I am often in the English dept. offices on my college campuses quite early in the morning, as I have early classes to teach. A few other profs will be there as well. We part-timers don’t have our own offices but we do have a common work area.
Invariably, students will wander in and ask the following:
“Are you the secretary? I need help with blah blah.”
Our response: “No, I’m not, and you can see from the note on her door that she is not in yet, and I can’t help you with blah blah.”
Student: “Well, who do I go to? When will she be in?” :rolleyes:
Or:
Student: “Can I use the computer just for a minute? I need to print something.”
“You have to be able to log in as faculty or staff. And this printer is only for dept. use. You can use the library or writing center when they open.”
“But I have to turn it in RIGHT NOW.”
:rolleyes: (Why do they always wait till the last minute??)
Or:
“Where is Prof. So and So’s office?”
“That should be on your syllabus.”
“Uhhhhhhhh…”
“Or you can check the posting on the wall of all the profs’ office hours.”
“I’m not sure of the name.”
{It’s the middle of the freaking semester! You don’t know the name? What?!}
“Is s/he in?”
“I don’t know anyone’s office hours. Go see what it says on the office door.”
…
“It says her office hours start in ----- minutes/hours.”
“Then you can come back.”
“But I really need to talk to _____ NOW.”
{Email, sonny. Phone call. See prof in class. Do you think we all sleep under our desks and live 24/7 on the campus? Yep, you probably do think that.}
What is worse than all of that is when the vaguely human noisebox on the other end of the line starts screaming at you saying “I called you because THEY WANT TO CHARGE ME MONEY”.
A short bit of free support from us *for our product *which you own does NOT translate into “we support everyone elses shit too!”
Then they come back with “but I’m using it with YOUR PRODUCT!”
Yes, and I still cannot tell you your Facebook password.
I honestly had a guy write several letters, one to our CEO, one to my boss (whose email he got from someone who shouldn’t have given it to him) all because I could not tell him his AT&T wifi password. No explanation about not working for them or not having access to that made the slightest dent. It was “horrible customer service” and I was “arrogant and rude” for “refusing to help”. :rolleyes: What was worse was I had a moron supervisor at that time (since thankfully fired) who seemed to think that he had to take every complaint seriously and that we had to give a Soviet Show Trial type “confession” of what we did wrong and be contrite about it or we were not being serious about our job. He was not happy when I absolutely refused to cooperate with that shit.
I can take hours and hours of stupid or merely ignorant people when they are pleasant in dealing with me and make an actual effort. What is making me look for another job are people like the guy above.
Look folks: B,C,D,E,G,P,T,V,Z all sound the same on a bad connection or in some people’s voices. That’s NINE letters out of 26 that sound very similar. F and S can sound a lot alike too under some conditions.
I don’t like asking people to repeat their serial number any more than they like repeating it. But I have to have it down before I can do anything.
That’s one of those things that you know intellectually, but don’t actually process at the moment. I’ll do better, promise.
Mine: picture me, 4000 patients waiting to be triaged and I go out to look at what’s coming up and approximately 3997 of them “just have a quick question” - “Excuse me, but I just need some blood drawn and the results sent to my doctor’s office.” “Can you tell me the status on Weaver?” “How long do I have to wait to see about my knee I twisted last week?”
Really? You waited until 2:00 am on a Saturday night to do this? Were you bored? Are you drunk? Even if you work the overnight shift, surely you don’t think that wading in a sea of people to ask me to take your blood for a doctor’s office test was a good use of emergency medicine. I’m trying to make sure there is no one having a baby or a heart attack in the waiting room while I sort through the ear aches that have been going on for “oh, about a month now”. Excuse me while I can’t hear your whining about how you may as well have not bothered to drive down here for your blood to be drawn for your regular office visit.
Note, I did ask him if he had any medical emergency or need for the tests (I’m trying to rule out 'Oh holy crap I have a fast advancing cancer/internal bleeding and my doc sent me here). I also asked if there was any other way we could help him. He responded by angrily tearing up his information sheet in my face, dramatically dropping it inches from me and telling me that if I couldn’t accommodate him then he might as well have saved the trip.
“If I bluetooth my computer to my refrigerator while at the same time a train leaves Chicago headed west going 37mph and the radius of a collapsing star somewhere in the vicinity of Betelguese is X minus the square root of the volume of Yankee Stadium in Cubic Angstroms…”
Ever consider the notion that the note isn’t for you? We had an office gizmo go on the fritz and a repair dude repair was dispatched to come and deal with it. Meanwhile, about a dozen people needed to use it. A big note saying “Does Not Work” was taped to it to prevent our employees from plugging it back in and further frakking it up.
