Friday, December 13, 2013

Tricky creatures, those dinosaurs

At work, I'm stuck in a training class today. (I'm posting from class now.) It's computer-based training, and as I'm my employer's resident Luddite, it's been annoying for me and entertaining for my co-workers, many of whom habitually refer to me as the department's technological dinosaur due to my belief that everything humanity ever needed or will need had already been invented by 1980 or so and therefore, anything newer is irrelevant and just a way for that self-aware Sky-Net to get it's nose under the tent.

But there are bright moments. For instance, earlier today, the gal siting at a terminal behind me suddenly called out to the instructor to let him know that her screen had suddenly gone blank. She's our class know-it-all who has been competing with the contract instructor to see who could show us that they know more about this new system that we're getting trained on, so when she suddenly had a problem that she couldn't figure out, there were more than a few smirks and smiles in the clas.

The instructor stopped droning and walked all the way back to her work station, and just as he got there, she stated that her computer was back up and starting to work again. She then offered up several theories as to why her machine had crashed and come back, and the instructor had to discuss and rule them out one by one. Finally he went back up to the front of the classroom and began to bore us again.

A few minutes later, Ms. Know-it-all exclaimed that her system was down again. The lecture stopped again and the instructor told the rest of us to take a break as he walked back to her work station again. As the rest of us began to file out of the room, she let us all know that her system was now back up again, but her and the instructor still spent the next ten minutes trying to diagnose her problem. (The rest of us have been trying to figure out her problem for years.)

After the break, we all settled back in, and the instructor began again. The boredom increased, and finally, about half an hour later, Ms. Know-it-all swore loudly and began cursing her computer and the new software system as her screen had just gone dark again.

Alas, this time the instructor was a bit quicker getting back to our part of the room and he caught me plugging her monitor back in again as he approached. Her "computer problem" was solved, much to the amusement of everyone in the class, save her of course.

So how's your day going?

9 comments:

  1. Is it 5 o'clock yet? Stuck here waiting to leave....

    ReplyDelete
  2. We tormented a coworker by putting transparent tape on his phone line modular connector. Lots of amusement watching him switch out telephones trying to find one that worked while the rest of us got all the oncoming sales calls.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Haha! I knew immediately what the problem was...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, I see that Belle's got two dogs to retrain, as well as where Murphy get's it from!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Much, much better after reading that story! Hoisting a beverage (sweet tea....I'm at work) in your general direction now, sir!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Put the check in the block... sigh

    ReplyDelete
  7. God I wish I had thought of that during some of the training I had. Pure genius!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Foamy the Squirrel's tech support could have helped her ...

    And I'd hate to have to give up Linux (1993-ish), but it's based on Unix, which well pre-dates 1980. So perhaps we can give it a Gentleman's Pass.

    Or we could get hard core and run Multics ...

    ReplyDelete