This page originally appeared in the November 2003 issue of the Tampa Bay Computer Society's monthly online magazine: the Bits & Bytes. It is reprinted here with permission from the author, Barbara Kalmin.
by Barbara Kalmin
Did you have a great time at the Open House, or what? It was another great success thanks to the planning and preparation by Frank Bucca, Dave Dockery (Doc), Jan Norman, and Mary Kimball. And we even had some help from above—the weather was beautiful! We couldn't have asked for a better day.
Jan and Mary were in charge of food and drinks, and they got lots of compliments on the great tasting hot dogs. As usual, Jan burned a few to keep in reserve for one of our Random Acts of Kindness (RAK) crew, Jack Kinney, but found others who like burned dogs, as well. In fact, the hot dogs were so good, Jan and Mary got to pack up early. In spite of buying more hot dogs than usual, they ran out around 2 p.m.
Doc organized and coordinated the Random Acts of Kindness (RAK) clinic, which was set up in both the Special Interest Group (SIG) room and Computer Repair Clinic. And, he had a record number of volunteer troubleshooters. It was a sight to behold!
And, in the Learning Lab, we had Frank Bucca and Howard Poindexter giving impromptu computer lessons and answering questions, with periods of standing room only.
We got some volunteers taking pictures at the event, as well. Bob Baker and Bob Randall stepped up to the bar; you can see some of their pictures in Open House & RAK Photos.
Congratulations to all who made this event such a great success. You've done it again!
by Dave Dockery
Wow, another Random Acts of Kindness is behind us. This one was one of the most ambitious RAK events that we have held. I'm hardly an objective observer, but this was a very successful event.
We normally have the resources to work on 20 computers at a RAK clinic, which usually requires 3 weeks of aggressive advertising in order to fill one. Not this time! Our friend at the St. Petersburg Times, Dave Gussow, published an article that included information about the clinic, and we filled it in 2 days! Suddenly, I had 3 weeks left to take reservations, but no more empty timeslots. You can read his article at
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/29/Technology/The_computer_support_.shtml
Fortunately, the article also attracted some people who wanted to volunteer their talents as troubleshooters. In the hopes that we would have more resources available to us, we decided to continue accepting registrations. I cancelled further advertising in the St. Petersburg Times, and on my Web page, I asked potential registrants to please only sign up for problems that really needed fixin'.
Ultimately, 30 people registered—a new record. Ultimately, Ron Kalmin, Jack Kinney, Dennis Schulman, Art Crofford, Ron Regan, Chuck Vroman, Jody Savage, and myself made up our troubleshooting team—again a new record. However, even with a larger team of troubleshooters, we would have had too many computers to work on.
I sent out a listing of the problems to the troubleshooting team, and some of them responded with the approach that they would take to fix the problem. Some of the problems were fixable over the phone. So we made some calls and sent some emails, and several people no longer needed to bring their computers into the clinic.
Another unexpected wrinkle occurred. You see, I try to handle ALL communication with registrants via email. I simply couldn't afford to promote this event if I had to call everyone personally. Once I assign registrants a timeslot, I send an email to all of them that includes everything that they need to know about the event: their assigned time, the location, instructions, and a request that they RSVP. If they don't RSVP, I have to call them the night before the event to make sure they know when and where to go and what to do.
I try to minimize the number of people I have to call, I try to emphasize how important it is to RSVP. To this end, I included the following text in the Subject line of my email "PLEASE REPLY". This caused several people to delete my email unread because they thought it was spam. I had to spend almost 5 hours on the phone the night before the event giving instructions. Needless to say, I will use a different approach the next time.
It was "controlled chaos" the next day at the Resource Center, but we kept 'em moving through the clinic. I don't think anyone had to wait more than 10 or 15 minutes to get served. We were able to fix all but two or three machines that Saturday.
I should also mention that we served three or four walk-ins at the RAK. Someone had contacted a couple of these people and told them to drop in. We try to discourage walk-ins as much as possible. It requires a lot of preparation to put this event together and when people just show up expecting us to fix their computer, it stresses our system.
I want to thank all of the people who worked so hard to make the Open House such a success: Jan Norman and Mary Kimball made sure that everyone was fed and watered, Frank Bucca and Howard Poindexter gave impromptu computer lessons and answered questions in our Lab, Jim Boynton presided over the courtyard and saw that guests were introduced and questions about TBCS were answered, and our team of crackerjack troubleshooters showed infinite patience, caring, and goodwill towards our guests.
We'll be scheduling another event soon for next spring!
Doc