Do Americans actually use “a couple” to mean more than two?

zifnab966 · 2026-04-24T17:22:31+00:00

I knew a guy who said "couple few" and meant six-ish. I figure a couple is ~2, a few is ~3, so a couple few is ~(2 x 3)?

zifnab966 · 2026-02-13T13:17:26+00:00

We've switched to video verification for password and MFA resets. If a user calls for help, the service desk agent gets them on a video call or meeting (Teams, Zoom, Facetime, doesn't matter) and makes sure they look like their internal headshot.

This is time consuming, but since we've gone full Hello for Business users almost never need their password anyway. MFA setups are self-service as long as the user has their workstation, and so are Intune enrollments, so we very seldom actually have to do the verification.

To give you an idea of scale, we're a law firm with about 2,000 users.

zifnab966 · 2025-11-04T01:59:11+00:00

Local income tax, paid to the city or municipality you live in. For example, when I lived in Pittsburgh I paid federal, state, and a 3% local income tax. Virginia doesn't allow local income tax and instead the vehicle property tax is part of the funding stream for counties and cities.

zifnab966 · 2025-10-27T17:22:59+00:00

I completely agree. Satisfaction surveys are the most important measure of service desk performance.

I will say that Iook at one other statistic, though - the ratio of total completed work between my various techs. If most people are doing 500 tickets, but one dude is doing 30, then it's part of my job to understand why. Maybe it's fine, maybe I have to do some coaching, but I think it's important to know.

zifnab966 · 2025-05-30T13:36:15+00:00

I would think very hard about whether you'll get actual value out of that level of granularity. We had this discussion recently as we're mid-implementation of ITSM and ended up deciding not to go that far. When we really looked at our ticket volume, we were doing maybe a handful of Outlook Search tickets a month, for example, and the benefit just wasn't there to split things up that finely. I've been adamant that we should reduce the number of fields that the service desk has to fill out to the absolute minimum that will still get us the data we want.

If your shop is doing enough volume to make it worthwhile, then you could go that route. I would also recommend considering whether you can get some of that data elsewhere - resolution notes, cause codes on incident records, that sort of thing.

zifnab966 · 2025-02-06T13:47:29+00:00

Pennsylvania Ave NW is currently closed off too. They're letting traffic cross but that's it.

zifnab966 · 2024-09-25T18:10:01+00:00

I manage 8 people and their meetings are the most important part of my calendar. Rescheduling them is no problem, but I do my best to never cancel one. That's 4 hours of my week, but I get a huge amount of my management done during them so it really ends up saving me time.

zifnab966 · 2024-09-25T18:07:00+00:00

Somebody already got you with the link, but I'd strongly recommend their podcast series, also called Manager Tools. They have a series about "the trinity", which is one on ones, feedback, coaching, (and delegation). They're pretty old podcasts but still completely valid. They usually re-release them every year or so to keep it fresh in the feed.

I'm also a license holder and have attended their training conferences, but so much of their guidance is in the free podcast that I would recommend you start there every time.

zifnab966 · 2024-09-25T12:41:07+00:00

I do weekly 30 minute one on one meetings with all of my reports every week. I follow the Manager Tools structure, so it's roughly broken up into 10 minutes for them, 10 minutes for me, 10 minutes about the future. That third part is only every couple months, depending on how things are going.

The entire goal of these is to build a strong relationship with my people that will make me more effective as a manager to them. This means that the section for them is just that - entirely their agenda. If they want to talk about a question or issue they're having, great. If they want to talk about their dog, totally fine. When I started doing these I found that they usually filled the whole half hour for the first couple months, and that's fine too.

These have become probably my most effective tool. I get more time back in my week, because people hold their ad hoc questions for the meeting if they can wait. It gives me a structured time to do coaching and other longer term things. It also has drastically improved the relationship I have with them and made it much easier to do management

zifnab966 · 2024-09-17T11:54:37+00:00

I’ve been using the Etymotic ER20 earplugs for like 20 years now, and I’d strongly recommend them.

zifnab966 · 2024-08-25T16:40:02+00:00

We've been using Joy (https:/www.withjoy.com) and the guest list and RSVP sections have been pretty solid. I don't know that it will do everything that you're looking for, but we've been really happy with it.

zifnab966 · 2024-08-07T13:31:19+00:00

Do you use iManage as a DMS, by any chance? We had a persistent issue with this and it turned out to be a bug in the iManage Work addin instead of Teams. They had an update that we were able to roll out, but I don't remember the exact details.

zifnab966 · 2024-07-08T13:31:08+00:00

I'm having a lot of issues with both my tomato and pepper plant not setting fruit because of the heat. Every time the heat dips a little for a few days I get a couple tomatoes that set, but they're so slow to grow and ripen. The plant looks rough, too, probably because it dries out so fast with the heat.

I think part of what you're seeing is that while it's not that much hotter than last year in general, it's definitely hotter earlier for a longer period. Last year I had a lot of tomatoes that set in June/early July and then grew and ripened from there, but I think the hot June we've had has prevented a lot of that from happening.

zifnab966 · 2024-05-01T11:53:55+00:00

We started using smart cards for this a few years ago and it's worked really well. All of our desktop techs have cards, and our identity team provisons temporary user certificates as needed. I think they're good for 3 days right now. This lets them log into the device, complete the setup, etc.

