You learn something new every day and it feels good to help someone do that, especially when they show appreciation for it.

Check out this sweet exchange between a developer and a pharmacist.

The small joy of hotkeys.

I’m a developer and don’t manage our hospital’s SharePoint system, but I know enough about it that I sometimes get roped in to assist when the actual manager is busy or on leave.

I took a ticket from a pharmacist who said the SharePoint list they used to triage out-of-hours medicine requests wasn’t updating.

Seems to be an easy fix.

I take a look and see that one of the automated processes has had the auth token expire; I take the service principal and update it and it starts running again.

I contact the old fella who filed the ticket and tell them to refresh the page to check for themselves. It goes as follows:

Me: “Alright, have a go at refreshing the page.”

Pharmacist: “Okay”, followed by a good 20 seconds of silence.

Me: “Are you able to see the updated items?”

Pharmacist: “Sorry, I normally use Chrome but the last person to use the computer opened the page in Safari and I don’t know where the refresh button is.”

It turns into a conundrum for both of them.

I don’t use Safari so I didn’t know where the button was either. If we were screen sharing I might’ve seen it, but I contacted him on the landline since not all workstations have a microphone.

Me: “Say, do you have the keyboard in front of you?”

Pharmacist: “Yes, this station has a keyboard.”

Me: “Most browsers use f5 as a refresh hotkey, try that.”

Pharmacist: “WOW, that worked, and the list has refreshed!”

Me: “Fantastic, anything else you needed?”

Pharmacist : “No, but thanks for the tip about f5, I’ll remember that.”

The appreciation was appreciated and refreshing!

That call actually elevated my day.

Sometimes it’s the small things that feel the most helpful, especially because I spent the rest of the day having to tell people filing T3 requests that we were in a change freeze and that they’d have to wait.

Here is what folks are saying.

I like the name!

LOL not surprised at all.

This is great!

Macs are awesome. Maybe Apple gave them a good deal for the licenses.

Oooh this is a good one.

I need to memorize more keyword shortcuts.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.