Open Thread: What Support Services Do You Miss?
April 23rd, 2008 (8:47am) Jason Harris 8 Comments
In a news.com article, Steve Tobak laments the fact that when you work on your own, you are typically your own tech support. It’s true - when you work solely from home, you miss out on many of the support services like administrative support, IT support, janitors, and so on.
For administrative support, self employed people can look into virtual assistant services such as Longer Days. For IT support, you can rely upon your own skills or call Geek Squad.
However, the fact is many of these ancillary tasks take away from doing whatever it is that brings in money.
What support services do you miss most about your traditional office job?
8 Comments Post your own comment
Richard Millington says: April 23rd, 2008 9:42am
Simple, I miss cleaners.
Thursday says: April 23rd, 2008 10:06am
I miss a stocked soda machine — I often forget to pick up more for my home office.
Chris says: April 23rd, 2008 11:07am
I am one of the non-independent web workers that reads every day. IT problems are a struggle even when you have a contractor working on it, mostly because you have to wait. If you have a really important, time-sensitive project going, sometimes the “advantages” of an organization/company are not really advantages at all. I end up doing a lot of stuff myself.
Zviki says: April 23rd, 2008 1:12pm
IT is more than wasting time doing stuff yourself. My MacBook Pro died on me last week. It is still at the lab and it can take up to 2 weeks to get it fixed (yes, I have AppleCare, but I’m not in north America). Not to mention that I had to commute to get to a lab. Now I’m struggling with my PC (can’t afford another Mac) and retrieving data from my online backup.
When I was working for a company, I used to take my laptop to IT (on 1st floor :-), they’d take my HD out, put it in a replacement laptop and take my original laptop for repair. My down-time was about 2 hours.
Maybe that’s a service worth offering to freelancers.
Ted says: April 23rd, 2008 5:37pm
I really don’t miss anything. Then again, I was an IT Director before embarking on a new career, so I know pretty much how to fix any IT issue that comes up. I do a lot of preventative maintenance, so I have pretty minimal downtime. I don’t miss hearing “That’s not supported” from IT staff…that’s for sure. That was always the excuse for “It’s not a Microsoft product, and we don’t want to have to learn it.” So I ended up learning an awful lot about alternative products.
CowboyBob says: April 23rd, 2008 5:38pm
I know it sounds feudal, but I miss a receptionist/aa in the office. Somebody whose job it is to present a smiling face to the customer, to answer the phones in person (!), and who is the Minister for Smiles; they set the tone, remember the birthdays, sooth the disgruntled, keep the copier running, find you a stamp, etc. etc.
Depending on the nature of the office and the work we keep them one-three years before they either move on within the company or to a better job someplace else.
From a customer-service perspective these people are the “front” of the business. I can’t quite understand why service businesses think that they can get along with an automatic call director and phone mail…I think they are missing out on an opportunity to interact with clients and customers directly.
IT Support says: April 24th, 2008 2:44am
I miss the coffee machine
seo sydney
Robert Adelman says: May 6th, 2008 6:01am
I miss the ability to switch off when I get home at night