600 The Junior Chronicles and Smart Coffee

00:09 - Marvin Bee (Host)
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals. If you provide support to any business, of any size, this show is for you. Presented by Net Ally, we share product stories and tips, all in an effort to help you do your job better, smarter and faster. This is a very special weekend edition of the show. It's an audio podcast, so I also want to thank our friends over at SuperOps for being a sponsor of the audio shows when we do them, and today I just wanted to do a quick little show, share a story about our good friend CJ. We're going to introduce Uncle Mark's glossary when it comes to juniors and I want to review a couple of Amazon things that people have purchased using our links. So I wanted to give a shout out to people. I don't know who they are, but I wanted to at least mention them and remind you that if you want to support the show, you don't have to be a Patreon and do a monthly subscription, but that would be nice. You don't have to be a sponsor and sponsor one of the segments or pieces of the show, but that would be nice as well. You could just simply save an Amazon link as your favorite on your browser and if you purchase anything from Amazon and I do many anything, anything if it's tech related or home related just use the link for Uncle Mark's IT Business Podcast and we'll get a little bit of commission for the show. Let's see here. Let me do this before I tell you the story of CJ. Some of you are probably new to the show and don't know who CJ is, and CJ is the nickname that has been given to one of the texts that is at a client that we co-managed, and he is named CJ because he claims that he is Cisco certified, and when I first met him and asked him what he knew about networking active directory, yada, yada his response was I'm Cisco certified, so I should be able to figure it out. So somebody in the listeners in one of the chats actually said Cisco junior should be CJ, and that's how we came up with his name. 

02:47
But we also need to separate out some of the other juniors that I talk about, and so I've decided I'm going to create a little glossary of all the juniors, and that way it'll help you understand who we're talking about, because juniors are different. You have your TJs, which is just your basic tech junior and for the most part this is probably the best of all the juniors, somebody that is new to the industry. Maybe it's their first job as their desktop technician and they are truly understanding of where they are in their journey. So they are very open to reaching out for help. They make sure that they don't touch things without asking if they're unsure. They're very eager to learn. They are going to go far in their tech journey, their tech career. So if you hear me refer to a TJ, that is who I'm referring to the very best of the juniors, the probably worst of the juniors, because CJ is not really that bad, but OJ and I'm not talking about the OJs from the 60s that had the great music. I'm not talking about OJ that allegedly killed two people. 

04:15
I'm talking about the owner junior who is the owner of a business and probably when he started the business, did everything himself or herself, because they just thought they had to. They did everything. They probably installed their own computer and learned networking as they went along. They're probably the ones that Tell you that if we're going to install a server, let's install it in my office. That way I'll have access to it and If I run into any trouble, I'll call you and you can walk me through. So, owner juniors I've had a couple of those in my time and those are the worst in my opinion, and I Won't work with an owner junior, basically because I don't want to be the one that is their personal help desk after hours. So I don't have any owner juniors, although there might come a time with. 

05:15
Her is one that we talk about it and share stories about. The other common one is AJ, and AJ is your admin junior, usually an office manager in. In my case, I work with law firms and their title is either firm administrator or Admin, something whatever, but you get the point somebody that's in an administrative position that is not IT, but they take it upon themselves to do the things that they should be calling us for. So I wanted to get those nicknames out there, because I know there are some people new to the show and Are kind of surprised when we're talking about who are these juniors that you speak of. So those are the names right now that you need to know. We'll come up with some more. I'm working on an EJ, I'm working on an MJ, but right now we have TJ, tech junior. We have AJ admin junior, CJ Cisco junior and OJ, the owner junior. So add those to your glossary for the IT business podcast and, as we refer to those Stories, you'll now know what we're talking about. 

06:41
Now on to my CJ story for this week. I had to go to One of my favorite clients yesterday I'm recording this on Saturday, by the way, so Friday is when I had to go there and I had to do a couple of networking things. Got that done and, of course, CJ came up to me as I was getting ready to leave and Asked if I had looked at the printer issue that he emailed about. Now, for those of you that don't know, CJ is the person that this Month’s Question of the month is for. So if you head over to IT business podcast Dot com and click on the queue, the question about responding To CJ is this particular person and, to be honest, there were actually three emails that I did not pay attention to. CJ had sent an email basically with the statement Allison cannot connect to this printer, please advise and you know that, if I see that, if that's all the email I just deleted. He sent another email asking for follow-up and then a third email where he actually did do more techie stuff and I was quite surprised and he sent an email Good morning, Marvin Allison cannot connect to the Billing printer, please advise. 

