Today at work was a varying array of tedious boredom with little interesting incidents being reported, however there are always those that come along just to make you wonder why you bother and contemplate a cartoon strip where these people are escaping from a giant evolutionary Darwin based death. Today's prize winning exemplar of stupidity is for the following exchange
Customer: 'I phoned up 5minutes ago about accessing my documents off campus, and was told to remote desktop to xxx.xxxx.com but it doesn't seem to be working. Can you help me?
Me: 'Do you have and are you connected to the Internet?'
Customer: 'No, do i need to be?'
Me: 'yeah, then you shouldn't have any problems'
Customer: 'Ok Thanks bye'
Me: 'bye'
At this point i put the phone down and just stare at it in complete disbelief, I am fully aware that this is currently university resit period and we have many instances like this especially at this time of year. But really what do they expect me to say 'No, you don't need an Internet connection - the Internet works just like magic pixies carrying lumps of data in there back and fly off to there destination very very quickly. I'll let you in on a secret - the Internet cable, telephone socket, modem etc are all just empty boxes purely for decoration to make us technical staff look like we know what we are doing'
This also helps making me think that sometimes the customers just contact us purely for social interaction or to give us something to do, its like we as IT staff are zoo animals that need occasional petting or affection to continue our demoralizing existence just changing passwords and trying not to offend people that probably use post it notes to remember how to breathe.
