From: jwgh at earthlink.net
Subject: Amusing anecdote
Date: Fri Oct 16 19:31:34 1998
Message-ID: <jwgh-1610982230060001@1cust138.tnt35.nyc3.da.uu.net>
Newsgroups: alt.tech-support.recovery

Do you know someone whom you genuinely like and make every allowance for, but who constantly reveals herself to be a complete luser? Probably not.

Still, one of my cow-orkers (not in my department, but reports to the same boss and for a while was in the same room as us) is such a person. Why do the people in our department put up with her? Probably some combination of the following:

1. She's genuinely nice and cheerful, and not in an annoying way.
2. Her enemies are also our own.
3. When she starting working here, she was straight out of college, and it was entertaining to watch her natural enthusiasm start to transform into our natural cynicism and disgust with the idiocy that is rampant in certain sectors of our company.
4. We had to share an office with her, and we didn't want this to make any of us miserable; hence, we made allowances for her that we would not normally make for others.
5. OK, I admit that the fact she was an attractive young woman among dorky-looking young men may have had something to do with it. Though I don't think as much as you might think.

Well, anyway, she's out on her own now so we don't see her as much. Occasionally she makes a call to the help desk (which I'm a member of) with a request of some kind. Today she called to ask for the Office 97 CD so she could install Excel 97, because of its html-writing features (of which I know little and wish to know even less).

Because I know her I was a little skeptical of her ability to do the installation on her own, so I brought the CD up with the intention of staying in the area to keep an eye on the installation. I was not, however, prepared for what I actually saw her do.

She took the CD from me and attempted to poke it into the floppy drive.

Naturally, this didn't work; for one thing, the aperature of the floppy drive was not nearly large enough to admit the CD. When I pointed out her error, she then tried to slide it into the crack underneath the CD drive. I then showed her how to open the CD drive.

Things didn't improve much after that; before long I decided it would be best for me to just do it for her, which I did. Then I left.

Somewhat amazingly, I kept a straight face through the whole thing; perhaps that's because my overwhelming emotion was not amusement so much as awe.

Just a short fragment of my day from hell,
jwgh

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