No one is an Expert at Everything

We all have our specialties; we’re all good at something. This by definition means that we all make mistakes at other things. Making mistakes is apart of our everyday lives. The trick of it is not to let it completely ruin your day when it happens. I see mistakes, and I make mistakes all the time, but I do my utmost to make sure that they are corrected as quickly as possible. In my day job, I am an information manager. I also do a little “Frontline IT” work. Think about it this way; if there is an issue with your computer, you would call a guy like me. 90% of the time I’m able to fix the problem, every once and a while I can’t so we call in specialists who are able actually to fix the issue. In my capacity as Frontline IT guy, I see a lot of the same problems.

 

This means that I can solve them relatively quickly. The only problem with this is that I occasionally deal with people who have issues that they can’t address, I come in and solve it very quickly because this is an issue that I have dealt with a hundred times.  They feel silly for not being able to solve it themselves. I make them feel better by telling them that anyone could have the same problem (and that is true) and that if you didn’t know what to look for then, the solution would be hard to find. I also try to teach them what I did so that if the same thing happens again, they know what to do.

 

The one comment that I get on a regular basis is “Wow, you must never have to worry about issues like this.” While that’s technically true, I deal with feeling silly for asking experts questions that they can figure out quickly in other areas. A great example of this happened to me only last week. We have a TV screen that has a news channel feed. Truth be told I don’t do a lot of stuff with cable boxes at home, and I do even less with them at my office. All this means that my knowledge of cable boxes and how they work is somewhat limited. I would also like to specify (mostly to make me feel less stupid) that the one we use has a unique situation in that the cable box is about 100 feet from the actual television, so getting the connection to work right is occasionally tricky.

 

One of these times I was asked to fiddle with the cables going to the TV and then to the cable box to see if I could make the thing work. I fiddled with the cables, and  I even took the power cable out of the box in the hopes that I would reset the thing. Sadly that didn’t work, and it wasn’t transmitting. While I didn’t throw my hands up in defeat, per say, I did advise that we call in the cable company itself because they would have better diagnostic tools which would be able to figure out what was going on.

 

The cable guy came in the next day, and I showed him where the cables were connected to the TV, and he agreed that they were correctly connected. In the back of my mind, I thought that this was a point for me, in that I had assessed that situation accurately. We then went back to where the cable box was located (a different part of the office I should specify) in the hopes that we would be able to get to the bottom of the problem. I was encouraged by the fact that the guy was carrying around a big tool bag which I imagined there would be all kinds of gadgets and gizmos which would be able to fix the issue.

 

Anyways, I showed him to where the box was in my office. He put down his bag and started assessing the cable box. In my mind He would have to use some fancy gadgets to analyze the issue, he would have to work for about 20 minutes to find the problem and then solve it. In reality, he looked at it for 2 seconds, then turned to me and said: “You know the box isn’t turned on right?”

 

In my defense, I don’t work with cable boxes, and I’m not too familiar with how they work, so I had assumed that the thing was turned on. It just goes to show that making mistakes is okay. I think that the moral of this story is that the next time you ask an expert’s advice and they can solve the issue without batting an eyelash, don’t put yourself down for not knowing what to do. It’s not that you’re silly for not being able to figure it out, it’s that the expert who fixed the issue for you has likely fixed that same issue eight or nine billion times and so can do it blindfolded. I walked away from my experience with the Cable guy, and I started to think that “I should have been able to figure that out” but then I realized that because I didn’t figure it out was the reason we called in the expert in the first place. When you call your expert, don’t feel bad if they figure out your issue quickly, feel great that you saved so much time by calling in someone who would know exactly what to do to fix your problem.

 

Have you had an issue that an expert has solved quickly?