(no subject)

[katyism.livejournal.com]

The university retired support for Pine as an email client, and replaced all the IMAP servers that had Pine access with one big IMAP server with no terminal access whatsoever. It was a huge undertaking and news about the Pine retirement was spammed all over the place for the last 6 months. Everybody, even people who don't know what Pineis, knew that it was being retired. The implication of this is that the diehard Pine users here are being forced to switch to a graphical, local email client, or use the webmail interface. Needless to say lots of people call my helpdesk all the time hating that, and there is nothing we can do for them except train them on how to use webmail or setup a desktop client. Most of them whinge about it for a while and grudgingly try to learn to use a new client. But not this lady.



I will type a version of our conversation here.

Me: Support center, this is Katy speaking. May I have your--
Her: jdoe
Me: --username please? Okay, jdoe is it? One moment... Ah. Professor Jane Doe, how can we--
Her: Yes I'm frustrated with webmail, why can't I paste into a message composition window?
Me: --help you today? Ah. So what happens when you try to paste something there?
Her: Nothing, I can't do it at all! I don't even know where to begin to paste something here! It's not possible, this new system is so shitty! I clicked on "New message" and a popup window comes up where I would type a messsage, but there's not a menu on the top bar where I can choose to paste.
Me: Have you tried using the keyboard shortcut for pasting?
Her: What? No? There's no menu, so I can't do that! And it's so slow. What idiots programmed it without a menu? It shows up on the main webmail page but not in this message composer window.
Me: You must be referring to the Edit menu, which in many applications has cut, copy, paste, etc..
Her: Yes!!! What the hell!
Me: The reason that menu is not showing up in your message composition window is because it's a popup window, and typically when a web browser displays a popup window, it leaves out the menu and toolbar and such. The edit menu is actually part of your browser, not part of Webmail.
Her: Well that's stupid.
Me: So you're not familiar with keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting?
Her: Of course I am. I have been using pine since 1970 (*cough*)! Pine is all about keyboard shortcuts. Now I have to switch to this new thing. When I am in pine I can do everything I need to just by pressing keys.
Me: You can still do that here. If you wanted to copy something from another window and paste it into your message, that can be accomplished without ever even touching the mouse. I can walk you through an example if you'd like...
Her: I'm a professor and this is unacceptable.
Me: Yes ma'am. I'm trying to help you here.
Her: Webmail is so slow though. It's bizarrely slow. It's interfering with my work as a professor. I have this Word document and all I wnat to do is copy a paragraph and paste it into an email to send my daughter! What I have to do with this crap webmail thing is use my MOUSE to highlight the paragraph, then I have to mouse all the way up to the edit menu and choose copy, and then I click over to the Webmail window and there's no Edit menu and AAARGH!
Me: So you have the paragraph copied already?
Her: Yes.. sigh..
Me: OK try this. Go back to the message composition window, and click in the area where you want the paragraph to start.
Her: Do you mean right-hand click?
Me: Left click.
Her: Nothing happened.
Me: It should have a blinking cursor there now. Now check this out. Hit the control key on your keyboard, and hit the V key at the same time, and then release both keys real quick.
Her: V as in zebra?
Me: V as in victor.
Her: OMG!! The paragraph is there!
Me: Magic! That keyboard shortcut, control V, is how you paste into something that doesn't have the menu. You can use other shortcuts like control C to copy something in webmail, or control X to cut something, and then control V will paste that stuff. You don't even have to click anywhere, because the alt-tab key combo will switch windows for you, and the tab key will move between the different boxes on the webmail composition window.
Her: Are you serious?
Me: Yeah, Windows has tons of shortcut key combinations that do convenient things like this. they work in most programs, not just web browsers or Word, etc.
Her: No, are you serious that I have to do this? This is way too much for one person to have to do just to paste something.
Me: Pardon?
Her: I have to hold down TWO keys at ONCE to paste something! And I still have to click over between what I want to copy to where I want to paste!
Me: The alt-tab and tab keys will save you from having to click between the windows.
Her: This is insanely slow. You are telling me I have to learn all these keyboard shortcuts, and then press two keys at once just to do what I could do in pine without using the mouse or typing too much. I must remind you that I am a professor and this seriously cuts into my efficiency at work here.
Me: You don't have to use those shortcuts, but if you choose to become familiar with them, you'll be sailing through webmail just as smoothly as you did through Pine.
Her: Outrageous. And on top of that this webmail shit is slow.
Me: I didn't write the webmail application, ma'am. I can only refer you to the proper channels through which to file a complaint.
Her: Oh I know, sweetie, but I'm so frustrated. Can you just file the complaint for me?
Me: Yeah sure blah blah thanks for calling bye.


