Turning the minirants up to 11ber

The BBQ Pit
61

I don’t think it’s necessarily being berated and hit, I think it’s parents who worry if their kids do anything vaguely important that they might do wrong. I’ve got friends who, while they’ll cheerfully experiment with hobbies and stuff perceived as unimportant, will look up interesting recipes and try them, or learn new skills from youtube, but when faced with anything involving a computer, car or anything like wiring a plug they freeze and wait for someone else to do it. Because those are important. Society sometimes doesn’t help either- I’ve never once changed a bulb in my car without a guy stopping and offering to do it.

The same people who are scared of using a computer will sometimes happily do anything on their smartphone, because they were never told that smartphones were important or valuable and nonono stop, not like that, you’ll break it, move over, let me do it and watch.

I’m having to teach several (older) uni classmates how to use powerpoint at the moment- I’d never used it before the first assignment we had using it either, but I regard computers as something to play with, and they don’t.

62

I taught a computer class that was literally divided into two camps: “I’m a teenage gamer and I worked on my high school paper using Photoshop and InDesign.” vs “Why doesn’t the little arrow on the television part move up when I pick my mouse straight up?”

And I soon realized that the kids raised on computer games were used to trying something multiple ways, nope that didn’t work, try something else, whoops, died again, let’s try something completely different, over and over until they got it.

While the students my age tried one thing and if that didn’t work, often gave up. I noticed one oldster just sitting with her hands in her lap… “I don’t want to break anything.”

63

It really is a matter of being comfortable with something. I was born in 1989 to an electrical engineer who liked to take old computers home from work. While I am NOT good at the physical side, I can usually muddle my way through using new software by reading what it is telling me and having courage to just click on things. To some of my other coworkers, this makes basically magic.

Rant for today - I have the blahs, everything is grey, no motivation. Someone help me get this fire lit so I can do some actual work.

64

This.

I made the mistake of helping a co-worker with a document once. I really like her, and she’s always been pleasant to me. She needed to use an old document to make a new one for a different entity.

Seeing it’d be a matter of making a template, and then just a few “Find and Replace” commands, I made her document in 10 minutes, where she said it normally takes her an hour or two. (She’s not very familiar with Word.)

Well, she is working on a project with another co-worker who is notoriously lazy and is rarely in the office. He’s the type of person who will find a way to shift his work off on someone else whenever possible. In passing, she’d made mention to him that I quickly made those documents for her, and so he contacted me and let me know that the co-worker asked if I could do another one for her. Trying to be a team player, I obliged.

I’m sure it’s obvious who now is the go-to person for this guy, whenever he needs any of those documents done, because I’m “just so good at it.”

It doesn’t take a lot of time out of my day, so it’s not really a huge deal, as much as I’m sure I’m not getting the credit with the people who matter when it comes to the work that is done. (I’m pretty sure the slacker is buddies with our boss.)

I did enjoy getting to draw the line when he wanted me to create an entirely new template, and I think I got the point across to him.

“Well, can’t you just do the research and make it?”

“It’s not my project and it’d take a lot of time. I need to work on my own assignments.”

[Stands there for more than a few seconds]

“Oh… well, thanks anyway.”

Gotta find the moments of pleasure where you can…

65

I’m one of about a half dozen who were in the same training class about a decade ago, we were all being transferred out of the same department and I’m the one who understood the new material the best. Guess who the others come to when they’re stuck. One of them has since been promoted ahead of me and still comes to me with questions!

Yes, I was up for the same promotion. No, she’s in a different unit so is not one of my supervisors.

66

It’s 2018. How do all of these office workers without competence in office work have jobs that require competence in office work?

And here’s a fun old saying: Do something once and it’s a favor; do it twice and it’s your job.

67

Well, if you work at my company, you can pop over to the local non-ABET-accredited school to get yourself a generic engineering certificate, then get magically promoted to project work (a position above engineers who attended traditional four-year programs at accredited universities, and who have pursued EI certificates and PE licensure, but that’s for another thread). Then you get to spend several afternoons per week explaining in detail to the guy who performs inspections what, exactly, he’s supposed to be inspecting, because the drawings and such you passed along to him failed to provide sufficient detail.

And speaking of engineers, I’m wondering where you’re finding all these engineers who don’t want to touch things! One of our more senior engineers loves having the opportunity to do anything network-related; he happily volunteers his services whenever someone is having trouble connecting to a network printer. Any one of us will promptly replenish printer paper – even if it means a trip to the supply closet – or clear a paper jam. Changing toner and such is left to one person though, because meticulous records need to be kept about these particular supplies for some reason.

