mother F'n pager

last night, i was FURIOUS. bent. beside myself. boiling, browned off, corybantic, crazed, demented, desperate, enraged, fierce, frantic, frenetic, frenzied, fuming, hacked, hopping mad, incensed, infuriated, insane, irrational, livid, mad, maddened, maniac, rabid, raging, smoking, steamed, vehement, vicious, violent, wrathful.

in short, i was full of rageohol.

just ask RB when i called him.

(yes, i removed a few synonyms i felt didn't fit)

anyways, there has been an ongoing saga with CC at work. she has her own laptop, and recently obtained an external monitor (19" if i recall our discussions internally). that's all fine and good, however, SHE BOUGHT THEM. which means that officially, WE DON'T SUPPORT them. we don't support the laptop. we don't support the monitor. we don't support connecting HER laptop to HER monitor. yet she doesn't get that. so whenever there is a problem, she pages the IS pager and we sit for 5 minutes as she rambles at 100mph while we try to decipher what her issue is.

this time, she had just returned from vacationandwhenshepluggedinhermonitortoherlaptopshecouldn't *breath* getthemonitortoworkwithherlaptopandshehadthisproblembefore *breath* andRBandCLhelpedherfixitandandand...

turns out that she has written instructions (thanks to RB & CL) as to how to connect her monitor to her laptop. it turned into a massive undertaking on their part, but in the end, she managed to do it. only this time she couldn't find the Fn (that's Function for you non-laptop users) key. after several minutes of her flustered rambling (including a mention that she had called RB at home - a MAJOR no-no, and why i called him afterwards) i tried to help her find the F'n key on her keyboard. on my laptop, it's in the bottom row, between the Ctrl & Windows (the little flag like key) keys. however, i knew that she had a Dell laptop, and mine being Fujitsu, couldn't be sure that it was there. (i think HP puts it right of the spacebar on some models)

so she reads off the bottom row of keys, and sure enuff, no F'n key. so i have her look at the top row, and it's a standard top row (Esc, F1, F2, etc...). while she is reading them off, i'm frantically googling an image of a Dell laptop keyboard. and i finally find one and sure enuff, the F'n key is exactly where mine is. bottom row, left side between Control & Windows keys. at this point in time, i've been on the phone with her for nearly 10 minutes. i'm baffled because i know her laptop has the key. i've seen it. and so i explain to her, that i've found a picture of a Dell laptop keyboard and it shows it where i expected.

then i hear:

oh, maybe it's on the laptop keyboard. oh, i see it now!

how i managed to keep my cool is nothing short of a modern miracle. i think a nervous laugh escaped, and i realize that she was looking at her fucking EXTERNAL keyboard. i had no idea she had one. she never said she had one. and i don't think that RB or CL knew she had one. of course she won't see the F'n key on that, because it's not a LAPTOP configured keyboard. (i don't think i've ever seen a laptop specific external keyboard that includes the F'n key). so i suggest she annotate her notes to indicate that the F'n key is on the LAPTOP keyboard, and that it's in the lower left corner. i'm hoping like hell that she doesn't lose that piece of paper, because if she does, we're all screwed. fortunatley, i heard her pager go off, so we were off the phone a moment later, at which point i just exploded.

i called RB (who had left me VM while i was on the phone with her) and as he asks how things went, all i could do was yell "WHAT A FUCKING DUNCE!". (i think i startled little CO downstairs with my bellow) RB let me rant for the next few minutes and we talked about the situation and we both agree that my first statement is fairly accurate.

she's always been a problem, and my experiences with her have always been painful. she's one of these people who are so unwilling to try and learn a few simple things when it comes to computers that it makes it painful for any of us to deal with her. and to top it off, her manager is aware of this.

example: we have a log that the night managers are required to fill out, and it took her ~2 months to come in to have it set up on her laptop. and when she did, due to a medical condition, she refused to walk down to the IS department, so LJ had to goto where she was sitting and then spent the next 30 mins trying to explain how to use a painfully simple application. (i wonder what goes into the 'Name' field? what does the 'New Patient' button do?) by the time LJ finished working with her, she was clearly frustrated (we were sharing an office at this time) and she ranted for the next 10 minutes. all of the other people who cover were all set after 5 minutes. and i don't consider any of them to be particularly computer literate.

anyways, i'll stop here. suffice is to say, she makes computer illiterate users look like savvy users. and we all suffer for it.

oh yeah, she paged me again at 930pm. her laptop had gone blank. by the time i called her back (a few minutes later), she had discovered that her laptop hadn't been plugged into the wall.