Slacker

Yeah.. I know. Been a busy and somewhat stressful week or so. Sick kid.. wasn't feeling great myself.. blah blah blah.

So not really wanting to go to work this morning, I got to come in and deal with a user who holds a third degree black belt in window licking. We recently migrated from Groupwise 5.5 (R.I.P.) to MS Exchange. The interface is different and the buttons inside look different and are placed differently. It is, however, still a basic email client and could be operated by a 4 year old with a bit of training. I was not really surprised when this user called with issues. What did surprise me was my overwhelming need to beat my head against the wall to make the pain go away after trying to get her logged in for 20 minutes. It took no less than 3 password resets and 2 account lock removals to get an adult to be able to type in a 7 letter username and then hit tab once and then type in a 8 letter password. Both of which I was reading and spelling for her specifically because I was afraid she wouldn't be able to puzzle them out on her own.

This was followed shortly by the brain trust in marketing calling me to tell me they couldn't print. Complaining of error messages and whatnot, I started troubleshooting the problem. After about 10 minutes of her denying everything I was asking and saying it wasn't her fault, said user suddenly announces.

"Nevermind, I figured it out on my own."

Curious now.. I had to know. What was this user figuring out on their own without my expert advice? Oh.. well the error message was not actually that the printer was not ready as she originally stated. That was a paraphrase.. or something. What the message actually said was "print to file.. please select filename". Had she told me that in the first place I would have told her to check and make sure that there was no check in the "print to file" box. Which was what she managed to figure out on her own. She obviously checked it intentionally or accidentaly at some point.. so she just figured it out on her own.. right. There needs to be one of those beer commercials here..

"Here's to you oh marketing genius. Oh master of the copiers. Only you can show IT how to do their jobs by creating problems for yourself and then miraculously fix them after lying to them about what the problem was to cover your own ass. You pave the way for idiot users everywhere. So I lift my glass to you oh patron saint of the window lickers."

This was all followed up by a call from another department that was complaining that they lost one of the shared drive mappings. I told them to log off an back on quick to see if that fixed it as that runs the logon scripts again. She told me she can't. That they have no way of saving all the work they have put into the brochures that are up on the PC and that they never log it off. I told them they should be logging it off when no one is using it. She says that they haven't logged it off in 2 years. I told her to select "File.. then Save" from the list. She told me its not even really a program. Just some free thing that came with the printer that was setup by a vendor. I asked her why they don't use publisher or something designed to work with brochures and save them. I could hear the air rushing in and out of the wind tunnel that she calls a brain. I got the same answer I get from my kids when I ask why they did something really stupid. "I dunnnnnnoooo" /sigh

I can at least deal with it from my kids. Infuriating as it is, they are kids, learning and I know I gave my parents my fair share of BS answers like that when I was growing up. As an answer from an adult who is being paid to do this as their job and she never once saw a problem with never logging off the PC (security issues) or having the ability to save what amounts to about 4 hours of work each night as she puts the next days brochure together?

You want to know why IT people get paid well? Its not for our knowledge or certifications or troubleshooting abilities. It's hazard pay.. for dealing with these kinds of people on a daily basis. The mental trauma they inflict should be worth a lot more than we are getting paid still. My stress relief is thinking that the offending user is actually the penguin in this game and see how far I bat their head down the field.. the more blood the better!

http://www.robrob8.com/games/penguin-bloody-ball.htm

/cheers