Today's photo caption: The Inspiration Behind our Weekly IT Disasters 

Welcome back to Tech Service Today's IT Disaster of the Week series where we normally showcase the ugliest IT environment our technicians ran into this week. But this week’s photos are of my father, Raymond Sauer, which I’ve posted for several reasons.

The first is that my father unknowingly gave me the idea for this blog series. For years he’s called me and said: “Tim it’s your IT-disaster-of-a-father requesting your help with my computer again.” I always told him not to apologize because it actually made me proud to be able to help him, especially after all his years of helping me.

The second reason I’ve featured my father is that he asked me to. He was hospitalized last month and was connected to countless monitoring and life support machines. One night as I sat by his bed and looked at all the wires and tubes connected to him (one of which was almost directly beneath one of the wheels of his bed), I jokingly said “I should take a picture of this and make you my IT Disaster Of The Week this week.” He enthusiastically agreed saying he’d certainly earned that title and that I should really do it. But I told him it probably wasn't a good idea because, even though he thought he looked pretty good in a hospital gown, he just didn’t have the kind of legs that would draw the right audience to my blog post – a comment that gave us both a good, much-needed laugh.

But the most compelling reason I posted pictures of my father here is that he passed away last week. During his final days, my brothers and I took turns sitting by his bedside each night. On one night in particular, my father and I were reminiscing over some of the great times we’d shared in my youth, and I talked about the many life-lessons he’d taught me. It was then when I realized how a simple lesson he taught me at a young age impacted my personality so profoundly that I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this blog without learning it.

It happened after I returned home from a Boy Scout camping trip carrying the filthy pots and pans we cooked our meals in over the campfires. It was my job to clean them before our next camping trip, so I gave them a quick wash in our utility sink in the basement and set them on a beach towel to dry. My father saw them and asked about the stains all over the bottoms of the pans. I told him they always looked that way – which was the truth. But he asked “if those were your own pans, would you be happy with the condition they are in? Or would you try a little harder to get them clean?” Understanding his point, I picked up each pot and went back to work on them for hours, scouring each one until it shined.

At our next scout meeting, my dad helped me carry the pots into the building. We presented them to my Scout Master who took one confused look at them and asked why we purchased new pots. I explained that they weren’t new; I just gave the old ones a little extra elbow grease and got them clean. He was so impressed that he made an example of me to the entire troop as he talked about what it means to really take pride in your work.

It made me feel really good to see how appreciative people could be when you go above and beyond the call of duty. But the underlying lesson I learned from that experience was simply this: If you do a job the right way the first time, you won’t need to do it again. If you read back through the advice I’ve offered in every edition of our IT Disaster Of The Week series, you will find this underlying theme resonating in every post.