Jermiah Robinson
November 25th, 2025
Old Dominion University – IT Help Desk
CYSE 368 – 15101
As I reached the 300-hour mark of my internship and can now review my full 300-hour time with my job at the IT Help Desk completely, I have learned a lot more about myself and what potential I have as a leader and how I can apply problem solving to my job. With how many responsibilities I have as a Student Lead, time management becomes a very important skill to have when things start to get rough at the Help Desk, especially when a person starts to get upset after some unfortunate news.
During one of my shifts, a very angry user reached out to the Help Desk about their account not working for their email. Since the user is no longer a student at Old Dominion University and three semesters have passed, resulting in the account and service deletion. The moment the user heard that, I heard very loud yelling from my desk through the employee’s headset. The user went completely ballistic, even threatening to sue the University for deleting her account. Without any hesitation, I stopped doing my tasks with Guest tickets, and I went up to the employee and asked if I could have the headset for myself so I could chat with them. Even without putting it on, the user was demanding a supervisor or higher up to get in contact about this issue. The user immediately started to cool off after hearing my voice and letting them know exactly what happened. While the user was still upset tat the account deletion, I informed her what they could really do at this point and that an incident with our Accounts team may resolve this issue. The user, however, pressed on further. She slowly got angrier about the loss of their research data with the university and was still threatening to sue ODU still as it counted as teaching material. I quickly informed the user about our AUP policy and that further discussion of this matter could go with the Accounts team who manages the accounts within the university. The user sighed and wanted to make the ticket with our team. While I knew what would happen, which is that Accounts would inform the user of account deletion and that the data does not exist, I at the very least did my best to prevent this issue from turning into a legal matter against the university. Although, there wouldn’t really be any grounds to do a lawsuit over against the university with our AUP policy.
My next shift also had a problematic user, but for another reason. The user came in person to the Help Desk with a question regarding their laptop. I decided to take over the walk-in and had the user bring out their laptop to see what the program was. The moment the user opened their browser, a very loud blaring noise rang through the office and multiple pop-ups started to appear through the user’s notifications. I had to think quickly here to prevent our callers who were calling the help desk from hearing the sound and interrupting our troubleshooting. I quickly informed the user what was happening and went to their history on their browser and cleared it right away, along with their cache and cookies. The moment I did that, I quickly restarted the computer and was happy to see that after opening the browser, nothing was playing anymore. I apologized for suddenly taking control of the computer for the user and gave the form for them to sign, stating that we will be touching or managing the computer for a moment. Afterwards, I waved goodbye to the user after dealing with the problem. An infected notification attack can lead to panic due to improper care for security. When this happens and the user enables notifications for the website, it will abuse Window’s notifications to spam warnings about the computer having malware and will have the user download a malicious file to steal user information. By acting quick here, I was able to prevent chaos by having the loud sound play the entire time and with quick thinking, the user was able to use their computer and finish their work distraction free.
Conclusion
In my 300 hours at the Help Desk, I have learned numerous skills with my position as a Student Lead. From problem resolution to damage control to time management and many more skills, my supervisor has noted my performance with the Help Desk, and I feel like I have done a good job at the position. I even managed to score the highest with my performance in the past few months of my time here. I’m happy that I was able to fulfill the position and will be glad to work further.