OK there are so many things wrong with this lady.
She has used pine since 1970? I didn't think it was that old.
She has to press two keys to paste something? I was under the impression that the commands for copy, paste, etc in Pine were usually two keys as well. Some commands are just one key but they aren't generally editing commands.
Using keyboard shortcuts interferes with her job? WTF? She's been issuing keyboard commands to Pine for 25 years (snort)!
And the not listening part! She does not have to use the mouse, if only she is willing to accept hte idea of keyboard shortcuts.
She has been using Windows systems for as long as it's been around, it's not like she's soem hardcore unix person or anything, she just happened to always terminal into Pine to check her email. I'm amazed she never learned control-c and the like.
And since she's been on Windows all this time, she should be used to clicking between a Word document and her terminal session with pine open. Unless she already knew about alt-tab and is refusing to realize I'm talking about the same thing.
And how exactly is emailing her daughter related to her oh so important professor job?

Batshit lady.

The kicker is that I promised I'd file the complaints on her behalf, and when I did, my co-workers bitched at me for me sending the complaint through, because whoever's on email duty gets the complaint forms and has to file them and forward them to the appropriate department. Apparently it's not cool for me to send one little message that they have to click 2 things on and be done with, but it's OK if crazy professor lady sends it herself. I was just doing my job and trying to placate the user.

Comments

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

Um, what is this lady a professor OF?

[katyism.livejournal.com]

Library information sciences.

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

Oh God no please.

*is starting her MLS in the fall*

[katyism.livejournal.com]

Just make sure you're not going to indiana university and you should be fine...hopefully.

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

I totally am. So what professor should I avoid? :)

[jjjiii]

Prof. J. Doe. RTFA. ;)

[katyism.livejournal.com]

heh, not her real name.

i keep a huge shit list of professors who are sucky helpdesk callers. i have no idea what they teach like, but they suck when they're not the ones imparting the knowledge.

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

I have a linguistics prof who calls us from time to time. I took a great phonology class with him, but man, he sucks at the Internet.

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

Ha ha, smartass. :P

[newsedition.livejournal.com]

I applaud you and fear for you at the same time. Tech-savvy librarians are hard to come by, and are terribly necessary. Librarians are, by and large, a crazy lot, and they're getting moreso as their job requirements outpace them (I'm half the IT department in a mid-sized library - I know whereof I speak).

Good luck!

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

I do tech support. The tech aspect will not be a problem for me, thank goodness.

I'm trying to decide if I want to specialize in library technology management, but there are so many interesting aspects of librarianship that I don't want to be pigeonholed come job-search time. You have any insight about that?

[newsedition.livejournal.com]

My recommendation would be to take the technology management route (note: I'm biased, as I'm a geek and not a librarian). Anything and everything you can take regarding Library Automation, ILS vendors, and database management will serve you very well, as there's not really going to be much help for you in the field regarding these things, and they are very important, and extremely useful.

Other aspects of librarianship are going to be relatively easy to get help with when and if you need it, and the necessary ones will be required for your degree anyway, but many aspects are changing as the technology changes. If you ground yourself in the technology, you will serve yourself far better than if you focus on something like reference librarianship (For what it's worth, I hear that children's librarians are in great demand, but that pretty much would pigeonhole you).

I could pretty much transfer into any department in our library and have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing because I know the technology, despite the fact that I have no formal Library Science training. Those bits I would need to know to be fully integrated into the department, I could pick up pretty quickly from the folks who have been there for a while (e.g. "We have this collection available for car repair", or "here's how we file news clippings").

You might also want to take the course on Management of Libraries and Information Centers to give perspective on the various bureaucratic aspects of libraries, which you will definitely wind up having to deal with in one way or another.

Something you might want to do is set up koha (http://www.koha.org/) (when their site is actually up and running) on a home network and play around with it to give you a good idea of what ILS software does, what a MARC record is, etc. I've been meaning to play with it myself, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Bad me.

You might also want to add the shiftlibrarian and walkingpaper feeds to your friends page to keep you abreast of some of the latest trends. They can also point you to other librarian resources.

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

Awesome advice! Thank you.

[fatesplaything.livejournal.com]

Wow... That is one crazy prof, my guess would be science of some sort... chemistry, perhaps?

