2000-12-05 - 14:46:16
Moonlighting as Miss Angel, the Extraordinary Help Desk Girl

Nope, not just one entry today. I thought I'd inject a little humor into my diary:

Here's a sampling of the various computer problems I've been asked to solve for my co-workers. I am making NONE of these up.

1. "Could you help me? My subordinate isn't here, and his computer makes a lot of noise. It's hard to concentrate. How do I stop it without turning off his computer?" (It was the screensaver. My solution: Turn off the speakers.)

2. "When I print my spreadsheet, the last column prints on a separate page. I don't want it to do that." (My solution: Change the width of the columns to fit the page. Easy to check in Print Preview).

3. "I started typing on one of those Word document forms, and my typing went right over what was already there! What's wrong with it?" (My comment: "Did you press the Insert key?")

4. "This budget spreadsheet isn't adding up the numbers anymore! What's wrong?" (Upon investigation, it turned out they didn't like seeing all the zeroes in the sum column. So they deleted them ... taking the formulas away with them!)

5. "I can't find my document!" (Me: "Where did you save it?") "I just hit SAVE ..." (Me: "Then look in My Documents.") "But I didn't want it to save there!" (Me: "Then you have to tell it to save somewhere else.") "Ohhhhhh ..."

6. "I can't open this document! It keeps telling me there's a malfunction, and I have to restart my computer!" (I glance at their desktop and see a dos-program icon: "Hmmm. You said it's a text document?") "It's just an email from my daughter that I wanted to print out." ("What did you save it as?") "I used my daughter's email address ... I thought it would make it easier to remember." (Of course, the address ended in ".com" ... So I changed it to ".txt" ...)

I'll add a few more throughout the day as I they occur to me. =^)