Florence ITgales

In my current job I work in earshot of an IT suport team. Forget nurses, firemen and Battersea Dogs Home volunteers - these are the true heroes of the modern age. Beyond the "have you tried turning it on and off?" cliches, the patience with which they manage the daily slew of mundane problems presented as potentially career-ending disasters is unbelievable.

Recent critical issues which have had me running the short distance across the office to their wire-strewn triage area, whimpering all the way, include:

• Paper jam in the printer
• I've forgotten my password so many times I've been locked out of my computer
• The page numbering on my Word document's gone really weird
• Paper jam in the other printer
• I've poured a cup of tea into my keyboard and now it's fizzing

In each case they dry my tears on a discarded Excel doc, stroll to my computer with the unhurried air of someone who has seen this exact problem literally hundreds of times before, and sort it out in seconds while I hop from one foot to the other behind them, biting my nails and squeaking. Most importantly, at no point do they make me feel like the techno-moron that I so plainly am.

But in terms of pecking order, I'm so low down that I barely have a beak. They really earn their money when dealing with insane requests from senior types of a certain age who tend to: not understand technology; not want to understand technology; lose things like Blackberries easily and often; and consider delay of any kind for any reason completely intolerable.

At my last company I asked the IT manager what the most idiotic problem he'd been faced with was. He told me that he took a call from an extremely important and short-tempered person in an absolute fury - his mouse had stopped working overnight. "It's a disgrace, I've got an extremely ugent blah that needs to be done in an hour, get your useless arse over here this instant" and so on.

So the IT chap went over to the empurpled exec's desk in the open plan office to find him furiously tapping and rolling an apparently dead mouse. This was because he'd grabbed the mouse that was connected to the vacant computer next to his. To diagnose this would have publically shamed the exec in the eyes of all those in the vicinity - not likely to improve the career prospects of a young computer specialist. So what did this noble fellow do? He apologised profusely, announced that the central circuitry of the mouse had suffered a fatal combustion, and advised that the exec get a coffee while he found a replacement. When the coast was clear he put the 'dead' mouse back on its original mat and retrieved the correct one from underneath a pile of papers. The exec completed his dull whatever in time and with his public standing unblemished.

IT folk - you are the best of us. Keep up the good work. And ohmygod ohmygod the printer's out of magenta toner and I've got to get this presentation printed by PLEASE HELP ME YOU'VE GO TO HELP ME!