Sometimes the smallest IT problems can be the biggest irritations. Cards Technology CEO Sam Card talks about the need to quickly take care of small, but pesky, technology issues.
I recently purchased an upgraded mouse with a nice scroll wheel that makes it easy to scroll up and down and left to right. Shortly after buying this mouse, I discovered that the scroll wheel wasn’t “clicking.” The wheel just continually rolled without any brakes to slow it down. This quickly became very annoying. Despite being an IT company with dozens of spare mice in the office, I chose to just keep working with this tremendous annoyance.
When scrolling, I kept flying past what I was trying to read in my web browser; I flew past the email I wanted to look at in Outlook; I zoomed in and out repetitively trying to get the text the right size in my Excel sheets. It was very frustrating, but I was busy so I continued to deal with it and push through my work. Although hindered, I was still able to get my work done.
After about three weeks of this, I was at the breaking point. This mouse was only a few months old, so I emailed the manufacturer and told them what was happening. They instructed me to plug the mouse into a different port, try other applications, clean it with compressed air and test it on a different computer. None of these things worked. I told them their suggestions did not work. They said they were sending me a new mouse and asked that I discard the old, defective one. I thought that was a very nice warranty replacement process!
In passing, I told one of our techs of the problem and how easy the resolution to it was. Funny enough, he had purchased the exact same mouse at home, and he experienced the same problem out of the box! What was even funnier is that, like me, he had dealt with this problem for a long time. About 6 months! That evening he contacted the manufacturer, and they sent him a new mouse as well.
When my new mouse arrived, the tech came to install it. Our service manager’s 20-year-old son who works part-time for us in the summer came to assist. As they were preparing to install the new mouse, he asked why we were replacing the old mouse. The tech explained the situation with the scroll wheel continually spinning when rolled up or down. Our service manager’s son laughed and said, “See this little button below the scroll wheel? When you press it, it toggles between having the brake on the scroll wheel and the wheel spinning freely.”
Why didn’t the manufacturer mention this button before sending us replacement mice? Especially since they knew the model of the mouse we were troubleshooting – you would think they knew it had this button.
Then I added up what this little mouse problem cost our business – the labor costs (one CEO, a technician and an intern!) were high, not to mention how we could have been spending that time on something way more productive. We had a couple of hours of payroll among the CEO, two skilled engineers and our receiving clerk to deal with this problem – a very expensive way to spend time that did not produce any value!
The moral of the story is that you should never force yourself to tolerate simple annoyances. Get in a help desk ticket and hold your IT department accountable to getting these issues fixed. Little problems can add up to big, expensive time and money wasters – take it from someone who tolerated a silly mouse problem for weeks!