Introductory post...

[guitarguy1980.livejournal.com]

Greetings all! Let me introduce myself. My name is Brian, and I work for a company in the tire retreading business, where I do tech support for a program based in the korn shell of Unix.

I found this community, and feel it will be my salvation from the dullards who call in everyday because they once again fried something in their computer

Suffice to say, the primary people I support are the retreaders in the plants, and well, not to offend anyone, but these guys aren't the most computer literate people on the planet, so I often have to dumb down everything (click the red x in the upper right hand corner of your monitor instead of close out the window) and of course, it drives me nuts.

How can people be so stupid?

Case in point: I was helping a retread customer yesterday configure a terminal. Now, let me explain, that these terminals are windows based, but use Netterm to connect to the Unix host box. So, I have to know some microshaft along with Unix in here, and if that wasn't enough, I have to tell an amoeba how to use it.

So, we're in the configuration tool and I'm trying to explain to this guy to use the mouse to select a particular field. He then replies to me "Well, I don't even have a cat here, but how is a mouse going to help me?"

I swear, I couldn't make this up. So, I explain what a mouse is, and then I say to take the cursor (which I had to explain wasn't a foul mouthed person) and put it into the field (which wasn't on his farm) where he can input the IP configuration (Won't even go into the rant how how long it took to explain IP and it's possible configurations).

So, after about an hour and a half of basically teaching this guy to use the computer, I finally walk him through getting it fixed. The Default Gateway was off by one number in the last octet, which of course, prevented any type of network connection.

God save me from the morons....

Brian

Comments

[krease.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed - It probably would have taken me a lot longer to get through to that guy...I tried explaining the concept of a mouse to my grandma once and gave that up after an hour.

[klytus.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of my worst user ever story. It is a tale of a 70+ year-old lady, who had a small spiral-bound notebook with hand-written instructions on how to:

1) Turn on the computer (and monitor)
2) Log into Windows 3.11 (this was a long time ago)
3) Connect to the network
4) Open WordPerfect
5) Open a document in WordPerfect
6) How to work with a document in WordPerfect once it was open
7) How to turn everything off

It gets worse: this lady was a secretary. All of the above were things she did every... damn... day! Yet she was lost without her notebook. And it was my job to not only plug in a SCSI scanner to her computer, but teach her how to use it. I had to go back to that site three times before she could do it... even after she had all the notes in her precious notebook.

On the bright side... next to her, even the most ignorant and ogre-like end users have been an improvement.

[guitarguy1980.livejournal.com]

Well, at least this guy I was talking to (probably in his 70's as well) was really nice about it, and upfront that he knew nothing of computers. So, at least I didn't get an attitude along the lines of "I don't know computers and this is your fault!" So, I was happy to stay on the phone and try to educate him, since he had a good attitude.

[oh-kevin.livejournal.com]

heh, me too.

i would have told him to put on some sweat pants and call it a day.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

BTDT. Why a bunch of leathernecks working in a warehouse need individual email accounts (or even logins) I'll never know. But I had to show'em all how to use them. I'm not sure I succeeded.

hmmmm

[255-255-255-0.livejournal.com]

Maybe they should all change from retread to retard department.
:-)

seriously off topic

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

Hey Krease! The hell are you doing here?!

/ the interweb is too small

Re: seriously off topic

[krease.livejournal.com]

I learned it from you! OK! I learned it from you!

:P