A woman walked into our office one afternoon with a laptop bag in her hand. She had a smile on her face and seemed friendly enough.
"I have come for my new loan." She exclaimed excitedly, assuming we were psychic. You know what they say about assumption being the mother of all.... Enough said!
It's amazing how many people walk into our office like that, making announcements and believing we automatically know all the details of what they are talking about.
After a short question and answer session we discover that she was sent over by her manager, on the off chance that she could return a temporary laptop and have it replaced with a permanent loan.
A senior colleague checked our rather long waiting list and we found her name tagged on to the bottom. We decided to upgrade the laptop she had brought back and assign that one to her. We explain this too her, and she didn't look too happy about it.
"I think the battery is on its way out on that one, the laptop keeps turning itself off after a few minutes, unless it's plugged in. That's no good to me" she says eyeing up the stack of new laptops on the desk. Wait for it...
"We can soon change that." I say making my way to the store room and grabbing a brand new battery out of the box.
Here it comes...
"Can't you just give me one of those nice new shiny ones?" She croons, planting a sickly smile on her lips and squinting her eyes.
"No, sorry" my colleague replies firmly. "This one is fairly new anyway." This was true, it was one of the best models we have.
The woman's cheesy grin fell in disappointment.
We then quickly checked what the laptop needed, but for some reason the woman kept getting involved.
"Does it need imaging with the new Windows?" My colleague asks me.
"No, it's got it!" She pipes in.
"Yes" I reply.
"What memory has it got?" He asks.
"Well it's slow..." the woman chimes in.
"2GB" I tell him "doesn't need any more."
"Has it had the latest BIOS?"
"Yes" She says.
"No" I say.
My colleague and I look at each other half amused, half confused and a little annoyed at the woman's interruptions with her apparent technical knowledge.
We asked her to come back in about four hours while we sorted the laptop out for her. This made her smile fade completely as she was unable to take it away at that instant. But the laptop's software was a year out of date.
With another longing look at the pile of new laptops she leaves, cheesy grin, useless technical advice and all.
Two hours later she's back and wanting her laptop. Obviously by this time the laptop is only half-finished.
"It's not ready yet" my colleague tells her as he had been working on it. "I thought you were coming by later."
Her eyes are locked on the stack of new laptops again and she is almost salivating.
"I have a meeting at another site and I really need to do some work on it tonight. Any chance you can issue me one that is ready? One of those new ones maybe?"
How convenient! My spider sense tells me this was her plan all along.
"No I can't, they are not for loan stock" my colleague tells her again. "But you can have one of these" he says picking up one of the oldest model laptops we have, much to her chagrin. I could see her biting her lip. The plan had slightly misfired.
The paper work was filled out, the laptop was assigned and she successfully logged on. But the fun didn't end there.
"What printers do you need connecting too?" My colleague asks her.
"Oh I can do that myself." She says as she starts to clickity clack on the keyboard. "I don't know why so many people have problems; most of it is common sense." She then went on to tell us how easy it had been to install a new hard drive in her desktop PC at home, using weird and wonderful words to describe the process, such as "cable thingy" and "jiminy bob."
Anyway she managed to set her email up, not surprising as all she needed to do was double click the icon, and click the next and finish buttons on the wizard.
She then attempted to add her printers, my colleague had gone to answer his phone and after watching her for about five minutes I finally took over. She had been performing a simple task in the most difficult way possible. I took pity on my own sanity and took over the laptop.
"Which printers do you need?"
She gives me a room number and I find there is two on the server.
"Which one do you want?"
"Urrm, not sure, can you add them both?"
To avoid argument I do so. I then ask if she needs any others.
She nods and gives me another room number. A printer I can't find on the print server.
"Are you sure that's the right room number?"
"Oh yes, I was in there earlier printing from the other machines."
I phoned another colleague and asked him why the printer was not on the server, he said it wasn't because there was no printer in that room yet.
The woman looked only mildly embarrassed and confessed to not being sure of the room number, and would "get back to us on it." I am very much looking forward to that (NOT!)
My colleague came back just I as I was asking her if she needed anything else. Much to my relief she said "No, I can install any other software I need myself."
I just smiled to myself thinking "No you won't, you don't have the rights to install anything. Phew! That should prevent a few mishaps."
All was set up, and we were then treated to another lecture on how easy IT and computing was and why she couldn't understand "why some people just can't understand some of it."
Once she was gone we both sat down, almost exhausted from her stupidity and constant banter.
Some people maybe technologically challenged, but others like these are technologically dangerous...
EXTRA, EXTRA:
A week later and the woman is back up at our office, insisting that her laptop is faulty. Was this yet another fruitless ploy to get her hands on a brand spanking new laptop?
"It's a hardware fault, I am sure of it" she informs us. "The network card is faulty, it won't connect to anything."
One of the guys from the office goes over to take a look, asking how and why she had come to this sudden diagnosis.
"The wireless doesn't work. It's the network card that's the problem" she tells us in a learned voice.
To cut a long story short, my colleague took a quick look, only to discover that the woman had connected to the 'wrong' wireless network and so had access to nothing. He disconnected it, logged it on to the correct network and strangely enough it worked without any problems.
Haa haa, her plan had been foiled again...
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