I've never had any trouble using pine with standard imap. Granted, you would have adjust your settings a bit, but it works fine.

Anyway, I just figured I'd pipe in.

[katyism.livejournal.com]

Nope, she's a library information sciences professor. No idea what they really do, but I imagine it involves computers to some degree.

The deal with our new imap server is that terminal sessions and the pine client are simply not available by design. I don't know why they chose to do it that way, but blah. I'm not sure what you're referring to by trouble using pine with standard imap.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

I <3 pine.

and they broke their IMAP server so bad that pine's built in IMAP support doesn't work?

[katyism.livejournal.com]

huh? who broke their imap server?

i must not have explaiend the new thing very well... sigh. i suck at these things. nothing is broken, it's just a policy. there is a new server that they have chosen not to let people use pine on. whether pine is actually on that server is not relevant and i actually don't know anything about the server itself.

if you want to read what the official They have to offically say about the whole thing, read this stuff:

http://kb.indiana.edu/data/aqhl.html

[fatesplaything.livejournal.com]

Oh! I get it!

*facepalm as he remembers how universities use pine for mail*

Ok.... here is where the confusion comes in...

Pine, the application, handles IMAP with no problem at all

The problem comes in that very few non-geeks, and non-mainframe users have pine.

Pine, as far as universities use them is on a unix server (typically a Sun system) that the various users access via telnet. From there they are either dropped into a command prompt (as it was at my last school) or pine is started automatically. pine, which is an app on that server (typically the same machine as the mail server), is then run.

Your school killed the terminal access, or simply removed pine from the server (or rather didn't install it on the new one).

Anyone with pine on their own system (like me) can use it just fine, as pine is nothing more than a text based (rather than graphical) mail client

Silly me for forgetting how schools use pine for their mail.

[katyism.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you got it. Schools do crazy stupid beurocratic shit and I'm learning to hate it more every day. God forbid I ever join the corporate world.

The thing this there is a pine ripoff client that this lady could install on her local machine, the only difference she'd care about is having to do some one-time configuration to it, but of course that's too much effort for a professor to go through... she'll be satisfied with nothing less than having her email options exactly as the used to be, rather than a compromise like pc-pine or fucking learning something.

[ximinez]

Nobody can top a university when it comes to crazy stupid bureaucratic bullshit.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, some one can. They're called the government.

[ximinez]

*snaps fingers*

Yep, ya got me there.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

You gotta look askance at any tech job where 'placate the user' is part of the job description.

So her real problem boiled down to the system she was accustomed to being removed.

Her choices: Switch to a supported system or set up an unsupported system (pine on a PC or something) and look after it herself.

That she couldn't deal with this policy change: Not your problem.

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

Laziness and resistance to change. That's all. She'll get used to it eventually, then pull the same shit again in 10 years when they change it, given that someone hasn't killed her yet.

[klytus.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the $hit-fits some of the teachers in our school district threw when we migrated from Macs to PCs. They just so completely did not want to give up their Macs! Even if it meant they would no longer be on the network and couldn't do anything useful on the damn thing AND would have to use the PCs for classses and e-mail anyway... they did not want to let go of their Mac.

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

Screw it, let 'em keep thier obsolete machines. Give the new PCs to someone who wants them. ;)

[klytus.livejournal.com]

Oh.. that'll make for a good lesson in the classroom: "Now, remember this very important lesson, childeren: Entitlement. You can always get your way by being an unreasonable, uncompromising, cry-baby of a bitch. In fact, if you cry loud enough, you can even get the world to change just to make you shut the fuck up! Your homework assignment for tonight: go home and try this on your parents. Tell them you wnat to stay up an hour past your bedtime, and don't stop pitching a fit until they give in."

Actually, I think they are teaching those lessons somewhere...

[aelsa.livejournal.com]

Pine's only been around since 1970. You don't have to select stuff to c&p, but you do have to press two keys at once: ^k and ^u. Changing fields in pine is done by... guess what, the tab key.

I think she was trying to use pine as an excuse to cover the fact that she's a dipshit.

[shifuimam.livejournal.com]

What amazes me is that computer-illiterate dipshits would take the time to learn Pine, yet they can't figure out how to use freakin' webmail.

What the hell is a prof doing using webmail, anyhow? Shouldn't she have an Exchange account?

[katyism.livejournal.com]

oh my god, if i tried ti introduce her to the many features of exchange and outlook and our exchange webmail, she'd have an aneurism.

i personally <3 my exchange account and so do m ost professors. no accounting for taste though.