People who are adamant that they NEED this report yesterday, and that it’s critical to the business, etc…
Then, when there’s a front-end glitch with the data entry, I realize that they have no clue and think that there’s something wrong with the report, because it doesn’t look like they expect, despite that the report is quite accurately showing the faulty data entry on the front end.
I can’t help but wonder how massively vital and time-critical this report was, if they’re too clueless to even know how to interpret what it’s showing correctly.
People that fill out important forms in cursive or with atrocious handwriting drive me crazy. Look, guys, we need to be able to read this information so we can verify the paperwork is correct and that it is being sent to the right place. By the time your paperwork gets to my department we’re likely looking at a copy of a copy (we NEVER get the originals) so it’s hard enough to read this shit without you getting fancy with your penmanship. Knock it off.
[Conservative Attack Ad] The thingometer. It didn’t get tagged FOR YOU [/Conservative Attack Ad]
But lately, our biomeds have been letting us down. We ship the thingometers to Winnipeg, get them tech’ed and they send us them back without updated stickers.
I want to send them a sticker to put up and say “remember to update the stickers.”
When I was a grad student, my office was between two elevators in a busy classroom building. Apparently, clueless freshmen decided my little cubby hole was where the janitor was supposed to be. Even after I put a sign on the door that said:
PoorYorick
Department of Anthropology
I AM NOT THE JANITOR
I’d still get people knocking on my door, telling me that someone had thrown up in room 203 or wondering if I had found their knapsack.
The manager has appointed himself Official Music Provider. It’s cranked up so loud it makes my ears bleed. And it’s trash; filthy gangsta rap mixed with wannabe Panteras grunting over their guitar power chords.
We have established feasibility guidelines that product development always wants to violate. Sometimes we’ll allow (in manufacturing) a deviation based on a low JPH or containability index, but this serves as a precedent for future, open-book violation of our manufacturing guidelines.
As another IT guy, the only thing worse than people who assume computers are hard and they can’t learn anything about them (like how to write down a decent problem report when it breaks) are the people who assume because they upgraded Windows on their home PC that everything I do is easy/trivial.
I got a guy on Friday, though. He’s the head of one of our development teams (specifically, the government contracts one) and I asked him a question about how his guys used one of the 3rd-party libraries we pay for. He wondered why I would even care, and ended up getting a half-hour diatribe on the specific reporting requirements and how his division’s method of charging potentially interacted with it based on both the letter and the spirit of the contracted agreement.
Admittedly, he only got the diatribe because as long as I kept it up, he kept giving me more and more of the information that I was trying to get via simple request.
The two hens a couple of cubicles over that drive me nuts with their whispering gossip. I could care less who their talking about. But the sound of pst pst pst pst pst pst for an hour is gratting to my ears and enough for me to want to jump out of my seat and yell I AM CORNHOLIO and run down the hall banging a pot.
Not where I currently work. but at the wildlife park I used to be at- first, and worst, the people who would phone up (or show up) with a pet they’d bought that they didn’t want because it was too big, too boring or ate too much, and genuinely believe it was somehow our problem. I had people yelling ‘well what am I supposed to do with it?!’ after being told that no, we did not have facilities to take their unwanted animal they should never have bought, and occasionally they’d just dump it in the car park (had giant fish dumped in trash bins, which promptly died because, y’know, they don’t actually make them out of fish-safe plastic).
Also, similar were the people who thought we had an obligation to tell them how to look after the unsuitable pet they just bought. Ok, I didn’t mind if it was a situation like ‘my neighbour just got rushed to hospital, and I’m trying to look after her pet lizard’, I’ll happily go through it’s proper care and feeding with you then, but you bought it without checking how to look after it? You’re not even calling the place you bought it from? You’re calling someone who’s actually supposed to be answering the phone to take group bookings and answer queries from actual customers, and you’re trying to guilt trip me into thinking it’s my fault that you fucked up and bought something you shouldn’t have had, and now it might die? Piss off. Buy a book, and stop buying stupid pets.
Also, people cannot read signs. It’s true. I would get asked multiple times a day ‘Is the outside section through this door?’ by people pointing at the door with ‘Outside section this way!’ written on it in large friendly letters. The odd thing about that is that it didn’t matter what you answered with- I several times replied ‘Naah, we just wrote ‘Outside section this way!’ on it to confuse people’, and only ever got a sheepish grin and them going out that way anyway.
