for the guy working in support/help desk

When I started my professional career, which didn’t last very long, I worked on a help desk. I worked there for about two and a half years. Most people have pretty boring Jobs that they don’t en­joy, so being a fairly intellectually creative person who gets bored fairly easily with quite a short bandwidth of attention, I started to invent little games that would allow me to get through the day more easily. One of the things that I started to do was joke around with girls on the phone and try and chat them up, using self-amusement.

They’d ring up and ask, “Is this the IT help desk?” and I’d say, “May­be. Who are you?” and ridiculous things like this. Ihey might say something completely innocuous and I’d try to turn it into an innu­endo, like they want to see me naked, or whatever ridiculous thing. This was about six months into my job after I’d learned how to do it properly, all the taught helpdesk routines and so on. I’d become restless and bored so this little self-amusement exercise was just about entertaining myself to get through the day.

People started to notice. Helpdesks are notorious for all of the sta­tistics they track for each person, such as percentage of calls closed, number of calls taken per hour and so on. We’d then discuss the statistics in monthly meetings. You’d have things like who got ac­colades and who got the best first time fix rate. Every month with­out fail my name would come up in conversations with customers: “Who’s this Steve bloke? Because every time we talk to him he’s really funny”. It was only the women I did this with. I wasn’t much interested in the men and of course you need some calibration. Some of the women just wanted to get the job done. I’d put a little joke in there and they wouldn’t respond, so I’d drop it. Nonethe­less some of them really played along and so this is how I started to develop the habit of self-amusement. It sprang from having an inquiring and inquisitive mind, trying to see the humour in situa­tions and trying to chat women up as well.

So if you’re in that situation yourself, and you have to interact with the public or work on a help desk or any other type of boring job, try to start doing these things that you find amusing. You might go a bit too far and if you’re a bit miscalibrated you might offend one or two people, but eventually you’ll figure it out. It has tangi­ble benefits in pick-up. First of all you have to be in the moment to do it, so it trains you to bring yourself into the moment. Second, it allows you to develop real on-point, spontaneous wit, which is really helpful in pick up.