This is a follow up to my previous two posts “Helping the Neighbor Surf Porn” and “Failure to *Educate* or ?”. Dealing with computers everyday is quite a task. I think most users have a love hate relationship with computers. Then you have computer savvy people. What would they say their biggest frustration is, the computer or the user? I have worked in IT for the past 7 years, during those 7 years you wouldn’t believe what users will do.

Okay before I begin I want to explain something. There are differences in users. There are users that want to learn as much as possible, than there are users who could care less to learn anything about computers. You have users that will try and do just about anything or you have users that won’t touch anything out of the norm.

This is somewhat humorous example of just how computer illiterate some people are. I received a phone call from a user I work with. After talking with the user I found that they probably needed to reboot their computer to fix their small issue. Nothing special just a reboot, so I held on the line while they rebooted. After about 20 seconds they told me it was done and back in windows. How in the world did this computer reboot so quick? I know their machine is not that fast. I had the user try the program again. No luck it still didn’t pick up the mapped drive. So off I went to find out what the problem was. Upon entering his office he was rebooting again. This time I caught his reboot procedure. On the monitor there is a power button, when you push it the monitor turns off, then when you push the button windows comes back up. Magic it reboots in about 10 seconds. I about died laughing when I saw this. I explained to him that this only turns the monitor off and showed him how to reboot, it fixed his problem.

At work we gave one of the users a laptop. They would take the laptop home every night to do some work, and then return to work the next day. All the users’ files were on the laptop but he would still access some documents saved on the fileservers. Every morning he always had a saving problem with his laptop. It was very strange, like he had been disconnected from the network. So I ran a couple of utilities on his machine. Then it occurred to me, I asked what files he works on while he is at home, of course he would open network files and hibernate his laptop, go home modify them and return to work to save them. Needless to say excel does not handle that to well.

Some users though no madder what they do, touch you in some way. I had helped a lady setup her computer because of a sight problem. She has an inoperable brain tumor and is 93 years old. Why did she buy a computer? To do Christmas cards, about a 150 Christmas cards to be exact. When she bought her computer she bought some lousy label software to enter her Christmas card list. The first night I came over to help her with this, the program got canned, it was horrible. I even had a hard time using it. So I did what any normal tech would do. I created an Access Database with easy to use forms and a report that would print the addresses on labels. After teaching her how to use the program, I left and went home. I figured it would take her a week or two to enter in all her stuff. Amazingly enough she is very skilled on the keyboard. About a week later she called me stating she was having a problem. So only living about 10 minutes away, I ran over to her house. She then tells me how bad she feels because she forgot how to use the program. I felt bad, we sat down and I showed her again how to enter them. I sat with her while she entered about 20 names and addresses. I figured she had it down pat now. About a week later I get the same phone call, this time she can’t remember how to turn the machine on. I really felt bad for her so I went to visit her. We reviewed how to turn the computer on and off and how to get to her label database. I had some extra time that night so we entered the rest of her addresses in her computer. After finishing we printed the address labels out. She was impressed; usually she starts in July hand writing her envelopes. She accomplished everything in just 4 weeks. Three years ago we began this journey and to this day, she does her Christmas cards on the computer. Every year she calls me in the beginning of November to help. No matter what she would do on the computer she would never frustrate me, I know she’s trying as hard as she can. Even at 96 now she is now on the internet and emails on a regular basis. I commend her for being the greatest client I have.

The last story earned my worst computer job ever. Actually this one almost made me want to quit what I did for a living. I was helping a user acquire some new parts to upgrade his computer. We had them shipped to his house. Then the following weekend, we would install a new motherboard, processor and memory along with a new sound card. The new parts arrived, and the following weekend I spent a while assembling all the parts. At this point I had about 3 hours in this project. After the first week he called me and said that he couldn’t get much volume out of the new sound card and wanted me to come check it out. My schedule was crammed, it took me 3 days to be able to return. When I walked through the door he told me the machine wont turn on. After checking all the cables outside the case I noticed that he had a screwdriver and a soldering iron next to the computer. I knew this guy did electrical projects and was an Electrical Engineer. This didn’t scare me at first, what really scared me is when I opened the computer to see nothing but black. I asked what happened, he said, “I tried giving the sound card more power, because he couldn’t get the volume louder.” This blew my mind, he soldiered the 12v power supply lead to the CD-In of the sound card. Let’s put it this way it was a total loss everything was cooked. He asked if I could put his old parts back in the case and get everything working. So I complied, I put everything back excluding the hard drive, it wouldn’t even spin up, I replaced it with an extra from in my car. While loading windows he said he was going to go eat with his wife in the kitchen, so being dinner time I figured I would run out to the local spot and grab something to go. I couldn’t believe the words that came out of his mouth next, “No, you get in there and finish fixing my computer before you go anywhere.” That pretty much said it all, I pulled my hard drive left a bill for my time and walked out. I never did hear from him again.

Do I hate users; there are days I can’t stand them. Then there’re days with a 93 year old woman that touch you so much, trying to embrace technology that pushes you to keep helping them.