Collaboration

Working on a document with a special user and I send him instructions with pictures and arrows, and speech bubbles that say things like "Click here!" "Press next!"

I get back only one complaint:

At the bottom of page 6 is 'view this list' and 'amd' (hopefully you see what I am talking about.) what is amd?

I respond:

Haha, AMD: Administrative Maintenance of Doughnuts... (take a break here)
Just kidding! I have no idea... just a blip I guess. Must have been typing too fast to make any sense.

Freudian Slip of the Fingers...

Following a series of rather unfortunate events through which both of my index fingers have been injured and rendered useless, I am stuck at the office typing with my two middle fingers. How fitting... *Eff you, work!*

Just picture it. You'll laugh too.

The preponderance of good over evil-wordy-documents.

Burried in a wordy 60 page document I find this gem: "there are a preponderance of data management storage solutions"

To-do list:
look up "preponderance" so I can fake knowing what it means in the next meeting.

Stupendous compendiums

PS: Today my boss used the word compendium in a document. There was a compendium of presentations in a certain folder.
PL: Never use a shorter word when a longer one will make you look more like a wiener.

Speaker phone

Kind of annoying when you're in a cube-farm and some yahoo insists on using speaker phone rather than getting a headset. Kind of funny though when it's a recorded message that is broadcast into the shared space: "...because you are a preferred customer press 1 now to claim your special gift! To claim your free travel voucher please press 1 now! You've won a surprise gift, press 1 now to claim your prize!..."

I piped up "Just press 1 already!"
Someone else added "I think they want you to press 1..."
"Press 5 and really mess them up!" added another guy.

Listen you...

File name: name_BetaVersion_Draft8_FINAL.pdf
As my head explodes someone, somewhere is snickering.

An IT joke

Q: How many IT people does it take to troubleshoot a coffee machine?

A: Six. But only if one of them has a paper clip, IT's secret weapon!

Robots

PL: This web content management system. It's not as good as these people think it is.  I think they've been working with it so long.  Maybe it's better than the alternatives but... it still sucks.
PS: that's frustrating
PL: we've got all these non-web people "helping" so they put the icons under their own folder, instead of within the images folder.
SIGH.
sure it works, but it's wrong.
PS: ahaha
PL: why? Robots, that's why.
and you can't explain robots to everyone.
most people would glaze over.
PS: haha yes
PL: dang robots.

How to confuse the new girl

A long string of increasingly frustrated emails winds up in my inbox with a "why can't anyone help me with this!!"

Looking over the email trail everyone has volleyed the problem into someone else's court and finally, probably because I'm new and might try harder, it winds up with me. It's a form problem. The location: somewhere on the websites. I search internally. Externally. Shared Drives. Can't find it.

I call, and turns out she is complaining on someone's behalf. She can't find the form either and the person complaining went home early. Really? Is this the best use of all of our time, tracking down someone to manage non-existent forms?

PANIC (!!!!)

PHBs: Everybody quick!
We have emergency urgent things to do as quickly as possible so let's quickly start working and have things done by Sunday!

Peon: Ok, what do we have to do?

PHBs: I don't know. Scope hasn't been defined yet but we need to start working on it immediately as urgently as we can!!!

Peon: So, umm, if we don't know what is required then how are we supposed to provide anything useful?

PHBs: We need to anticipate the questions and provide the answers before we get the details of what is required.



Comment: You know the term 'Work smart'? I always thought that was a pretty common thing to do, but it turns out working stupid happens much more often.

Need printer

The guy who runs a little league out of his office & sends out massive amounts of email newsletters through our corporate email server and prints off colour flyers like it's going out of style asks:

do we have a copier around that's portable? would like to use at hockey registration.. nothing fancy... thanks.

I said no to this IT request. He was insistent he needs a copier AND printer in one, surely we could supply him with something portable. I asked him if he's seen anything portable he'd like to take home around our offices recently. (*maybe a fridge?) There is a place where they sell an all-in-one printer/copier units cheaply, it's called The Store. He told me he doesn't have time to go get a new printer, never mind get toner.


*apparently a fridge/freezer left unplugged and open to defrost was taken out of the offices. There was an announcement that who ever took the fridge to please bring it back. Someone returned the fridge and angrily pointed out that there was no note on it that said "do not take."

Because that is how we roll.

Brain problems.

Things I've said today that sound just-plain-wrong:

"...I can't take a dump yet!"
Meaning... I can't take an extract of the data from the database. Yet. 
The person I was talking to looked like: O_O

"...do I need to do a re-flush?" I was talking to an exceedingly cute guy with freckles and I mixed an ipconfig /flush with a dns restart.

I need to get a really good night's sleep without any rain, thunder or lightning.

Eeyore

A minor power blip at lunch left the lights off throughout the building but the UPS saved the server, so everyone continued working right where they had left off. Everyone that is except an Eeyore. I restarted his computer and saw that it was having difficultly connecting to the network -- after unplugging a few things, plugging them back in and restarting his computer I asked him to log in again.

"What's the point? I don't think that will have fixed anything."

WHAT? FINE. So I logged in, and it connected in seconds. Turns out, it fixed everything.

This is because I am amazing!! Thank you, thank you verrrry much!

TMI

"I just thought I'd let you know that my mouse wasn't working so I rebooted my computer."
"Is it working now?"
"Yes. I just thought you should know I rebooted."
"Oh. Okay thanks." ... I think.

First!

