The technophobic woman whose work I am obliged to do

The BBQ Pit
21

Trust me, if you knew this lady & what she wants, you would ask for a 115% commission…she once gave me what was actually a beautiful salwar to sell, but it reeked so badly of unwashed body, rotten food, dog effluvia, and who knows what else (she opens the door to her car and visible stink wiggles, like the cartoons, come out), hung it up outside in strong sun and wind for over a week…and it still smelled pretty bad…

As for the china…we’re talking 4 or 5 complete services for 12 people…I’d no idea all the pieces you could have in a set of china…I was 1/2 expecting to see personal bidets listed.

She also didn’t want me to take any of the stuff home, but told me as things sold, just to give her their names and addresses (as well as their money) and she’d make sure they got their stuff…

:eek:

Not using my feedback, thank you!

Sorry about the hijack…I did find out I’m not the only person she has tried to do this to, actually…and here’s a surprise, a few people found out she’d sold things two and three times over…strange no one is willing to go into partnership with her…

22

Ah, but it’s the lunkheads that can hire and fire. In my case, though, I quit (for reasons other than tech issues).

23

Cowgirl, I have a piece of advice for you :slight_smile:

Stop using Word! Use a command line editor, such as edlin instead.

Instant cardiac arrest guaranted!

24

And then tell her everything sold for $5 less than it really did and pocket the difference.

Not like she could ever find out, right?

25

sorry for the blatant bump of my own thread, but I had something important to add:

ARGHH ! Flargin’ mothersnarfing growl growl …

She is off my back at last. But now that the fucking thing is published I have learned that it’s my job (yes, my job, not the job of the woman who wrote it or of anyone who cares at all about it) to test the fucking thing, the very badly designed web site that’s partly in Word and partly in Acrobat and partly in HTML and partly in this worse-than-useless CMA application (because it has to be ‘easy to navigate’ for people like the author of the document, making it look like ass), to make sure that all the links work, and as it turns out they don’t, because (a) I got bad advice from the web people when we designed it, and (b) my fucking CMA software isn’t working, so I make the changes (which I wouldn’t have to be making if I had gotten the right advice the first time) and publish, and publish, and publish, and publish, and for good measure publish again, and the changes still aren’t made because the CMA software has its own ideas. And I only have so much time to keep publishing it because people keep calling me with more changes to be made …

Tell me again how this is an admin assistant’s job?

Actually I’m pretty chuffed that I’ve been sacked, someone else will have to deal with this. Nobody else in this godforsaken* place will have the slightest idea what to do with it. Heh, heh.

  • I know for certain that all gods have indeed foresaken this place.
26

Wait a second, you got laid off/sacked/fired? If so, fuck it, let it burn.

Sam

27

My supervisor at my last job was the same way. She knew the software that was there when she started and it was like pulling teeth to get her to upgrade or try something different that might work better. She also insisted on doing all sorts of weird stuff to the computers, because it would make them work better, but that actually caused us much more work. We were graphic artists for a classified paper, and every once in a while, she’d go through and get rid of about 50% of graphics that were saved because “We need to clean up the server so it will run faster!!” Then we’d pull up a big car ad and find that 75 of the 90 graphics were missing, and would have to find the originals, and resize/re-edit/everything them. What should have been a quick ad, changing prices and dates turned into an all afternoon affair.
Not related, but she also was the one who would bitch at us if we walked out for 5 minutes or so without deducting it from our break time, but took a 15 minute smoke break every hour and always left at 4:00 (Leaving us to stay until the ads for that day were finished, and always with a remark like “Oh, it’s 4! I’ve gotta go, but it looks like you guys are going to be here a while! Hee hee!”.) so she could pick up her kid. Argh.

28

Damn you! You just gave me a horrid flashback! :eek:

And yes, it was uphill, both ways, through the snow

29

Crap, I didn’t mean to hit submit right then.
I also wanted to reply to the ebay bit.
I’ve got an aunt who is always out to make a quick buck, and she knows that I sell stuff on ebay, so she decided that she needed to sell stuff on ebay too, and that I needed to do it for her. She is hopelessly computer illiterate, so she is determined that she can’t do it on her own. Despite my protests, she brought some pictures of stuff she wanted to sell over to my house so I could list it for her.
Among other things, there were:
Really tacky dollar store quality religious figurines.
Mason jars filled with buttons, with a decorative top.
Quilts.

The quilts aren’t a bad idea, but she’s not going to get what she wants for them on ebay.
The other two things were just weird, and I didn’t feel like wasting my time listing them. She also gave me pictures of other random stuff, and when I told her that if she wanted me to list these things, she needed to give me a description, I got “Oh, you know how to do that ebay stuff, I’m sure you can come up with something good!”
No I can’t, if I don’t know anything about what you’re selling!!

I finally told her that there was no way that stuff was going to sell, so I wasn’t going to bother. Now she is always on me to teach her to use ebay. I told her that they have step-by-step instructions and that it was very easy to use, but she insists that I write out step by step instructions for her. I just avoid her now.

30

Just buy her Ebay for Dummies or something similar as a Holiday Gift kinda thing. Then you take care of the holiday shopping and every time they start to bug you, you just say, “Oh, I know that book I gave you would cover it. If you haven’t read it, you should.”

31

Just yesterday one of my co-workers was asked to “help” an attorney who rents out an office at our firm with a document.

Turns out this woman didn’t have any idea how to double-space her document, so – to quote Dave Barry, I swear I am not making this up! – she had hit two returns at the end of every line! My poor co-worker had to go through a ten-page document and take out all the returns just so she could correct the damn thing!

