The shoe on the other foot

I like my job. I just wanted to start by stating that. It's a good job. I get paid well. I don't have many complaints...

...except one.

DFUs (dumb ... users)

yes, it's a technical term.

Part of my job is to act as the first (and only) line of support for the applications that we write. People call me with all sorts of stupid questions. Instead of taking 1 single solitary minute to think through their problem, they just call me. I do my best to solve their problem without showing too much distaste.

Well, today I decided to put the shoe on the other foot. I decided it was time to call some of my support lines for stupid reasons. Let me explain. At DuPont, I check my e-mail through a program called Lotus Notes. Usually I really like this program, but today it just didn't work right. Eventually it stopped working altogether. So I used the age-old time-tested method of Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Woohoo! It did indeed close the program for me...but then it wouldn't open again. Just gave me an error message.

Now, I could easily fix this in a number of ways, but I decided that I'd just call the Help Desk. For the sake of the story, the person who helped me shall be named Dorgon: Destroyer of Worlds. Here is an exerpt from our conversation:

Dorgon: Hello, what seems to be the problem?
Me: Lotus Notes.
Dorgon: Ok, what's wrong with Lotus Notes?
Me: I broke it.
Dorgon: Ok, how did you break it?
Me: Well, I didn't like what it was doing so I pressed Ctrl Alt Delete to shut it down. Now it won't start back up again.
Dorgon: I see. Have you tried doing anything to fix it?
Me: Nope.
Dorgon: Ok... did you even try restarting your computer?
Me: Nah, it's an old Desktop Computer. It takes too long to restart.
Dorgon: Yeah, ok. Um, restart the computer.
Me: Ya think that'll do it? Shouldn't we just reformat the whole harddrive and reinstall windows?
Dorgon: We'll try that next...just try restarting first.
Me: ok fine.

*Pause for 5 minutes while computer restarts*
*Lotus Notes opens fine*

Me: Well, look at that...it opened! You're good. Man, I'm glad we didn't have to reformat.
Dorgon: Yeah, that was a close one.


I think it's the same principal that when you have a lot of siblings in a family, the biggest will pick on a younger sibling, and then that younger sibling will pick on an even younger sibling because he's angry that the oldest just picked on him. I take a lot of crap from people, so every now and then I feel the need to dish some back. Try it sometime...you might like it.