08:20
But he added a screenshot when he had opened up the command prompt and Try to ping the address of the printer. I mean, for those of you that do not know, that is Huge For CJ, that is probably. It probably pained him to do that extra work. So I'm there in the office and I'm looking at him and I just finally say where's the printer? And we walk over to it and what CJ does is Shows me the printer. It's an HP laser jet P 45, 15 or whatever. It's one of those. It's an older printer but it has on the display the IP address of the printer. 

09:18
So CJ proceeds to tell me I, you know the printer has an IP address, but I can't connect to it. And I Proceed to ask him Well, what else have you done? And he goes Well, I didn't know what else to do. So I looked around, followed the cable it was going into a cubicle area and underneath the cubicle area I could see a bunch of cables and wires. I saw a five port switch. One of the cables had a light on it and the others did not. So here I am, crawling under this cubicle checking out these cables, only to find out that the printer was going into the switch, the switch was not going into the wall, so of course, no connection. 

10:17
Now you may say, well, Marv, that should have been pretty simple for him and yeah, I would agree. But turns out that they were doing some other stuff where, in order to troubleshoot the connection for another computer in the next cubicle, they decided to run a long cable from that cubicle into the cubicle where the printer was. And I guess that they were plugging in, unplugging cables and it just must have escaped his mind that he maybe didn't plug the printer back in. So normally that would just be the end of it. But I have to tell you, this is a client where they actually have three data jacks in each cubicle location and I thought, oh well, why didn't you just plug some of this stuff into these other jacks? And his response to me was whether or not connected. I couldn't get any connection. So I take out one of my net ally tools, I plug in and, yeah, sure enough, there's no connection. And I said okay, well, did you check to see if it was patched in the server closet? And he looked at me with those glazed puppy dog eyes like huh, what do you mean, jaggy? So I then had to go into their server closet, find some patch cables, patch these jacks in. And everybody was so happy. The girls in the cubicles next were smiling and laughing and all juniors could say to me was thank you. 

12:08
So there's much more to that story. I'm trying to be nice, it's Saturday, I'm having a good day. I just, I just had to get that story out of my head and into your ears and have you guys enjoy what I had to go through yesterday. So that is my CJ story of the week. There's actually two other CJ stories, but we'll get to those another time. So if you have your own Junior story, we're probably just create a whole new segment of the show called, you know, the Chronicles of Junior or the junior Chronicles or something like that. 

12:51
Go ahead and share with me. Even if you have a comment about my CJ or any of my juniors, feel free to reach out to me. You can do that Two ways. You can either just, you know, send me an email. You can do that you know From the webpage. On the contact form I have reinstated the voicemail option from the website. So if you go to it business podcast calm you will see on the right hand side of the webpage there's a little pop-up that says message with a microphone on it, so you can click that and Record a quick little message to uncle Marv. So Send me your junior feedback Either of those ways, by email or by the voice message on the webpage. 

13:46
I Also want to put in a couple of quick links. I mentioned earlier that one of the things that I used to do a Thing where I would put up Recent purchases that listeners had done on Amazon, just to give you guys some ideas of what you can, you know, purchase using the link. But I wanted to go in this time I'm going to put links in the show notes Because obviously this is not a live video show, but we'll have the links on a couple of purchases. One that caught my attention and again, I don't know who purchased this. I Just know that it was purchased and it is a Klein tools and Klein is spelled K, l, e, I, n. The numbers are one, one, zero, six, three W. It is a wire cutter, wire stripper heavy-duty automatic wire stripper tool, and this tool looks Pretty awesome. So, again, I don't know who got this and If you're listening to the show and you want to reach out to me and it's Explained this tool to me it looks Pretty heavy-duty, it looks like something that you would use more for electrical work, not necessarily regular cable work that most of us would do, but it might be able to be used for cat 5, cats 6 cable, but it looks to me like it's really For electrical work. 

15:29
So I just would want somebody to Give me more guidance on this. It looks like a pretty good tool. There's no video. I'll go. Actually there is video. Oh, interesting. I'll check out the video here, but I'll put a link to that in the show notes. So if you are somebody that needs one of these tools looks to me like it's pretty cool and it's not very expensive. It's $29.97. So a pretty cool tool. Let's see here I, oh, I'm going to put a link into something that I purchased last week. 

