Capstone: a day on the help desk

This final lesson brings the whole course together. It follows Jordan through one busy Saturday, the first day Sam has left him in charge of Ridgeline's IT support on his own, with Sam reachable by phone for anything serious. Each ticket draws on earlier lessons: hardware, operating systems, files and backups, connections, the troubleshooting method, software and malware, and professional practice. Read each one and decide what you would do before reading Jordan's approach. At the end you will find a review of the course and the skills to carry into the rest of the IT program.

Morning: setting up for the day

Jordan arrives at 7:30, half an hour before the cafe opens. Sam taught him to start every shift with a short routine rather than waiting for problems to arrive. He checks the overnight backup report from OFFICE-NAS, which shows that every job succeeded and the cloud copy finished at 2:14 a.m. He checks the UPS status page, which reports a healthy battery. He glances at the service status pages for the point-of-sale provider, the online shop platform and Microsoft 365, which all show normal operation. Then he opens the ticket queue, where three tickets came in overnight and Friday afternoon.

The priorities come straight from Ridgeline's matrix in lesson 8. The card reader affects every card payment at the busiest time of the week, so it comes first. Jordan reorders the queue accordingly and sets out to the counter with a fully charged spare reader in his pocket, because Sam taught him that the fastest fix for a critical problem is often a workaround that restores the service while the real cause is investigated.

MATRIX = {("high", "high"): 1, ("high", "medium"): 2, ("high", "low"): 3,
          ("medium", "high"): 2, ("medium", "medium"): 3, ("medium", "low"): 4,
          ("low", "high"): 3, ("low", "medium"): 4, ("low", "low"): 4}
queue = [
    ("HD-2103", "Pop-up says the computer is infected", "low", "high"),
    ("HD-2101", "CAFE-POS1 card reader keeps disconnecting", "high", "high"),
    ("HD-2104", "ROAST-LT battery runs out quickly", "low", "low"),
    ("HD-2102", "Label printer misaligned", "medium", "high"),
]
queue.sort(key=lambda t: MATRIX[(t[2], t[3])])
for number, summary, impact, urgency in queue:
    print(f"P{MATRIX[(impact, urgency)]}  {number}  {summary}")

P1  HD-2101  CAFE-POS1 card reader keeps disconnecting
P2  HD-2102  Label printer misaligned
P3  HD-2103  Pop-up says the computer is infected
P4  HD-2104  ROAST-LT battery runs out quickly

8:05 a.m. HD-2101: the card reader

The first customers are already in line. Mei explains that the reader on CAFE-POS1 has disconnected three times since Friday afternoon, each time needing to be re-paired, and that the reader on CAFE-POS2 is fine. Jordan swaps in the spare reader, pairs it with CAFE-POS1 and asks Mei to run the next payment, which goes through. Service restored, he turns to the cause while the cafe keeps trading on the spare.

Identifying the problem: only one reader is affected, and the disconnections began on Friday afternoon. Asked what changed, Mei remembers that a delivery of new menu boards was installed on Friday, including a small wireless speaker for background music, placed on the shelf right behind CAFE-POS1. Theory: interference or a pairing conflict from the new Bluetooth speaker, or a failing battery in the reader. Testing: the original reader's battery reads 96 in 100. Jordan checks the speaker and finds it was paired from CAFE-POS1 by the installer to test it, and the tablet keeps switching its Bluetooth attention between the two devices.

The fix: remove the speaker's pairing from CAFE-POS1, pair the speaker instead with the music phone that Mei uses for the playlist, and move the speaker off the shelf directly behind the tablet. Verifying: the original reader stays connected for the rest of the morning, so Jordan swaps it back in and returns the spare to its charger. Documenting: the ticket records the symptom, the cause, a speaker paired to the point-of-sale tablet, and the fix, and Jordan adds a line to the counter equipment notes: nothing else is ever paired with the POS tablets.

9:20 a.m. HD-2102: the label printer

Theo's first shipping batch of the day comes out wrong: each label prints partly across the gap onto the next label. The printer itself works and the text is sharp, so the print mechanism and driver are basically fine; this is an output configuration problem. Jordan asks what changed. Theo loaded a new roll of labels from a different supplier on Friday. The new labels are the same four by six inch size, but the gaps between them are slightly wider, and the printer is still calibrated for the old roll.

