The three baseball-sized foil balls sitting on consultant Pete Schechner's desk are not part of a science experiment.

"I gathered up the foil because part of me feels bad throwing it away," he explains. He also created them for juggling, which he sometimes does in between calls.

Schechner, 57, knows a thing or two about juggling. During the day, he works at PC Helps as a software consultant, mostly speaking in English, and occasionally in his native language, German (he was born in Berlin, and moved to Philadelphia when he was 10). He spends the rest of his time volunteering as vice president of a suburban Philadelphia youth intramural soccer club and supervising hundreds of volunteers as chair of Philadelphia Folk Festival camping committee.

It's a lot of juggling, for sure. But all three of his hats have one requirement in common: excellent customer service skills.

Schechner began working at PC Helps three years ago. Like his fellow consultants, he helps customers archive their e-mail, create pivot tables, write formulas and everything in between.

His favorite type of call, he says, is one that enables him to connect with the customer. "I like it when people share a little bit of themselves," he says.

Volunteering for the Haverford Soccer Club requires finely tuned customer service skills as well. In his role as vice president, he helps organize 1,900 kids into 160 teams in the fall, and 700 kids into 60 teams in the spring. Their skills range from "tripping over their own feet to the next Pelé," he laughs. It's a huge responsibility for a volunteer, but he does it because he loves it.

The ultimate test of his diplomacy may come from his job as chair of the Philadelphia Folk Fest camping committee. Every August, the Old Pool Farm near Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, is taken over by music lovers of every ilk, who pitch their tents and park their caravans for a three-day celebration of traditional and contemporary music, dance, crafts and kids' activities.

His role?

"I'm sort of like the mayor of the campground," he jokes. The responsibility, which he has taken on for seven years, has him overseeing 400 to 450 volunteers and about 40 senior volunteer staffers, and includes meticulous planning in the months and weeks leading up to the event. He has worked in some capacity with the folk fest for the past 30 years.

Being unofficial mayor also means he has to hang around the campground during the fest to handle any issue that crops up, which often involves dealing with intoxicated festivalgoers. One of the more memorable challenges he faced was convincing a wandering bagpiper that 6 am was perhaps a little early for merrymaking.

More important than keeping the peace is his role as keeper of the "Folk Fest flame."

"It's my job to preserve the flavor of the campground," he says. The campground is "the refugee camp everyone wants to be in," he explains, and it's what brings people back year after year.

He sees a parallel between the folk fest and his help desk work.

"They're both customer service. [The campers are] my customers," he explains. In all of his roles - software support consultant, campground mayor, soccer coach - he is presented with problems, and must quickly find a way to deal with them.

Which brings us back to the foil balls on his desk. He mentions comedian WC Fields' ability to juggle objects like a bowling ball, a baseball and an egg at the same time. "It's one thing to juggle three uniform objects," he explains. But to juggle objects of varying weights and sizes is much more challenging and requires greater skill.

Indeed it does.

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