I anticipated using whatever new toy I bought for six to twelve months. That was an act of serendipity. The little box enables me to manage the cost of my output effectively. I cut down on the cost by limiting the time I need to research solutions to problems. Reducing the amount of time I spend on a problem lessens my customers cost of doing business.
Time is money, and there is a finite amount of both to accomplish any particular task.
Those minutes I shave off resolving a problem are minutes that reduce the overall cost of my customers products. I am part of the technical support staff that services the small-computer needs of approximately 4,000 PCs and a dozen or so NetWare and Windows NT servers. The boon and bane of small computer technical support are multiple standards for small computers. Every customer expects me to know or be familiar with every standard that applies to his or her unique computing environment. In the previous six months I resolved problems with three different network clients, five telnet applications, three asynchronous communication applications, three operating systems, five operating system environments, two business application suites, four different types of print servers, and two significantly different types of file servers.