Wanda Pham

For the summer and fall of 2005, I am doing my internship at LogicSouth in Columbia, South Carolina. The company is an Internet network service provider for many businesses in Columbia as well as distant businesses. They provide services such as Internet service, email service, and hosting services. The company is staffed with four main employees, a few interns, and many people who occasionally come and go to work. I have not worked there long, but the two main tasks that I am doing there are answering technical support calls and emails and troubleshooting clients’ computers.

Answering technical support questions from customers was the most frightening part of the internship. I did not how to solve customers’ problems because I did not have the experience and knowledge. Another reason technical support questions was a little scary was that I had to answer all the calls whenever I came in to work until the time I left. Helping customers through e-mail was much easier since I could ask the staff for assistance without making the customer wait. I knew that the only way I could learn to help customers was to answer all the calls because every call was not always the same. I needed to experience different problems in order to know how to solve them in the future. I haven’t work there long, but I am getting more comfortable with answering technical support questions.

The second task is troubleshooting computers for clients, especially their hard drives. The first customer was a lady who had a processor that was making loud noises. The noise was coming from her hard drive so we just backed up her files onto a new hard drive and put the new one back in her processor. Another customer’s vehicle got struck by lightning and it somehow ruined his new laptop. We did a few tests and found that it was the power supply in the laptop itself; the hard drive and power supply cable was intact. The only solution for the customer was to send it back to the manufacturer for repair. We got another client with a hard drive problem. We backed up the hard drive and reformatted the computer. There was the dilemma of not being able to install Windows XP. In conclusion, the customer had a hard drive failure and would need to replace it. I am discovering that I actually enjoy troubleshooting computers.