In one of my jobs, I was – yippee! – given a laptop with all the bells and whistles. It wasn’t new, but I didn’t care. Except for one thing.
Every time I turned it on, the laptop tried to synch up with servers, wireless accounts, software and what-have-you that once existed, but didn’t any longer. It was unsettling to be warned of impending security breaches, or commanded to upgrade stuff with a password that I didn’t have.
Now if you haven’t guessed already, I am not a tech-savvy person: we still have rotary-dial phones in our house (that have outlasted every other piece of technology in our possession, thank you very much). So after I exhausted my meager store of ideas, I called in the IT guru for help.
She took one look at all the pop-ups on my screen, and carefully explained to me how to “click on the x,” of each box, and the pop-ups would go away. When I asked, she admitted that all the warnings and notifications could be removed from my laptop, but that would take time, and it’s easier to just close the boxes.
Well, yeah, it’s easier to just close the boxes, but it left me wondering what other duties she was managing in such an indifferent manner. Jobs exist because there are problems to solve – a phone that rings, clients wanting solutions, a tricky issue between demand and resources. When you skate past the problem, people will eventually notice. When you solve the problems, you’re doing your job. When you find the problem and solve it before anyone asks you to, you’re doing your job really well.
This hit a "Oh, I can relate" vein in my body.
ReplyDeleteWorse, if you would have dealt with a problem from the IT Guru . . . in the same manner . . . she would have most likely had something to say to you or your boss.
11 years dealing with people who did the least and expected the most drove me bonkers. Therefore, it was not as hard to be laid off as I thought it was going to be . . . and I was able to leave with an xp laptop!!! Yes, it is old!