3DPO has spent the bulk of his time performing tasks related to behind the scenes functions in the Fabrication Lab, or helping to clean and sweep, or even the random construction project. He has blogged about all of these before. He had also been on some field trips with various Dankmeyer staff members when they went away to attend various classes. It wasn't long ago he asked for some information on the Check In station and everything involved in that.
Not office equipment.
He was helping to deliver packages to Nancy Lee, System Administrator, when he realized how little he knew about equipment that wasn't in the Lab. He was very familiar with screwdrivers and such - he even kept his own set of tools in the back - but he really didn't know a lot about all the other equipment everyone else used. Other than helping Adrienne use the coffee machine one day, taking his turn at kitchen refrigerator cleanup, and helping Heather vacuum at the Cumberland Office, he wasn't familiar with other office equipment.
When he asked, Nancy advised him that those items weren't really considered office equipment. What he wanted to know more about were the kinds of things that were in every medical provider's office - computers, and phones, copiers, scanners, the display board in the waiting area, signature pads and those kinds of things. These were tools that didn't build things - they were all more like organizing and documenting tools, and communication devices. But my goodness the things everyone did with them! The IT team was responsible for installing and maintaining much of this equipment and the software that went with it in some cases.
But Nancy and Becky (Snell, IT & Marketing Director), also performed support roles in addition to traditional IT tasks. Training users in using different kinds of software, creating forms and collecting data, creating material for the display board, flyers, name badges, assembling the Dankmeyer newsletters, website content and social media (along with one of 3DPO's favorite people and mentor, Art Ross), were just a few things they did. Nancy took some time to give him an office equipment tour - just to see how he sized up compared to it all. Needless to say, in most cases, he was a "bit" smaller than most of it. Becky and Nancy explained that was a pun - because a bit is a computer term for the smallest unit of data used in computers and digital communications. 3DPO remembered a line from one of his favorite TV characters, to which he had a passing resemblance, the robot from Lost in Space - That does not compute! But, really, the whole bit did if you thought about it.
