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Questions & Answers
Mark Ferguson is Help Desk manager and senior programmer analyst for Academic Services, Computing and Information Technology.
What is the CIT Help Desk?
The CIT Help Desk serves as the primary resource of centralized computer assistance for UB faculty, students and staff. We also participate in teaching and assisting IT Workshops. We are part of Academic Services, CIT. We are currently staffed by 40 students of various majors, one full-time staff manager (myself) and a part-time staff assistant manager.
What types of problems do you provide help with?
We will provide help for any computing problem. We are best able to help problems related to central computer services available to everyone at UB, such as UBITname Accounts, dialing in to campus and Central Email. We also focus on students with services such as ResNet, MyUB and UBLearns. If you have a problem accessing one of these services, the CIT Help Desk is the place to get help. Questions that we cannot directly answer are referred to other CIT units, such as CIT Repair, or to the customer's departmental computing help resources.
What is the CIT Help Desk Virus Center?
The CIT Help Desk Virus Center is located off our main Web site at http://helpdesk.buffalo.edu/. We update the site with information regarding common computer viruses affecting people at UB. It is a complement to the main CIT virus page at http://www.cit.buffalo.edu/virus/.
What is the most frequently asked question the CIT Help Desk receives?
The different questions about UBITName accounts are the clear winner. Of the 13,000 individual problems we have handled so far this academic year, almost 4,000 were UBITName related: What is my UBITName? Password issues, file-quota issues, etc. Questions related to getting connected (dial-in or on campus) came in second at just over 3,000 problems, with email-related questions a close third at a little over 2,500 problems.
What's the most bizarre question you or someone on your staff has fielded?
We receive a lot of interesting questions. Many start out sounding a little strange or bizarre to us, but after discussing the problem further with the customer they turn out to be not strange at all. These situations often are a result of customers trying to describe the behavior of their computer over the telephone to a consultant who has to map that description with the technology. And who can know everything about technology? Not knowing has led to interesting requests ranging from email exorcism ("My inbox has been possessed by the MAILER-DAEMON!") to a man who called because he needed help convincing his wife that the email he received with "I LOVE YOU" in the subject was from a computer virus, and not another woman.
How can one reach the CIT Help Desk?
The CIT Help Desk is located in 216 Computing Center, North Campus. Well over 95 percent of our daily customer interactions are either through phone or email. Our phone number is 645-3542; email address is cit-helpdesk@buffalo.edu. Our Web site can be found at http://helpdesk.buffalo.edu/. A recent SUNY-level directive has limited walk-in traffic in all SUNY data centers to data-center personnel. As the Computing Center is UB's main data center, this access restriction went into place on Feb. 13 and is effective until further notice. In order to minimize inconvenience, we ask that you first call ahead to make an appointment if you need to come to the CIT Help Desk in person. That way, a consultant can meet you at the front door, located on Putnam Way. We are looking into short-term and long-term solutions to this issue.
I see from your personal Web page that you like movies. What's your favorite?
I have many favorites! If I'm only allowed one, it would be "Lawrence of Arabia."
What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?
What do you feel to be the biggest computing problem we face every day? My answer would be information security literacy. We use computers and the Internet to get our jobs done and in our personal lives. Using computers and the Internet safely and effectively can be a tricky problem, with no simple answers. Often problems arise when you behave differently on a computer than you would "in real life." Whatever it is you do on your computer, how would you do it if there wasn't a computer? That's a question I like to ask myself a lot!