I completed college before any kind of computer drafting was formally introduced to the curriculum; the few classes that required the use of any of these programs pretty much expected us to figure it out on our own. I have noticed that some of the engineers who are younger than me seem to despise programs like AutoCAD, or at least regard these programs as just another piece of office software installed on the computer. The rest of us thought Christmas had come early when it was announced that the next upgrade would include Inventor LT…it’s fun to see what the program will do, and occasionally we get to use it for actual work purposes. In general though, our engineers are more willing than other employees to keep poking at a piece of software to figure out how to accomplish some task.

68

heh my disabled niece got her first of many gallons of egg nog the weekend before Halloween she was happy (because it means its tme for santa for her) … everyone else not as much……

69

lol I was the computer wiz in jr high and hs …… why ? because I figured out how to edit a program on a disk and save it ……
It was an apple2e and I knew basic … so all I had to do is press the “break” button get back ot the command prompt and just type “list” I fixed a messed up game that someone brought for the class to play but because the start screen was stuck in a loop it never loaded ……I deleted like 30 and saved it and there I was …….

70

The yearly slugfest to knock the cable bill down to something reasonable might have destroyed me this year. I have no idea if I won or not. But the cable supposedly won’t work for a week, although I have the equipment all set up already. We’ll see.

71

Flight got Southwest…woman saving seats! What? Don’t save seats on SW. …whatever. Didn’t frost my cookie.

72

D/p

73

Since when does requesting a rollover of your 401K into an IRA trigger fraud alerts?

I don’t know if this is the way it’s done these days because I don’t do rollovers very often, or if it’s just that John Hancock has crappy procedures. But this rollover is a real pain in the behind. Minutes on hold, several levels of security questioning, more minutes on hold, verifying my identity, acknowledging silly boilerplate about taxes being withheld if I spend the money when I’m clearly doing a rollover… and then the fraud prevention guy makes me call him to confirm that the transaction is legit. And you know that when I get through to him (yeah, he was on another call when I first called), he’s going to make me do the security questioning and id checks all over again. Ugh!

74

Or John Hancock has had a lot of problems with fraud, or at least enough to get some high-level manager’s attention who then required ‘a secure process’.

75

That made me snort. I did manage to book without the book!

It only took a week of near-constant harassment on my part. They’re pretty terrible communicators, so I think I just emailed everyone into compliance.

But I still need the book to book something else for January! Despite being told that I just make bookings, I also play cruise director and cat herder extraordinaire.

76

So after several attempts to get through to the fraud dude, I finally got my rollover cleared. I suspect that the reason it got triggered for extra security is because I failed to correctly answer one or two of the stupid security questions. These are the questions a computer pulls out of your credit history and you have to pick the correct answer. Some of the questions and answers are made up bullcrap, like the one I got this morning: What color was your 1979 Chevy Sprint?

My answer was (barely managing not to sound sarcastic): Well since I’ve never owned a Chevy sprint, I’d say the color was nothing.

Anyway, when I got through to the fraud department, the way they “proved” I was who I said I was? Asking me more security questions! One was exactly the same as one I failed to answer yesterday. It wanted to know the street address where I lived around twenty years ago. I know I lived in that town but, no Bob, I no longer remember the address! Sheesh!

77

I had my final interview with the big company on Monday, and everything went swimmingly. They said they’d get back to me by the end of the week, but it’s Friday at 12:37 pm and I haven’t heard a peep.

The suspense is killing me! I’m going mad, I tell you. Mad!

78

My girlfriend’s mother just died.

79

Once again I have encountered that (probably not uniquely) Midwestern phenomenon, the Aggressive Shit-Headed Samaritan.

I was driving on a busy four-lane road yesterday when the car ahead of me in the left lane suddenly braked and stopped…at a green light. I managed to stop in time, wondering what this driver’s problem was, and saw that he had decided to stop in order to allow someone in the left lane of oncoming traffic to make a left turn across our two lanes.

All well and good, except that our Aggressive Shit-Headed Samaritan’s big-ass SUV was blocking the view of the would-be left turner as well as that of traffic in the right lane who probably were unaware that the Aggressive Shit-Headed Samaritan (to be subsequently referred to as ASHS) was directing a turn right into their path and potentially causing a nice T-bone crash. I barely avoided such an accident about a year ago when another ASHS stopped cold in the left-most lane to let someone turn across three lanes of traffic on a 50 mph major artery and the turning vehicle suddenly appeared in my path.

Dearest ASHS, you do not get celestial brownie points for being an extreme dickhead and endangering others around you.

80

Sorry