The Joys of Helpdesk

There are few things in life as humbling as spending 17 and a half minutes (I know because my telephone tracks the length of my calls) telling a top-tier executive assistant whose starting salary is twice what I make after four years on the job how to open Notepad.

And then, for reasons I still can't understand, the text she wrote in Notepad instamagically became a Word document. Honey, I don't think you were following my directions. There were problems from the second she asked if she should click "Start" to open Notepad. "Yes," I tell her. "Programs?" she asks. I knew we were in trouble.

Now as near as I can tell, the process of saving a file in Notepad is not complicated. Open Notepad (if you can), type something, hit Ctrl-S, pick a path, choose a filename, and save it. There's no debate, there is no grey area. Text on your screen gets written to disk, God is in His heaven, and all is right with the world.

But no. I have to be precise, particularly when it comes to button labels. "Open" isn't the same as "OK". This became flagrantly obvious when I needed her to open the file she saved in "Notepad", if that was in fact what she used. (It wasn't. I swear.) Word popped up. Now, Word is abundantly capable of turning its open contents into a plain .txt file. Which is exactly what I asked her to do, going so far as to belabor the point that she should click "Save As" and make doubly sure to pick the plain text filetype. Word Document and Rich Text Format are no good, I told her. "It has to be a text file. Nothing else will do."

What I wanted was a human being on the other end of the phone who could understand that yes, Word warns you when it's about to lose formatting. And yes, a new file is going to be made. And yes, nothing more can happen until we end up with a goddamn .txt file and just do...it...already. What I did not want was to spend my time assuring her, repeatedly, that I knew that her text was going to lose its formatting, and that I was even counting on it. "There's a box. A dialog box. It says 'Some formatting may be—'" "I know. Click 'OK'." "It doesn't say 'OK', it says 'Save' and 'Cancel'."

This is the part that really irks me. She makes a ton of money and can type upwards of 60 words a minute. She fuckin' knows how to fuckin' save a fuckin' file. More to the point, she knows that's what I want, because I told her that's what I want. I have wasted 17 minutes of my life on this woman because she can't think for herself.

There's more.

The point of this exercise was to create a signature for her outgoing e-mail messages, which involves opening Netscape and making changes in her account settings. Her account settings are, not surprisingly, under "Edit > Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings". A monkey could find it. And to tell you the truth, she did, too. The first and third times she looked for it. Now, I don't know about you, but I've been using Netscape for nine years now, and a menu selection has never played peek-a-boo with me. So whose fault could it possibly be?

I ask her to close and reopen Netscape, a polite way of getting what I want without using the phrase "look harder you dimwit". It's back! Wow! Now we need to point Netscape at the new, good, text signature file instead of the old, bad, broken Word document signature file. Easier said than done. I'm paraphrasing here: "Choose the new signature file," I tell her. She does. "Before we click 'OK' and save the changes, what filename is in that textbox?" "I can't tell," she says, "It just says 'c:\documents and settings\user\My Documents\signature.' and then it cuts off. I can't read the rest."

That's right. Secretary of the Year here can't scroll text. And there are three little letters between me and Nirvana. One, even! I can tell success from failure with nothing more than "signature.t" versus "signature.d". I can't say the same for her. So I have to describe to her something that I have never described to anyone, anywhere, ever. "You gotta left-click on the filename, and then, y'know, drag. To the right." I feel as awkward as a parent answering when their kid asks what the naked people were doing on the tape Daddy left in the VCR. She figures it out. It says ".txt". I'm relieved. She finally gets her signature. We hang up.

And this whole thing could've been avoided if I told her to click Start, Run, then type "notepad". Which I'm going to do from now on.