16:06
We are a Keurig shop and a Keurig home we have where we had two Keurig’s here at the office, one on our office side, and then we had the Keurig duo on the lounge side so that if we had visitors in and we needed to do coffee, it would do both a single cup or a 12 cup carafe over there. And then we have a Keurig at the house. So the Keurig at the house died. So we were going to take the old Keurig from our office side here and we purchased the new Keurig K Supreme Smart Coffee Maker. It brews cups of 6 to 12 ounces. It has multi-stream technology. So if you're not familiar with Keurig, the older coffee makers would just poke one hole at the top and bottom and that's how your coffee would come out, but it would not saturate the entire K cup. So the new K Supreme's actually put five holes at the top of the Keurig and saturates the entire K cup. It's supposed to bring out the full flavor and all of that. 

17:25
But the other thing that I liked about this Keurig is that it has something called brew ID technology and the brew ID technology recognizes your K cup and customizes the brew settings for that K cup, and I was kind of iffy on that before. However, I have used it now for the last week and it is fantastic. It has recognized almost every cup that I did. There was one generic donut shop cup that it did not recognize. And then you can still go in and do the particular strength, the particular temperature as well as the cup size for your coffee. So if you've got this feeling that you always have to have either a rich or bold setting on your coffee and you want to do super, super hot, you can customize that and there's I think there's two settings that you can save. So, rather than using the brew ID, you can just hit your favorite setting and it will brew the cup to your setting. I have just been letting the system find the K cup and use the brew ID and just have it do the settings based on that cup, and it has been pretty good. It has been pretty fantastic. Every cup that I've done tastes close to what I've done before. They've even been better in some cases. So it's pretty good. 

19:01
The one thing that I'm not sure about the K Supreme Smart is that there is an app that you can use for it and, to be honest, I thought I was going to have to use the app, but it really you don't have to. But if you want to turn the coffee cup on or the Keurig on and you're not there, you can do that from the app. You can, of course, order your K cups and accessories. You can schedule the brew time. You can do all this stuff from the app. So I haven't done much with it yet. I just doubt it connected. But I'm happy that the K Supreme Smart will do just about everything I need without the app and the brew ID is absolutely fantastic. So if you are in the market for a Keurig, a single-serve coffee maker, I recommend this, this particular one. It is $156, but you don't have to get it because the K Supreme with the brew ID you can also get without the smart technology for a little bit less. It looks like I think there's $117, I think is one price on there, but check those out. So that is that. 

20:30
And then one last thing that I wanted to put a link to. Let me find it in my thing here. So this, this actually seemed pretty weird. At first. I thought it was an LED light that I would use for podcasting but turns out this is an LED light bar. It is a 52 inch curved bar with off road lights and LED pod fog lights with wiring harness for Jeep, chuck Polaris, ATV, UTV, boat light bar. So I was kind of taken aback when I saw this. This looked. You know, obviously, if you do custom lighting for your Jeep or your boat, this would be the thing. It is 30,000 lumens or 300 watts, so this probably is for the annoying Jeepster that wants to blind people on the road. So there you have it, folks. 

21:45
So those are the types of things that you can use to support the show. 

21:49
Head over to the show notes for this episode and click these and check them out. 

21:56
Save the link for the Amazon store Anytime you make a purchase. Use that link and we'll get a little bit back to support the show. And because SuperOps I mentioned is our newest sponsor, I don't know that I've taken the time to point you to the website. I'll put a straight link in the show notes to this, but it's also on the sponsor page on the website. They've given me a link where you can go to sign up for a trial. The trial is for 21 days, completely free, and you would get access to the complete suite of MSP tools that they offer PSA, RMM, the new network monitoring that they've just added but you can also do your contract management and your IT documentation there. So if you are looking for a platform to run your managed service business and have the benefit of both PSA, RMM, along with other additional features like your documentation. Give SuperOps a check and use my link and get your 21 days free trial. 

23:15
All right, that's it. I told you this was going to be a quick show and, just checking my notes here, we listed all the juniors, we talked about my CJ story, I've got the Amazon links, SuperOps and, of course, if you want to not only give any feedback on junior, but just want to give me any feedback on the show, email or message us from the website. That's going to do it, folks. Have yourselves a good weekend. We'll see you next week. We've got a live show on Wednesday featuring Eric from All Things MSP and we'll talk about his Facebook group, his community and all that is going on there. So we'll see you soon, folks. I've got to start editing the show. We'll see you soon, folks. Until next time, Holla!