temporal awareness

First one from today: “Why is my account locked out?” “Because you typed in the password wrong.” “Why did I type it in wrong?” “…Dyslexia?” Second one, overheard: “Darlin, if your computer isn’t connected to the internet, it isn’t going to get online!…..No, the internet is not in your computer…” Gotta love explaining the basics…

“My email isn’t coming until the day after people send it!” This is actually a fairly common problem, and nine times out of ten, here’s the problem: The eagle-eyed among you may notice that the “Today” group is collapsed, which would cause any email to only be visible when it moves into the “Yesterday” group.…

This has happened about fifteen times today, with slight variations: Me: “Can you read the words on the screen to me?” User: “It’s blue!” Ugh. UPDATED: This day just gets better: User: “I’m out of columns in Excel!” Me: “Um, Scroll down?” User: “Oh!  Will that work every time?”

One of the many varieties of callers that we get is “The Automaton.”  This type of user is trained to do their job by rote instead of understanding what it is they are actually doing.  All they know is that if they click the mouse here and type this word here the computer won’t yell…