem. So we engaged an on site engineer to have a look with the user.

We paid little heed to the case until it was closed and we recieved the resolution details from the onsite engineer.

"User requires larger mouse mat".

In other words the user just moved the mouse to the edge of the mouse mat and then stopped and somehow expected the on screen pointer to move over the required icon.

Lessons learnt - even with the best will in the world you will encounter issues like this.

Lessons Learnt?

While reading posts on another website I realised that we all have our horror stories of ICT support. So I thought as I have quite a few accounts to relate that I may as well give it a go by using a blog.

Yes. I am a blog virgin. So this should be a wild ride. I will take you to the dizzying heights of bizzare user requests to the lows of some pretty wild asks from businesses. Such as the company that insisted that all mice were asset tagged and logged on a asset register. The fact that the tag actually made the mouse unusable did not seem to be a concern.

You...yes you! You too are a part of this and I would enjoy hearing from you. Please feel free to send me any stories - nfmueller at yahoo. co. uk

Please note - this is not to be used to publicise any grievence towards any organisation or persons by myself or any other participant. This blog is to relate amusing stories that also can be learned from. And as an added bonus technical subjects will crop up here and there:)

Welcome and lets record those lessons!