Cocktail Confessions

It’s pointed out to me on occassion that my job exists solely based on the fact that others are morons, and we live in a society today where people like their hands to be held.

Whether we now live in a collective culture fo complacency or laziness, people call support services for the likes of all things.  And by that I also mean, they call for the obvious or just call because they jsut can’t seem to be bothered by using their own brain and the common sense that should go along with it.

Occassionaly there are those news stories where someone (usually in low income or urban settings) will call 9-1-1 to report that their fast food order was wrong, that the cheeseburger in fact had no cheese, or the window attendant forgot to place ketchup in the bag.

But stupidity and laziness isn’ just confined to fast food establishments and to those that believe WalMart is just this side of Heaven’s pearly gates.  No, stupidity knows no boundries or socio-economic classes.  Where there are humans, there is eventually a lack of perception, self-awareness, or thought at some random time.

I work at a techinical company.  I will even go as far as to say my compnay ‘manufactures’ technical equipment.  We have engineers, developers, copy writers, quality assurance inspectors, etc., that we apparantly pay large sums of money to, in hopes that they will design a sustainable product to be aptly sold in the market place for a return that will keep us all employed and keep the company growing.  The aforementioned people are also some of the worst abusers of common sense and I often wonder what our screening process is.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m no Albert Einstein, but I do take pause on occassion to note what I am doing prior to calling the Help Desk.  So what prompted my little tirade today?  Well, today I’ve been on the receiving end of a bevy of questionable calls:

“The video conferencing machine is not working properly.  We can’t see anything on the screen?”

Is the TV and/or monitor on?  No?  Go ahead and turn it on please.

“You guys are blocking the Internet.  I can’t check anything including my email.

Please look in the back of your PC.  Do you see green/amber lights? No? Is the ethernet cable plugged in? No?  Go ahead and plug that in please.

“My phone isn’t working.  I can’t make any calls.”

You do realize you just called me, right?  And you can hear me?  Good.  I can hear you.  Case solved.

“I just turned on the printer in my department.”

Er…okay?  Was there something wrong?  No?  Okay, in that case I’m very proud.  Nice job on toggling the power switch. 

“The printer just stopped printing mid -ob.  There is a red light on next to the paper tray.”

Please add more paper to the empty tray.

“The laser pointer in the main conference room is not lighting up when I hold the button down.  It generally always works, but we noticed it’s been acting sporadic lately.”

Have you checked the batteries?  Perhaps you should try changing them since it’s been in use for over a year.

I can’t install this software I just bought.  It’s says Windows XP on the box and I have a Microsoft computer.

But our company runs Window 2000.

I could go on and on with much more involved and ludicrous tales.  I picked the easiest ones here to type, but it amazes me how many of these guys are in fact engineers, or people who have worked here for years (as if we in IT just decided to come in one day and change ‘everything’ overnight that we knew was going to directly affect one random person and its a conspiracy on our behalf to not tell anyone.  Yeah, because we are that bored and we all collectively decided together that we all wanted to take these calls today as a challenge to validate our mental stability.