Today I have tried to live up to my own ideal of trying harder and caring about other people’s problems.
I received a call from someone working for the local state government. He was frustrated because he had been trying to access a database hosted at the Food and Drug Administration. He’s been unable to access it for over two weeks.
I had no idea what this database was or know anything about it. But I was determined to help him where others had passed him off. So I asked him for his email address and his ticket number.
While he was on the line, I searched for the site in question on the FDA’s Intranet and found it. But it had no contact information for support.
I told him I would contact the technician assigned to his ticket and find out who he could call for support.
He was very appreciative and we hung up.
Now the real work began. I could have ignored him and gone about my day. After all, it’s not my job to support everything the FDA does. But I was determined to help. So I did as I said.
I emailed the technician assigned to his ticket and asked for a better contact number since the site in question had no support information.
The tech got back to me quickly with the proper phone number and call tree options to press to get support directly.
I thanked him and sent the information back to the guy working in the state government. I hope he gets what he needs. The rest is out of my hands, but I did my best to give him an avenue for support. Now it’s up to the technicians on the other side to fulfill his request.
As an experiment, I recorded today’s post using Anchor. It’s slightly different from the written text but the message remains the same.
It’s embedded below. Or you can listen to the file directly.