Accidental Genius (and the SSE Tool Download)

I'm pretty sure I just got off the phone with Jess from New Girl. Not Zooey Deschanel who plays her on the T.V. show, but the actual person that she was probably based off of. (In my mind, all television show characters are real somewhere in the world. Yes, Hogwarts is a REAL school and yes, Smeagol lives somewhere in a cave, probably in New Zealand... Should I also admit that I was disheartened that whenever I felt a moment would be more heartfelt growing up that it is somewhat socially weird for me to break out into song? I should just hire a pit orchestra to follow me around... that would make it more acceptable.)

Her name is Bamby. (Not kidding.) I think it startled me when she answered the phone in a sweet sing-songy way. Most IT women that I speak to are very brash, to the point, no nonsense women who often times are immediately put on the defensive when they realize it is another female on the other end of the line. Not the case with Bamby.

"Hellllooooo!"

"Hi! Is this Bamby?"

"It surely is! How is your day? I have just had the best breakfast of my LIFE. And I can only hope that your day is as happy as mine is right now."

"........." Looking back on our conversation, I should have realized right then and there that Bamby was not in fact in her company's IT department. But alas, I am a slow picker-up of social ques at times in person, much less on the phone. We continued to chit chat and finally I got to the point of my call.

"Bamby, the reason for my call today is that I noticed someone in your company had downloaded our SSE tool off of our website and I was just calling to see if I could offer any assistance or possibly set you up with a free demo of our software solutions for File Management."

"Oh yes! That was me! But I don't know who you need to talk to."

"I don't understand."

"I'm not a computer genius."

"Me neither. But I don't understand. Do you mind telling me why you downloaded our tool?"

"OH! Because I got an email from somebody in my company who IS a computer genius and he quite nastily told me that I had to delete all of my files off of the place where I save my files to because I had reached my quote thing that number that you can't go over and I didn't know where else to save my files... I NEED need NEED my files. All of them. Especially my music....oh my goodness I can't live without my music. And my pictures. I have a brand new niece. She is SOOOO cute. And of course all of my files from work and stuff. So I saved them to my computer itself but apparently that's a big ole no no because the computer people can't do the back thing up so it saves if my computer dies.... I don't really know how I got to you guys but I founnnnnd youuuuuu (She literally sang this to me which immediately made me start thinking of those stalker songs from the late 70's to early 80's such as Blondie's One Way or Another and The Police's Every Step You Take.) and then I downloaded it and had no clue what to do! But it says it downloads a bazillion files an hour! That's sooooooooo much! I just wanted it to tell me how much stuff I had and maybe it would tell me what to delete even though I KNOW I need EVERRYTHINGGGGAH."

I think my brain went on strike at that point. Part of me was in absolute disbelief that this was indeed a real conversation. Thankfully, as horrible as it sounds but I can't find the words to rectify it, my mouth went into autopilot and I asked her for the main number to the front desk to speak to an administrative assistant to get me at the very least to the IT department. Lo and behold, Bamby IS the administrative assistant.
 We talked for a few more minutes and after placing me on hold for what felt like an eternity, I was transferred to Darren. The gentleman who had emailed Bamby.

We were able to quickly establish that along with Bamby, several (majority) of the employees were saving files to the network, causing huge traffic flow and exponentially taking up space on the file servers. Per company policy, they highly dissuaded against saving files to their work computers as there was no way to ensure that those files would get backed up. (Unfortunately for my imaginary world, Darren did not seem to fit any character that I knew of. For the sake of this blog post, lets pretend he was like Indiana Jones's dad in The Last Crusade. That will probably make me feel better about his lack of personality.) 

This is when the subtle genius of Bamby shone through... probably almost like a divine light with choirs of baby angels humming and strumming harps. She knew there was a resolution to the problem she was facing with her files. The download of our SSE tool could now be utilized by none other than Darren. (I'm seriously having a musical montage run through my head right now. Its pretty epic.) 

After running the SSE tool against his file server, this is the report that came back: 

Darren was flabbergasted. Bamby wasn't the only employee who "NEED need NEEDED" her music. MP3 files were his top file space taker-upper and by simply implementing some sort of file archiving system or software for his specific server environment, everyone could be happy, many could keep their music (within reason) along with their ZIP files and pictures and personal files and Darren would save well over 80% of his server space.(Genius of the res-to-ration. Had to throw an Indy quote in there.)

Sometimes the SSE tool gains new business for us, sometimes we get repeat SSE tool download people who simply use it as a way to gauge how their file servers are doing. I can't lie, we had one customer who went through downloading it, going through a demo and then used his report from the SSE tool to purchase a competitor product. To each his own. All we want to do is help. And I can truthfully say that today, we did. And, I probably met the coolest administrative assistant on planet earth. You rock Bamby. You and your epic breakfast and my belief of your love of polka dots, and singing while you talk.