It's vexed me for years and years that end users seem unable to comprehend very simple things like what a Web browser is, the difference between Windows and Office, and how to come up with effective search terms to type into Google.
In more recent years, I have come to understand that, for some of these people, simply putting a thing in a box and affixing a label to it is a nigh-impossible process.
Today I received a desktop computer that was just thrown into a box with no padding whatsoever -- a current model and redeployable (well, maybe not anymore) -- and an old, past-end-of-life laptop packed inside of multiple boxes and wrapped in layer after layer of bubble wrap with tape. The former shipped from out-of-state, while the latter came from an office two blocks away from mine. Would be nice if they could work out some sort of happy medium.
Two weeks ago I missed a day of work with a migraine. The day after that I scrambled and played catchup and shipped two days' worth of computers in one day. Turnaround time from shipping a new computer to receiving the old one is right about two weeks, so today I was hit with two days' worth of returns in one day.
And okay, I've spent enough of this post complaining about stupid users that I'll take a moment and acknowledge my own stupid fuckup of the day.
I had a giant pile of boxes in front of me and a small pile of outbound machines, and I started to stress out about it a little. And I made a mistake.
I took a break from processing returns to ship a machine out, and I got my wires crossed and started going through the return process. I deleted a user's old computer and its access group from ActiveDirectory, before shipping her replacement. And since I don't have access to fix that, I had to ask my coworker to take care of it.
It's about that time I decided I should probably take some deep breaths and try to relax before doing anything else -- not just for fear of more sloppy mistakes, but because if I'm not careful I'll give myself another migraine, and then I'll just be going through this same song and dance again in a couple weeks.
Still opted not to take a break right away -- because that just means more crap I gotta do tomorrow -- but I slowed down a bit. Got through maybe half the stack, finally got enough facefuls of dust from old Dells that I decided to call it quits for the day.
So, more to do tomorrow. But I guess that's the closest thing a temp ever gets to job security.