First thing, first coffee, first email:

Good Morning, Two things

1. The door at the back is not working again 
2. I can not open certain docs being sent regarding Adobe Reader Can you help this?

I especially loved the ESL desparation in the last line. He speaks English. It doesn't sound like it.

In charge of batteries, common sense, and catastrophies.

Universally people don't love to be responsible for themselves or their actions. Equally true is the fact that everyone needs to be right. This evokes mental distress to the point of physical pain for me on a daily basis.

Example one - Laziness:
User: I brought you my laptop to fix on Friday but I didn't bring it out of the car.
Me: Did you bring it with you today?
User: No.
Me: Ok well try to bring it with you tomorrow.
User: Maybe you can buy me a car charger so I can do my work in my car. On my laptop.
Me incredulous: There isn't internet in your car.
User: No, ha ha, but I could send you out there to fix the laptop.
Me: >:(

Example two - Computers are too complex. There are too many buttons. Too much clicking:
User: The photocopier says "BROADCASTING"
Me: So?
User: It never says broadcasting. It also says "Waiting." It never says waiting.
Me: It looks like there is a large job ahead of your job so it's waiting in queue. Let's look at the details of your job to find out why it says broadcast -- oh look, it's being sent to an email and a fax address.
User: No the copier is wrong. It should just be email.
Me: Well that's strange, I wonder how it decided to send it to two addresses?
User: I selected their fax number first, but changed my mind and then pressed the email address.
Me: But you see how that selects 2 destinations? Fax first and then email? Either clear all the accidental selections by using the CLEAR ALL button, or de-select the wrong address and then select the correct address.
User: Why can't it just read my mind?

Example three - This thing won't work. You provided this thing. Therefore it is your fault:
User: I can't make this work, it is falling apart.
Me: You clearly have broken this thing. It looks like you purposefully have used it in an improper manner and/or drop-kicked it.
User: You bought me a bad thing. You should get me a better one.
Me: >:(

Example four - Define catastrophe.
User: I cannot print. I can never print!
Me: You printed yesterday just fine. Here is an error message "Error: Cannot print document." It looks like there are a lot of printing jobs that you started after one that failed. Did you get mad and press print 14 times?
User: You bought me a crappy printer! You should buy me a better one.
Me: This is a good printer. I will restart the printing. See, now it is printing just fine.
User: You bought me a bad printer. You should get me a better one. I consider not being able to print a catastrophe.
Me incredulous: A catastrophe? We have many other printers. Maybe it is an inconvenience to walk 20 steps to the next printer, but this is not a catastrophe.

On Pea-Brains and 1989 technology

I'm not in charge of facilities, but I happen to be often mistaken for a person who cares. Someone in our office was complaining about cigarette smell for three days and how he can't get rid of his headache from the stink until 2 am. I stood in his office and it smelled like wet earth. Since it has been raining for three days, I think that's reasonable, albeit weird. But exactly unlike cigarette smell.

While I'm there I take a peek behind his desk to see if anything crawled behind there and died. There I see the little fax machine the "sales team" insists they cannot do without is out of toner... so I replace the toner.

The memory starts spitting out pages from MARCH 29th onward. Almost 2 months!
...including sales orders
...including requests for quotations
...including multiple resubmissions for the same quotations.

Apparently "NO TONER" isn't enough of a warning for people who can't even set up a fax machine from 1989. One guy declares that he never uses that fax machine. As a matter of fact he has never used it and therefore cannot be held accountable. The other guy who uses it declares that he's not responsible for changing toner, I am, and therefore it is clearly my fault.

While I was waiting for the ream of paper to stop I had noticed the time was out by 2.5 hours and decided to help them out by setting it. Same complainer, when asked what the current time is, pointedly asked "do you want the computer time, the phone time, the cell phone time, or the real time?"

Really? Are there any other complaints I can possibly disregard for you today?

Tooting one's horn!

I interviewed a technical support company today who's representative decided the best place to start answering the question "what is your technical background so that I may understand your expertise" was to start with "back when René Lévesque started politicking in Quebec I was working as..." and then put me to sleep three times before the end of that story.

Yes. I can see how you have loads of relevent expertise. (I hoped nodding off looked like nodding in encouragement.)

Then at 4 pm the trumpet sounded. I thought it might be the rapture, but it was only the soccer hooligan trumpet ordered online. Which means, tomorrow, I will still have to show up for work.

Do you know what day it is?

Fixing other people's PCs means you get to touch a lot of dirty keyboards and mice and see how really filthy people are... and observe their weird desk collections of Anne Geddes postcards, Happy Meal toys and cat pictures. The worst is needing to write something down and only finding chewed on pens and pencils.

Today's weird: a calendar collection consisting of three Nascar, three oil field supply vendor, a desk blotter-type and a flip-style calendar from a bank.  It's April 22. Half of them were still on March, with the exception of the desk calendar which was on September 2008.

That durn server!

I got a new server at work to play with a month ago and it's been the greatest thing since sliced bread. Runs fast, really fast. I installed our old ERP software on it and it functions brilliantly. Now if only the new version software we wanted to run on it would arrive, we'd be in business... or, more in business than we already are.

But users in my office have started blaming the server for every little thing. If they can't see video on Youtube, can't get sound, can't login, can't remember their password they'll call and complain "ever since that new server! I'm tellin' ya! Ever since you installed that new server I can't...< insert lame excuse here >."

It's too bad the new server is actually not turned on. Maybe I'd believe them.