I am Bob Williams, I’m retired from the Kansas Association of Osteopathic Medicine. I was there for about a decade. I inherited Jeff from the previous executive director. Primarily Jeff’s responsibility then was at our meetings to deal with the electronics. Audio visual has become much more complicated than previously. It’s no longer overhead projectors and slide carousels.
We were a small office, 2 staff people. It was taking a lot of time for us to do that plus everything else. So, we continued to use Jeff and as it progressed, he was so effective at it that we just turned everything over to Jeff in terms of the electronics and whatever he needed to do to make it function.
So, we ended up, speakers who were willing, would send us their presentations in advance. Jeff would download them to his system so when the speaker walked in, all Jeff would have to do is mic them up and explain the situation and they moved on. Which saved so much time in the meeting.
In addition to that, because he was at every meeting the members got to know him as well. You know, he was just part of staff as far as they were concerned.
This included the receptions, and they would talk to him and would say “Thanks”. It was nice and a great involvement.
The other thing of Jeff is he is so patient. I have a tendancy to get intense sometimes, but when things weren’t working. But sometimes they would bring their own computers, and it didn’t match this or that. Jeff was just able to figure it out very calmly, kept everybody calm and moved forward.
Jeff stayed in the meeting room the entire time, at his post at the very front of the meeting room. The only time he really left was when the videos got so graphic in terms of surgery or illnesses that he would get up and leave. I would get up and leave because they were sometimes just … I’m not a doctor, never wanted to be a doctor, that was the only time, though.
He stayed in the room the entire time, and would come out every now and then to get a snack, but that made so much sense to us.
Then, we began to use him for our office work, on our computers. If our computers were down, or we were having problems with it, we would call Jeff up on the phone. He was very responsive even when he would leave his work and come over and help us out and figure out what was going on with the computers.
But it wasn’t just that, he was able to figure out when we were having router problems, or WiFi problems, connecting the whole system up in the basement. The wiring was unbelievable, as I think about it, he re-did all of that and put it up on a board for us, so it wasn’t quite so confusing.
And he redesigned our website for us, made it more user friendly. Made it so the staff could update it on their own. And then he could make signs. We used him to make a lot of signs for our meetings.
One thing about Jeff, is that he was able to explain situations to us, and problems in very user friendly ways we could understand it. And again, he was so calm through the whole process. He would allow us to work through it.