An $80,000 legal education and she never learned how to double-space a document???

I don’t mind being free tech support for people who are willing to learn. This same co-worker admits she’s hopelessly ignorant, but ignorant does not equal stupid or unwilling, and in her case she’s really been soaking up everything I can teach her and putting it into action. It’s a pleasure offering free tech support to someone who actually learns. But then there’s my idiot boss, who’ll type up a whole letter he wants me to send out – then print it out and delete the file without saving it, forcing me to retype the whole damn thing. I cannot tell you how many times I have told him, “Just type it up in an email so I can at least cut and paste it!”

Of course, that’s also one reason why I’m quitting my job. :rolleyes:

32

I sorta hate to ask, but (assuming MS Word was used) why didn’t your co-worker use the Replace function to turn all double carriage returns into a regular space? That would’ve been a lot easier than doing it manually…

33

When I worked in IT, I had detailed directions for folks like this, and when they called me to say “I can’t dooooo it!” I’d say, “OK, go through it step by step, and tell me which part you are getting stuck at.” Of couse, they wouldn’t get stuck because the directions were RIGHT THERE. I refused to do their work for them, and if they continued to bug me, I suggested “training” for them, which usually resulted in a few hours of one on one with me- BORING, horrible Windows training. Going over job duties/procedures ad nauseum. I find that “I can’t leeeearn it!” whine extraordinarily annoying.

I used to tell my computer students (adult business people) who would say “OH, I just can’t use a computer! ha ha!” “What would you think of someone who refused to learn to use a telephone. I mean, it rings and they look at it all freaked out and call you over to answer it? This is the same thing. Follow the instructons, do the work, and stop being proud of ignorance. Those days are long over and your cries of 'I don’t get computers!!” will be the one thing your boss remembers come review time or when he/she’s interviewing a potential replacement for you. Willful ignorance is nothing to laugh about."

I never had a single student that didn’t learn after that. I guess it put it in perspective for them.

34

I think she did, Leaper. But we were just so totally appalled at this woman’s ignorance, we were completely stunned. At least my co-worker tries to learn, and is always thrilled when I show her new stuff.

My new job, they’re in the process of switching from WordPerfect to Word, so since I’m very good in both, I suspect I may be serving as free Word trainer a lot there, too. Which is actually fine, as long as people respond like my current co-worker. As compared to another co-worker who shares our printer, and one day recently was sighing over a document that had an awkward page break because he was putting in hard page breaks instead of using widow/orphan control. I offered to show him how to do it, and he just kind of muttered under his breath and stalked off. Fine, waste your time, idiot. Just don’t ask me to fix stuff for you when you refuse to learn how to do it yourself.

35

I don’t think Word can find two hard returns and replace them with one. The find/replace command works on characters, not on formatting. I just tried it, and I couldn’t get Word to recognize a hard return. Not that you should be using hard returns in a document at all, unless you are between paragraphs. Good way to get your parsing screwed up.

This is another one of my peeves - people who don’t format documents right the first time. If you set your tabs and indents and styles and such right, Word will take care of all your changes for you with the click of a mouse. One of my missions in life is to replace all instances of multiple tabs with a properly set tab when I come across them.

And just for the record, I’m a Microsoft Word 2000 Expert User. I got the certificate yesterday. :smiley:

36

I forgot to add that I think this is just beautiful. “Willful ignorance” - that sums it up very nicely.

“Yes, I know that I don’t {insert easily learned skill here} very well, but I prefer to just laugh about it instead of actually doing any of the things I could be doing to fix it.”

We all have strengths and weaknesses, but I’ll be damned if I act like any of my weaknesses are a joke that I can’t do anything about.

37

Yes it can. In the replace dialog, there is an extra drop-down menu called (something like) format, which includes hard returns.

38

Yes, featherlou, it can – I’ve done it. Don’t have Word on this computer so can’t remember, but there’s definitely an extra option to search for formatting characters. I’ve searched for all kinds of formatting in Word, including multiple hard returns. (Just don’t get me started on the general suckiness of Word; even though I don’t have the Expert certificate to prove it, I’m pretty close to the Expert level and I think it is the most abominable excrescence of a word processing program ever created!)

But I digress from the thread, which is definitely “willful ignorance.” A great phrase indeed. If even my 82-year-old mother can learn new things with technology, there’s no excuse for folks half her age to proudly exclaim that they’re too old. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s also no excuse for 20-somethings to call 40-somethings “stupid” who don’t know how to do some things on a computer, when they’ve never had occasion to learn since they’ve only been using computers for a very short time in relation to their whole lives, as I’ve seen happen.

39

My copy of word 97 sr-1 in the replace dialog box has a button on the bottom that allows you to put in format characters in the search. I had to press the more botton to bring up the extra options. I successfully replaced 2 returns with a space.

40

I’ve since learned to quickly dodge these people as soon as possible. You can tell the difference between the ones who will suck the life out of you, and the ones who will actually learn from your knowledge. Over the years, I’ve been putting out this vibe that basically says, “stay the fuck away from me if you’re an idiot”. So far it works. When a repeat offender comes to me, I basically snap back at them. Not yelling, but a real stern voice that kinda makes them think twice about what they’re asking. “Did you read the tutorial?”, “how about the help screens?” Yeah I sound condescending, but damnit, if I can figure it out, you can too, it really, REALLY isn’t that hard.

Soon, my questions begin to overpower theirs, and they no longer want anything to do with me. They also probably think I’m an asshole, but I know who the real asshole is.

Now you probably think I’m an asshole, but let me say this, I’m glad to help you if you’re going to learn from it, but if you keep coming back to me with the same problems, over and over, forget it.