QUESTION:  
What questions do people ask you at the help desk or  
the hotseat?  What is a hotseat? Who asks the questions? 

ANSWER from Lisa Sherbert on June 10, 1996:
We get all kinds of HST-related questions at our Help Desk.  Mostly
people who are trying to understand the data they got from one of the
HST instruments will send us questions.  Either they are not quite sure
how to read the computer files, or they are not quite sure if they need
to recalibrate (which means to take the instrumental effects out of the
data so that the numbers relate just to the object they looked at.)

Many times people are looking for documentation:  either reports
written by the scientists, or handbooks that will help them propose to
use a certain instrument, or handbooks that will help them understand
their data.

Many of the questions come from people who work where I do, the Space
Telescope Science Institute.  The large majority of our questions are
from people using the software we support, called STSDAS.  We pronounce
that S-T-S DAS and it stands for Space Telescope Science Data Analysis
System.  Sometimes people have trouble putting the software on their
computer (installing); or they might have trouble using a certain task
which is a program that runs in the STSDAS environment.  Sometimes they
aren't using a task correctly, but other times they have found a bug, a
problem which makes the task not work correctly.  Sometimes I can
answer their questions based on my experience using STSDAS; but many
times I have to pass the question on to a programmer who writes tasks.

Other times we get questions from a student working on a project and
they want to know the answer to a question.  Unfortunately, that is not
what our Help Desk was designed for and we may refer them to a
librarian who can help them find the information they seek.

What is a hotseat?.  
I guess it is called a 'hotseat' because whomever is sitting in the "seat"
has to "jump up" and answer (or forward) whatever questions come in.
No sooner do you "sit" in the "seat" than you are "jumping" to 
answer the questions.

- Lisa E. Sherbert