I had something similar; a lady I was called to help because her pc kept “hanging”. She would create a new file by opening word, print her copy and proceed to open word again with a new document, NEVER closing the old file OR saving the file, the printed copy was her saved file. Eventually word could not open another copy and would crash, losing all her work, but then she did have her printed copies so no real loss. And yes, she would re-type any document she needed to add to or make corrections on. She could never get out of the typewriter mode. She had been at the Pentagon for about 35 years and when her boss ordered her to get some pc training, she retired instead.
Yes, but if that one file gets corrupted somehow or is accidentally deleted, you’ve lost ALL your letters. Not smart at all.
(keeping them all in the same folder, on the other hand, is just common sense)
Oh my goodness. I feel so sad.
In a former job I worked to a programme manager in charge of a local government Oracle e-Business suite.
Big loud scottish woman - think Mrs Doubtfire with the delicacy of a clumsy wilderbeeste.
She insisted that when the techies said a server had “fallen over” that it had literally toppled off its stand, and couldn’t understand why they weren’t strapped to the shelves to prevent this happening.
She also claimed that you could tell if a CD had been copied to mp3 by looking carefully at the disc… her sons had told her off for copying their CDs without telling them, and she was convinced they worked it out by looking at the discs (presumably she’d scratched them with the stylus…).
She also argued in a meeting with our supplier that their entire email system was down because nothing she sent was getting through… turns out you don’t spell “Fujitsu” as “Fitjitsu” :rolleyes:
And she once traumatised a junior project manager by asking her to sellotape (scotchtape) her fingernail back on when it fell off due to some skin complaint or other. Major ick-factor!
(That same junior PM was asked by our Chief Exec whether she could take a look at his mobile phone to dry it out. She thought he’d spilled a glass of water… turns out he’d dropped it in the toilet while peeing ‘n’ txting).
You didn’t specify it had to be in an office. Can I offer up something that happened in grade school? Because I did have a ‘co-worker’ and she was stooopid!..We were split up into pairs and told to write and perform a skit in history. My partner, “Karen” and I were going to do a 3 minute puppet show. She was the dimmest of bulbs. I had to write the script, and write OUT the script. My parts were in blue ink. Hers were in red ink. For good measure, I wrote her name first before her lines, i.e. “Karen - 'The settlers arrived in 1874…”
Oh yes, it went swimmingly as she stuttered out her lines until mid-point, where I had forgotten to put a dash after her name…and she read her name out loud as part of the script!!! she actually said “Karen, the settlers arrived in 1874…” :smack: I wonder what she went on to do in her life…
When I flipped hamburgers as a teenager I remember watching the fry cook trying to fill the empty deep fryer with a soup spoon.
He had a cube of fat, maybe 2ft x 1ft x 1ft, that he was transferring to the fryer one scooped-out soup spoon’s worth at a time: Scoop. Tap-Tap-Tap-Tap-Tap. Fat Slowly Slides Off Spoon. Plop.
I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. He was going to be there until the next ice age. I walked over, grabbed the cube of fat and flipped it upside-down onto the top of the deep fryer and turned on the pilot light to allow the fat to warm up and melt into the fryer. “Now go do something else while this is melting.” He looked at me like I was The Messiah.
You guys know how to turn a phrase!
When I joined a small organisation they were computerising their membership list.
Now this was decades ago, so database packages were just becoming available.
So one self-taught programmer had started to write his own.
He showed me it proudly.
It started up as a blank screen. I asked what I was supposed to do. “Press spacebar” he said. (There was no manual).
I tried to enter a new member called Joe Smith. (There were 25,000 existing members.) The program took over 10 minutes to register him, with a huge amount of disc accessing.
I asked the ‘programmer’ how the program worked.
“I have all the records in strict sequence on the disc. I don’t like these ‘tags’ the operating system puts in to insert a record, so I rewrite the entire file each time, leaving a gap for the new person.”
I asked him how long it would take to enter a family of 4. “40 minutes.”
Sharon was an engineer I worked with back when I was a document control specialist for a government contractor.
Every week, the engineers had to submit this excel spreadsheet report to my department. And every week, Sharon would have a problem getting her spreadsheet to work.
Now, I’m going to show my age a little here, but back when Sharon and I worked together, our computers were still using 5.25” floppy disks. So every week, I would put a copy of the excel spreadsheet on a 5.25” disk and give it to Sharon. She would do her report, print it out and turn it in. Then next week she would try to access her disk, and the file would be corrupted.
My boss and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so I was sent to personally deliver the disk to Sharon and make sure it worked. I watched Sharon as she opened the file and entered her information. I watched her enter and save the spreadsheet. I watched as she printed it out. I watched as she took out the disk. I made her put it back in and try to open the file again. I watched as the file opened up without any problem.
“Isn’t that the way?” she joked. “It always works when someone is standing over your shoulder and watching.”
