An Interesting Couple of Days

Interesting things about my job:

Yesterday, a woman upstairs pulled me aside. "I'd like you to help me with my wireless on my laptop." Easy fix. "We don't have wireless in the building." End of story, right? Not a chance! She had turned on her wireless card and found a wireless access point owned by Cleveland City Hall, and wanted me to help her use it because hey, it's there, right? While I applaud her technoanarchist ethic, I had to nip this impending legal nightmare in the bud. "You can't use City Hall's wireless," I state. I'm the computer guy. Let it drop, lady. She wouldn't. It wasn't until I started saying "can not" as two distinct syllables and speaking. in. single. word. sentences that she finally agreed to just let me give her a hub and some extra cat-5 cables. And do you know what she says? "Then what's the point of wireless?" Exactly. Dumbass.

Later that day, the same woman calls me and asks what a USB cable was. I guess it's easier to get through to me than it is Dell technical support. Please shoot her now.

Yesterday a different woman yells out to me. I had stepped on the escalator before she even said anything, and I was mercifully being pulled by gears ever further away from her. For some reason this did not end her interrogation whatsoever. "Do you know when the phones will be fixed?" she asks. The phones were never broken. Turns out she can't call out. By the time I get off the escalator and ride back up to her floor, she is gone. Like a ghost in the night. I go to her phone. I call my home number. It rings. I call something long distance. It correctly prompts me for my long distance code. Everything is fine. I hope that she'll try again and release that nothing is wrong.

Hope is like a cellar door: it always lets you down. This morning I have an e-mail from her, again asking when the dialing out problem will be fixed. Oh, and she's received some strange e-mails and would it be OK if she forwards them to me to take a look at?

Today, she's confounded by a dialog box that pops up when she's trying to send an e-mail message. The box says "the message you are trying to send was rejected because it exceeds the maximum size limit." And she looks at me to ask what she should do about it because she cannot figure it out herself. Please shoot her, too.

Today I went through the usual routine of helping someone import her bookmarks and address book to a new computer. Yesterday, I exported them for her. I've written in the past about how much I love exporting people's data for them because they are too ignorant to do it themselves, so I won't belabor the point again.

Towards the end of the day, I have a voicemail waiting for me from a training manager who, I have realized, likes calling different people in the organization until one of them gives him the answer he wants. In the voicemail he talks about how there's "some confusion" about some training that's happening tomorrow, and that he was under the impression that X would be the case. I and the Finance department, on the other hand, are all unanimous in our comprehension that Y would happen, not X.

So I call up Sue in Finance and ask her if we're still set with the plan to do Y. We are. "Well I just got a voicemail from Mike, and he's thinking otherwise." I know this is not a simple mix-up because he's done this before and, in my opinion, no one can truly be that retarded without it being a ruse.

So I'm psyching myself up mentally to knock this guy around in regards to sticking to plans when Sue simply tells me that it will be "taken care of". Apparently, I'm not the only one who's caught onto Mike's act and we are not, gratefully, going to change the plan at the last minute just to make him happy. Sue reiterates that we are doing Y, that she is going to be on top of executing Y, and that Y is, quote, "not rocket science". Sue is awesome.