As an IT professional, you may find yourself anywhere from a customer's home, to a massive datacenter in a large company. Whether you're on your own throughout the day, or working with a team, the ultimate objective is to provide a service for your customer. Business dress can be anything from a company uniform, to jeans and t-shirts. Whether business casual, or holy jeans and flip flips, professionalism in how you treat your customer is still your priority.

Who is the customer? Well if you're in someone's home, that's obvious. If you work in a tech center, datacenter, or on the phones at a helpdesk, your customer can vary from your co-workers, other departments, or the person on the phone. Every company has standards for professionalism, or something called an SLA (service level agreements). These are things that set a minimum standard for customer support. Some SLAs could be that your customer receive a callback within 1 hour if you have to research something. Others can include turn-around times for repair, cost, or equipment delivery if theirs can't be quickly fixed.

There are many expectations of you as an IT support person. Things like being punctual, professional, not being on your cell phone (whether calls or texts), and not chatting with coworkers in front of a customer. Unless you're researching or escalating an issue, your customer is your primary focus.

For this week's discussion, I'd like you to put yourself into the place of an IT professional in the following scenario. From your reading, you should have some idea of the expectations you would work under, so this is your opportunity to read or research what a company would expect of you as a field technician. Think about job requirements, dress code, skills, and whatever else you should consider as an IT professional.

1) You're in a SOHO office. It is roughly 60 miles from your shop. The customer has a computer that won't boot, and you suspect that it has a dead hard drive. You've left your power supply tester, and a spare hard drive back at your office. You have your regular tools, various flash drives that contain various Operating Systems and data recovery tools. You also have a company-issued cell phone, laptop, and expense card.

The customer is furious because he's been down for 24 hours and he's concerned that he's losing money from his online stock trading. You know that it will be a minimum of 2 hours round trip to return, and you will him that this is the minimum turn-around along with service time. He continues to rant about what he was promised when he bought the computer and that his SLA included a 12hr resolution to any hardware issues, which has now passed.

Q : How would you handle this situation? What options could you consider? What things should you communicate to him? Feel free to give your professional opinion. You must outline a plan of how you will assess the issue with the computer, communication, and your plan for resolution.