In my world

Welcome to what I have to say. Welcome to a doormat into a conceited, distracted, impulsive, and admittedly ignorant viewpoint on the world. Welcome to a place where the most consistent aspect of my rants will be a continually expanding list of epiphanies, usually occurring ten years later for me than for anyone else.

I work in a company that's small enough you can have a beer with your boss on a Friday, but large enough you need to peer warily over your shoulder when you crack an edgy joke. Littered throughout my company nestled here in the suburbs of Kansas City are employees with varying levels of education, mixes of races, differences in ages, and so on and so forth.

My job in this company --with this "family" of coworkers-- is two-fold (or 30-fold depending on whom you ask). Firstly, I am the IT department for this particular branch of the company. Secondly, I do programming for the company, which can range from building small javascript applications to working closely with data for our clients.

Today's post is a story involving a particularly ludicrous IT endeavor wherein I set out to discover why an Excel file wouldn't open in windows. The employee in question is a female in what I can only assume is her mid somethings. Everything I personally know about this woman screams "ten-t error" (sorry for the obscure reference, but I don't want it to be so obvious as to hurt anyone's actual feelings). From the day I started with the company, this woman has done everything the opposite way I would teach someone to do something, hell anything for that matter. When she's looking for a file, she will open the program corresponding to the file, then use the menu bar to open the file. That works well enough, except for when you have no idea at all about what kind of file you're opening, which has been the case more than once. I've spent more than my fair share of wasted breath trying to explain that PDF's and excel files don't open in Microsoft Word.

There was even a particularly delightful time when she asked me to install a floppy disk drive into her computer so she could install some software for template making that she had at home. (Anyone beginning to grasp the depth of the knowledge base here yet?) That happened about 8 months ago.

Well on this particular occasion, I was called into her office to examine why an excel file wouldn't open. The file in question was an excel file from Word 2003 or 2007 or some such year, basically it was an .xlsx extension. We have installed on all the machines a converter for such occasions, since we, being on the cutting edge of technology, are still running the Microsoft Office 2000. As it turns out, you have to download any files locally before they can be converted. You can't simply choose the "Open" option, which makes sense.

Well, if you work in IT, then you know full well that when A doesn't work, you try B. So if A is open, B is "Save file to disk". At least in her browser it is spelled out in that exact manner for saving documents attached to emails, such as the one she was trying to access. So to paint the rest of this picture in less than a million words, I'm in her office hovering behind her as she clicks through the prompts and I say, "We can't just open the file, because the converter won't work. We'll have to save the file first. So just click on the file again, when the prompt comes up click save to disk."

At that moment, she turned to me, with the single most serious expression I have ever seen on anyone's face before and said, "I don't have a disk."

Think about that for a second.

Yes, she thought for sure she was going to need a floppy disk to finish this process. A 3 and 1/2 inch floppy diskette. I fear that even many of you reading this now are googling floppy disks to try and catch on to the joke.