Thermal label printers detect the gaps between labels with a sensor and must be calibrated when the label stock changes. Jordan runs the printer's calibration routine, holding the feed button until it feeds a few labels and measures the gaps, then prints a test label from the shipping software, which lands perfectly. He checks one more thing: the label size in the printer driver's preferences is still four by six inches. Verifying with Theo, the next ten labels print correctly. Preventive measure: Jordan writes a short knowledge base article titled Recalibrate the label printer after changing label rolls and tapes a printed copy inside the printer cover.

day = [
    {"number": "HD-2101", "category": "hardware", "minutes": 35},
    {"number": "HD-2102", "category": "printing", "minutes": 20},
    {"number": "HD-2103", "category": "security", "minutes": 40},
    {"number": "HD-2104", "category": "hardware", "minutes": 10},
]

def summary(tickets):
    return {"count": 0, "minutes": 0, "by_category": {}}

print(summary(day))

10:45 a.m. HD-2103: the scary pop-up

Anita, who came in to catch up on bookkeeping, sent the ticket at 10:40 with a photo from her phone: a full-screen browser page with flashing red text claiming that OFFICE-01 is infected and that she must call a support number immediately, with a fake countdown timer and a loud alarm sound. She has not called the number and has not clicked anything. Jordan recognizes it from his course work as a tech support scam: a web page, usually reached through a malicious advertisement, designed to frighten users into calling scammers who then ask for remote access and payment.

He follows the method rather than assuming. Identifying: the page appeared while Anita was searching for a supplier's website and clicked a sponsored result. The browser is in full-screen mode, which makes it look like a system message. Theory: a scam web page, not an actual infection; possible but less likely, a malicious extension or adware. Testing: pressing F11 leaves full-screen mode and shows that it is just a browser tab; closing the browser through Task Manager ends it. Reopening the browser shows no unknown extensions, and the browser's history confirms the page came from an advertisement on a search results page.

Even though the evidence points to a scam page only, Jordan runs a full Microsoft Defender scan, which finds nothing, checks the browser's settings and startup items, and confirms that no remote access software was installed. Because the user did not call or enter anything, there is nothing to change. Verifying: the browser and accounting software work normally. Educating, the step that matters most here: Jordan thanks Anita for reporting it rather than calling the number, and explains that real security warnings never ask you to phone a number, that Microsoft does not contact people this way, and that sponsored search results are worth skipping for supplier sites. He writes up the ticket, including the advertisement's address, and Sam later adds the scam domain to the network's web filter.

1:30 p.m. HD-2104: Kai's battery

After the lunch rush, Jordan turns to the lowest-priority ticket. Kai reports that ROAST-LT lasts only about two hours away from the dock, compared with most of a working day when it was new. Jordan generates a Windows battery report, which shows a design capacity of 54 watt-hours and a full-charge capacity of 31 watt-hours: the battery holds 57 in 100 of its original charge. The usage history shows the laptop spends most nights on the dock at full charge in the warm roasting room, which is exactly what wears lithium-ion batteries fastest.

This is not a fault to fix today but a part to replace and a habit to change. Jordan checks the inventory: the laptop is two and a half years old, out of warranty, and its battery is a replaceable internal part. He raises a request for Sam to order the correct battery, switches on the laptop's firmware setting that limits charging to 80 in 100 when docked, and suggests Kai keep the laptop on the office dock overnight rather than in the roasting room. Documenting: the ticket records the battery report figures, so the replacement can be justified to Rosa and the next battery's ageing can be compared.

TARGET = {1: 15, 2: 60, 3: 240, 4: 2880}
week = [("HD-2101", 1, 5), ("HD-2102", 2, 55), ("HD-2103", 3, 5), ("HD-2108", 1, 40)]

def late_tickets(tickets):
    return []

print(late_tickets(week))

The tests for that exercise use their own lists of tickets as well as the one on screen, including a ticket exactly on its target. Testing a function with data you control, especially at the boundaries where a less-than should have been a less-than-or-equal, is a habit worth carrying into every script you write for a help desk.

Late afternoon: wrapping up

At four o'clock Jordan does the closing routine Sam taught him. He confirms every ticket is updated and closed with clear notes, or left open with a note saying what happens next. He checks that the spare card reader is back on its charger, that the label printer's knowledge base article is in the shared folder, and that the battery order request reached Sam. He sends Sam a short end-of-day summary, generated from the ticket data and checked by hand, listing the tickets, the causes and the follow-ups.

Looking back, none of the day's tickets needed deep technical wizardry. What made the day go smoothly was method: a morning routine that caught problems early, priorities that put the most important problem first, a workaround that kept the business trading, careful questions that found the real causes, one change at a time, verification with the user, and notes clear enough that Sam could follow every decision from home. That is what good IT support looks like at any scale, from a coffee roaster to a hospital.

Course review

From here, the IT program branches out. NET-103 takes you into Linux administration and NET-105 into Windows Server and Active Directory. NET-110 develops the networking basics of lesson 7 into a full understanding of how networks work. CYB-101 builds on lessons 10 and 11 to cover security fundamentals, and ITSM-201 turns the ticket handling of lessons 8 and 12 into professional service desk practice. If you are working toward CompTIA A+, this course covers the foundations of both exams; the A+ prep program adds exam-focused review and practice.