I laughed with her. Then I watched as she took the disk out of the computer and stuck it on her metal file cabinet with a magnet for “safe keeping.”
“Uh, Sharon?” I began. “I think I figured out the problem . . .”
The coworker I have in mind is not stupid, just a product of a less technologically focused age.
We switched from beautiful, hard-bound paper lab notebooks to an electronic system. You can use any type of file you like to enter data into the electronic notebook - you just select the notebook as your printer and print into it. If you’d like to enter handwritten data, you can scan your handwritten copy and print the scanned file into the electronic notebook. If you do so, you lose the advantage of searching for keywords from your document, but some people are hung up on handwritten entries, so they’re instructed to make a keyword page (in Word) to accompany the scanned document.
One venerable scientist was flummoxed by all of this entering and logging and scanning nonsense, but tried valiantly to comply. Also, they took his paper notebook off of him.
So he would type up documents in Word, print them out on a conventional printer, scan them, then print the scan into the electronic notebook. Not only did this require twice the work, but it rendered the documents unsearchable.
Someday I, too, will be close to retirement and struggling with whatever system they foist upon us. I suppose.
While going through a tutorial program, a co-worker came to my office and asked for some help. After going through the first step, the program told the user to “Press any key to continue”. My co-worker looked on his keyboard for 15 minutes trying to locate a key with a label “any”. He couldn’t find one.
:eek: This actually reminds me of when I was a stupid co-worker. We were using some A/P package and to back it up took like 12 5.25" disks. I would get through maybe ten and not have enough and not finish. I know, it was really dumb but I was a cocky youngster who nothing bad would happen to. Until it crashed and the IT guy was rather cross that I hadn’t gotten through the whole backup.
So I ask you all, if something takes 12 disks and I run the backup for ten, how is it that nothing on the first ten did me any good? I know I was wrong but where’s the flaw in thinking 10/12 would get me something?
I used to have a coworker who would regularly email me things like, “Could you email Jim and tell him the price is $1000?” Jim was a mutual coworker. This used to drive me bonkers, but since I was fresh out of college and she had seniority over me, I didn’t want to have a confrontation about this, so I would sit there for minutes and weigh the options of just forwarding her email to Jim as-is, typing a fresh email so Jim wouldn’t see her weird reluctance to communicate with him directly, or email her back and say, “You know, it takes just as much effort to type his name in the To field as it does to type mine, which is to say, very little.”
I usually wimped out and went with option #2. :smack: I wouldn’t do that today.
Hell, one of my bosses does that today. He e-mails me requests that I e-mail so-and-so in another department to do this or that. I’ve tried in the past pointing out that he’d save a step and get a faster response by e-mailing his request directly to central files or accounting or wherever, but he resists this kind of logic. Of course, he also leaves a document on my chair with a note attached: “Please call me regarding this document.” When I call him, he says, “Make me one copy of it, please.” Couldn’t he have written “Copy X1 for me” on the face of it? To me, saving time is the same as saving money, but I suppose I shouldn’t complain - dumb bosses mean job security for me!
Memorably, I once mentioned to my manager that I was going to use find and replace to change all of the usages of some word in a document to some word that we had decided to use instead. Her response “Oh, can I watch? I’d heard you could do that, but never actually did it.” This was sometime in the early 2000s at a technology company whose name you’d recognize. Other coworkers would alphabetize lists of names in MS Word by cutting and pasting rather than the Sort command. Calculating and typing into Excel cells was also not unheard of. And one woman actually did look for a computer file on her physical desktop. Aaah, memories.
Skald, your first 2 win prizes, but the third is actually pretty common in call centers, IME. The idea is that the hour break results in a more rested employee in the afternoon, who is better able to maintain good customer relations. An absolute ban on short lunches seems like overkill, but from my experience in some fast-paced call centers, I can get behind the general principle of one-hour lunches. Management gets better work out of people in the afternoon if they’ve had time to decompress over lunch.
Hi, Neighbor, management will appreciate those short lunches more when they aren’t paying you by the hour, that’s for sure.
Except, of course, that the person in question is one of her top salespeople. She is trying to fix a problem which doesn’t exist. Moreover, theis associate makes very few calls in the afternoon, as she doesn’t go to lunch until she has met her call quota for the day, and uses the afternoon for creating sales presentations, doing paperwork, solving customer problems, etc.
Did he try to order a Tab?
My mother does that. She’s horrible with electronics–except, somehow, the adding machine, which I can hardly make heads or tails out of. Go figure. Fortunately, in her case only her and my father* deal with the records, so it doesn’t matter. It’s not sophisticated, but it works.
*Well, and the accountant, who I hear hates the fact that they still use paper records.
I am confused. I’ve known this woman for 20 years, but but she is in my field, not yours, and she lives in California. I wonder if she has a twin?
<Slowly, through gritted teeth> Some of My. Coworkers.Are.Still.Doing.That.