Divisions and Precisions

Stupid Monday

Mondays are always interesting days. I think people are stupider on Mondays. Seriously. If I were a psychologist, I would run an experiment. Give people IQ tests on different days of the week, and see how the scores run. I wonder if someone's already done that? (A quick web search turned up nothing.)

Still, it is my unscientific opinion that people are dumber on Monday. I know I am. Give me a problem to solve on Monday and I guarantee it will take me longer and cause me more frustration. This is not a good thing, considering that my job now consists of simply solving other people's problems. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one, however. Except when the other ones are calling me on the phone.

Let me preface this by saying, I love my job. I really do. However, there are just some days... and today is one of those days. A man called me today telling me that his shortcut to the program didn't work. I spent twenty minutes talking with him and trying to find the program. "Find files" turned nothing up. Looking through Windows Explorer turned nothing up. Finally he asked if it made a difference if he had uninstalled the program last week. Uh. Yes. Here's the lesson for y'all: if you uninstall a program, the file that runs that program is not on your computer anymore, and your desktop shortcut won't work anymore. Think about that before you hit "uninstall".

Another man I talked to today had some serious problems understanding English, apparently. Usually I can deal well with this, but he also had a serious problem following directions. This, I do not deal so well with. I'd tell him to click on the button labeled "Indent", to which he would respond, "I clicked on this button called "Insert Row" and it didn't work!" And then he kept sighing in my ear as if I were the one with the problem. This went on for an hour. Then he sent emailed me the data he was having a problem with, and I fixed it in five minutes. Needless to say, I took a long walk after that call was over.

Come to think of it, the most frustrating call I ever had was on a Monday too. This sweet little old lady (who also didn't speak English very well) called in to get help installing the program. Now, normally installing the program is an easy five or ten minute call. Not with this woman. I kept asking her to insert the disk, meaning the floppy disk that holds the licenses. "It's in there," she said. So I had her run the setup command. "It says it can't read the disk!" So I ask her to take out the disk to look at it, and sure enough, I hear her CD drive open. I carefully explained to her that the floppy disk is the square thing, and the CD is the round thing. She was quiet for a moment, then asked, "Does the metal part go in first?" After a stunned moment, I said that yes, the metal part of the floppy disk does go in first. "And does the label go in face up?" Yes, that sounded right. After forty minutes, we managed to get the program installed, during which time she asked me to help her uninstall programs on her computer. I gently deferred her to her hardware technician, to which she replied, "I don't have one. I'm just a little bird learning to fly on my own." Well... you ever wonder about those dead baby birds you see lying on the ground, if maybe they fell out of the nest or tried to fly before they're ready? Yeah. I know what happened to them now. They tried to install software without knowing the first thing about computers.

There's a good side to things too though. I've had people tell me they love me, they want to leave me in their will, I'm the most fabulous person they've ever talked to. And that's a real ego trip. It's hard not to puff up a little bit when you managed to save someone's data, or managed to fix a problem they've been working on for days in just a few minutes.

And believe me, I gave the woman who wanted to leave me in her will my full name. Almost gave her my social security number and address too. But these people never call me on Mondays. Especially not this Monday.

Are people really stupider on Mondays? I don't honestly know for sure. Ask anyone in the service industry though, and they're likely to give you a resounding, "HELL YES!"

And I'd be the loudest one of all.

Posted by Lisa at December 17, 2001 07:19 PM