Tuesday, October 9, 2007

You can't fix stupid!

Boring Monday morning, I walked into my cubicle. I was still half asleep even though it was way past 9 am. Don't blame me. No amount of sleep on the weekends is ever enough to bring a spring into my step to get to work on Monday. Every week, I suffer from a severe case of the Mondays.

As I browsed through the crapload of emails in Outlook I realised that the bossman was out of town for the week. Yay, I went for a split second without any tangible reason. I don't know what it is that when the boss is not around I feel more relaxed, because it's never like he's on my ass when he's around. This week though I didn't have much time to relax since there was a lot of crap flying all over the place which needed to be put back where it belonged. I had been delaying some things for quite a while now and had come to the conclusion that it had to be sorted out quickly. Technically, I have 8 weeks to get it done this year. At the end of the 8th week, I'll be on a monthlong vacation. Sweeeet!

Sipping on some green tea, I started working. Nothing gets me in the mood to complete work than the thought of an upcoming vacation :) Fifteen minutes later I got an email marked with High priority. This was sent by a user for whom I'd setup some Test cases for UAT. First thought - Daim! What did I miss now?! Then I went through his email and by the time I got to the end I fell off my chair laughing.

This guy was trying to logon to the system and was having issues. So he sent me stepwise screenshots of what he was doing and how he was unable to get in. Ofcourse the system was up and running. But how the hell can you login to a system if you hit CANCEL after entering your username and password?!?! I mean come on! That I am the system admin does not mean that I need to tell people to hit OK or press the Enter key on the keyboard to login. Isn't that basic computer sense? This coming from a 40 something guy who is a Business Analyst. Really? Gawd! How can someone not realise such a basic mistake after having attempted it a couple of times already and then while doing the same thing to take screenshots of the process?

Mr Ron White, your words are gospel. If something was wrong with the system I would've gone and fixed it. But "You can't fix stupid. There's not a pill you can take; there's not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever." Amen.

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