Posted: October 23, 2017

100,000 is a lot of somethings. 100,000 days ago it was 1744 and the USA was still a colony. 100,000 calories is 14 gallons of PSU Creamery Death By Chocolate ice cream, or 177 Big Mac sandwiches. If you bought 100,000 Agronomy Guides and laid them end to end you could make an 8.5 inch wide path from Independence Hall to the King of Prussia Mall (and would have to spend 3.5 million dollars…). 100,000 miles is nearly half-way to the moon.

When you contact Ag IT for help, we create a 'ticket' in our management tool, FootPrints. This helps us to track your request, and acts as a troubleshooting tool for us to look backwards in previous contacts for similar issues. We began using Footprints in September, 2003, and sometime this month we expect to open our 100,000th Footprints ticket.

When we started using FootPrints our first ticket was using data analysis with Excel 2002 (thanks to Jacki Weikert for taking the first ticket and solving it!). FootPrints watched the rise and fall of Palm Pilot, Dell Axim, BlackBerry, Meeting Maker, Eudora, and FreePPP. The first iPhone was released on 6/29/07….and our first request for information about iPhone configurations for email came two days before release, on 6/27/07!

Ticket 4900 warned of the harmful impact of computer viruses and reminded everyone to update their virus definitions. The user behind ticket 6283 in 2004 was getting too much spam. In 2005, ticket 8029 asked if we could find a faster Internet connection for a county office. Although we have made huge leaps and bounds in technology, ticket 100,000 in 2017 could be related to a virus, to spam or to network speed!

Our first ticket was handled by Jacki Weikert in 2003. Tom Weber handled number 25,000 in 2007. Vince Verbeke closed ticket 50,000 in 2011 and Tim Stetser closed the 75,000th ticket in 2014.

Now we are on Ticket-Watch! We were all set to order the balloons and have the confetti cannons and Blue Band on standby to celebrate our 100,000th customer….but that doesn't work so well for us since most of you arrive here electronically. So Plan B is in place - the lucky person who becomes ticket 100,000 will receive a place in Ag IT history; honor and salutations in perpetuity; and, most importantly, a $50 gift card to the Penn State Creamery, provided by our Sponsor and Sr. Associate Dean, Dr. Steve Loerch!

We've been pleased to work with all of you over fourteen years to resolve these 100,000 troubles. It has been a fun ride for us, and we look forward to the next 100,000!

Information Technologies

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401 Ag Administration Building
State College, PA 16802