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Tales of IT Idiocy
snydeq writes "IT fight club, dirty dev data, meatball sandwiches — InfoWorld offers nine more tales of brain fail beyond belief. 'You'd think we'd run out of them, but technology simply hasn't advanced enough to take boneheaded users out of the daily equation that is the IT admin's life. Whether it's clueless users, evil admins, or just completely bad luck, Mr. Murphy has the IT department pinned in his sights — and there's no escaping the heartache, headaches, hassles, and hilarity of cluelessness run amok.'"
Anyone have a Greasemonkey script on-hand that automatically hides stories containing links to infoworld.com, or do I have to whip one up on my own?
One day a woman came in, worked on a paper for a couple of hours, and then had her computer crash. She went to the lab assistant on duty, who didn't try to be helpful or sympathetic at all -- he just blew her off with a "well, you should have saved".
She blew up at him. Yelled, screamed, made a gigantic fuss. Lab guy thought it was funny, still wasn't trying to calm her down or be helpful at all. The supervisor heard the noise (his office was across the hall from the lab) and came in to see what was wrong. He talked to the woman, got her to go across the hall where she wouldn't be disturbing everyone else who was still trying to use the lab. There, he offered sympathy, offered to help her with retyping.
Once she started to calm down, she started crying. He finally found out that she'd been raped a couple of weeks before. She'd lost a lot of time for getting ready for finals and doing final papers in doing interviews with the police and the prosecuting attorneys -- and then found out earlier that day that the DA's office had decided not to prosecute her attacker, because he was a former boyfriend of hers and they were afraid they wouldn't be able to persuade the jury that it wasn't just her changing her mind after the fact.
He pointed her to the campus rape center so she could get help -- not just with the legal case and the emotional fallout, but also to have them talk to her professors. She didn't need to be trying to handle finals like that.
The moral is: You don't know how bad a day someone else has had. When people get extremely upset over something that seems like it shouldn't be that upsetting, there's a good chance that they were already upset about something else. And, of course, he added that if we had someone in the lab we just couldn't handle, get him or call the campus police if it was after his office hours. We should try to be nice, but remember that our job was lab attendant, not social worker.