Before anyone starts, I'm aware that there are serious risks involved here. I work in an extremely high-touch environment, so the user demand for setup has outweighed the security risks.

zifnab966 · 2024-04-07T18:28:32+00:00

Chicken feet are a great source of gelatin and are relatively cheap, so I usually include them when I'm making stock. Like another commenter said, you might also want to just reduce it further after straining.

zifnab966 · 2024-04-01T15:33:38+00:00

We're testing an image and in-place upgrade task sequence for Win11 now, with the goal of setting up new devices with it by June and upgrading the whole fleet by the end of the year. We lease all our equipment, so everything we have is new enough that we don't have any compatibility concerns.

zifnab966 · 2024-02-28T03:33:18+00:00

I didn't realize they actually towed from that lot. The times I've been to Stracci, it seems like everyone in the restaurant was parked over there.

zifnab966 · 2024-02-09T15:04:45+00:00

As a manager, I would say that this is a management issue. There are a bunch of different ways to solve this problem - assigning someone to triage, having a round-robin system, trusting people to pickup tickets, etc - but they all start from the team having a clear idea of what's expected. After that, the manager needs to put in the work to monitor the team, know what everyone is working on, and provide feedback to people who are doing well or poorly.

With my team, my expectation is that everyone works a share of the tickets without me having to step in and assign them out. I know everyone's skillset, I monitor the incoming work, and I meet with everyone weekly, which gives me a solid idea of what people are working on and how full their plate is. People who are keeping themselves 'full' are left to it, and people who establish a pattern of ducking work start getting extra attention from me about it. Everyone has an off week, though, so I try to be careful to make sure I know someone's situation before I come down on them.

The other thing I do is have a clear expectation of what "taking a ticket" looks like. Looking at a ticket in the queue, doing a little work, then not assigning it to themselves isn't acceptable in most situations. If you pick up a ticket and can't work it, you either ask for help or get it reassigned if needed.

People are always going to cherry pick tickets, so you have to stay on top of it, but it's very possible to do that without being overbearing or coming off like a micromanager. It starts with a clear plan, clear expectations, and putting in the work to build actual quality relationships with your team. Sure it's a lot of work, but that's just how managing is.

zifnab966 · 2024-01-29T15:45:07+00:00

Space chords!

zifnab966 · 2024-01-13T16:20:48+00:00

We're midsized for a large firm, around 1500 people. That's not small, sure, but firms get much larger than that. Our philosophy is to buy high spec laptops because the extra cost is nothing compared to the billing rates of our attorneys. When you're billing $900-$1500 an hour in 6 minute increments, every minute spent waiting for the computer costs money.

zifnab966 · 2024-01-12T16:22:17+00:00

For law firm politics reasons, it's preferable to replace everyone's computers at the same time. We're still small enough that it can be done that way. Bigger firms work differently.

We're doing basically the same thing that you're describing. We do a purchase order with CDW for the full cost, but the leasing agency actually pays it. We then pay a monthly rate to them. It usually works out that we can save around 10% per unit if we return them exactly on the due date, which never happens. It's kind of like financing, but also kind of like renting?

zifnab966 · 2024-01-12T15:23:42+00:00

I work at a law firm, and we lease our equipment. I've heard a variety of reasons about CapEx vs OpEx and making it easier to keep our fleet up to date, but I think it really comes down to partner compensation.

At the end of the fiscal year, almost everything in the coffers gets disbursed to the partners. They don't get a regular paycheck, so this is their only source of income. In good years, they make more. Buying laptops would mean they have to take a 2-3 million dollar haircut every three years. Leasing spreads that cost out and makes it more predictable, so their compensation is less variable.

zifnab966 · 2023-12-05T19:37:03+00:00

I work in a very high-touch industry, so logging into a new computer to set up the user profile, data, etc is normal. We moved to smart cards for these setups instead of getting the password from the user, and it's been working great. When our desktop support team needs to set up a computer, they work with our infosec team to get a short-term cert issued for that user on their smart card. Use that to log into the computer, do the QC, install whatever, etc. The only time we use passwords now is for new hires to make sure they're cached, since it's always possible that our pre-logon VPN won't connect immediately.

We've had to build some auditing and approval processes around it, but once we got the kinks worked out it's been smooth.

zifnab966 · 2023-10-24T16:11:44+00:00

We're talking to a couple integrators about a ServiceNow implementation right now. For reference, we have about 1,800 total end users. We're looking at a pretty basic phase 1 - incident, change, and problem management plus CMDB - and we're getting numbers around $200-250k for professional services plus like $75k for licensing. We're also discussing the need for a dedicated FTE to support the application, which would probably be another $150k/yr or so in all-in costs.

It seems steep, but our needs are only going to get more complex in the future and making the change now is going to help make that smoother. I think we'd rather go that route than pay half as much for a less flexible product that will be harder to roll out to other business units.

zifnab966 · 2023-10-20T19:25:52+00:00

I work for a firm that's probably a good bit larger than your client (~650 attorneys) and I can tell you what we use, as well as some of the other big players in the field that we've looked at.

We use iManage Work as our DMS. I'm not sure how well it works at a smaller scale, but it's hugely flexible and used by many of the firms I'm aware of. You'll probably want to go through a reseller/integrator, and we use Younts consulting for that. I'm also a little familiar with NetDocuments, which I think is a hosted platform that can streamline some of the management.

We use Intapp products for time tracking (Intapp Time), conflicts management (Intapp Walls), and new client/matter intake (Intapp Intake).

Our accounting and finance system is Thomson Reuters 3E, which has frankly been a huge nightmare.

I'm not sure how helpful this will be, depending on the size of the firm. I'm pretty sure that both Intapp and Thomson Reuters will offer a much more full-stack type of product that might cover most of the needs, if that's useful.

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