So anyways at half ten tonight, when I usually try to calm down and subjugate the bitter frustrations of another wasted day I get a call from somebody I think I met once in my old company 2 years ago who (from what I can make out) now wants me to help her with a computer, no wait a “caamputher problem”. Turns out this problem is helping her daughter send in an application to join the Guards. She’s doing this through publicjobs.ie. She’d registered there a few years ago but now couldn’t remember her username and password and the closing date is tomorrow so aah! Big panic!!.
I thank god I don’t have to deal with the deep sea octopus that is a member of the general public in my job with their glaring eyes and flailing tentacles of desperation and stupidity. Unrestrained by a normal work environment where they can send an irate mail to your manager when you don’t appease them, they are free to be as wildly diverse with how they display their repertoire of variations on a theme of demanding that somwhow you make the impossible happen because they really want it to.
I should have said I was at home and didn’t have an internet connection. I should have said that I was now a pearl diver living in a mud cabin off the coast of Cuba where I was poor but happy. I should have said something other than “OK I’ll help you”
So the closing date is tomorrow and the daughter is working in London. Mammy tells me she can’t fill the thing out herself because she’s not allowed to use the computer where she works. I ask where she works. McDonalds.
I manage to find out her username on the site after a whole lot of Mammy shouting at the fambily, ringing the daughter on another phone and panic looking for passport numbers and pps numbers to answer security challenge questions. I think the whole family were gathered around the phone as well as assorted neighbours, farm animals and the parish priest by the time we were finished. So I get a new password generated and sent to her email address. I ask what her email address is. They don’t know.
They find out after a few minutes “SHE THINKS ITS WWW. (they give her name here) . IE” I do my best to explain how you log into a yahoo account imagining my words being mangled and garbled up by her rural brain and being spat down the other line like mulched newspaper to the swirling cesspit of a mind belonging to her daughter. The daughter replies saying she now re-remembers that it’s defiantly her name (all one word) with the password 123456. It isn’t. Then the mother tells me that the daughter re-re-members there might have been a full stop in it or something, and what did I think it could be. What do I think her password could be. Oh lets speculate upon it! I think I have an Ouija board handy let’s use that! By now I am fully confident that I will leave the country if this girl ever gets into our police farce. I can just see her imagining what a sensible career it will be oooh soo sensible, you can get mortgages so easily!!, have you ever seen a poor guard??, and sure they’ll never put a girl in harms way anyways! You can hear the discussions they’ve had, she’s probably applied for each recruitment drive and gotten a big dirty rejection letter each time, but somehow she might get in this time and so she tries her very best resulting in this panicked phone call to me at – its eleven now!! Half an hour wasted. I explain that there is really nothing I can do about the mail password and without really wanting to sound rude I suggest that if the girl was really motivated she should go and find a cyber café and do this herself AND I give them the contact numbers for the site so they can ring and see if there is another method of getting the password. Of course I don’t say that first thing about the daughter as eloquently as suggested up there because I’m a goddam wimp and I can’t tell people what I really think because I wouldn’t know where to stop and might enjoy it too much and it might be like opening Pandora’s box and they’ve sapped my will to live so I really want them to go away. She finally ends the call with the resolve to get the dopedaughter do something about the issue and I go downstairs and make an immensely satisfying sandwich of melted blue cheese on toast (its delicious, try it chumbtime, especially with ham. Ham comes from pigs you now. Pigs that say oink)
She rings back 15 min later with another suggestion for the password which we dutifully try without results. I reiterate my suggestion that it’s basically up to them now and these aren’t issues anybody apart from a bloody yahoo mail administrator can have any realistic chance of troubleshooting for them so they leave me alone and have to wonder if that Smiths song “Heaven knows I’m miserable now” should be made the theme of IT support chumps wherever they may be.
In my life / why do I smile / at people who I'd much rather kick in the eye
I thank god I don’t have to deal with the deep sea octopus that is a member of the general public in my job with their glaring eyes and flailing tentacles of desperation and stupidity. Unrestrained by a normal work environment where they can send an irate mail to your manager when you don’t appease them, they are free to be as wildly diverse with how they display their repertoire of variations on a theme of demanding that somwhow you make the impossible happen because they really want it to.
I should have said I was at home and didn’t have an internet connection. I should have said that I was now a pearl diver living in a mud cabin off the coast of Cuba where I was poor but happy. I should have said something other than “OK I’ll help you”
So the closing date is tomorrow and the daughter is working in London. Mammy tells me she can’t fill the thing out herself because she’s not allowed to use the computer where she works. I ask where she works. McDonalds.
I manage to find out her username on the site after a whole lot of Mammy shouting at the fambily, ringing the daughter on another phone and panic looking for passport numbers and pps numbers to answer security challenge questions. I think the whole family were gathered around the phone as well as assorted neighbours, farm animals and the parish priest by the time we were finished. So I get a new password generated and sent to her email address. I ask what her email address is. They don’t know.
They find out after a few minutes “SHE THINKS ITS WWW. (they give her name here) . IE” I do my best to explain how you log into a yahoo account imagining my words being mangled and garbled up by her rural brain and being spat down the other line like mulched newspaper to the swirling cesspit of a mind belonging to her daughter. The daughter replies saying she now re-remembers that it’s defiantly her name (all one word) with the password 123456. It isn’t. Then the mother tells me that the daughter re-re-members there might have been a full stop in it or something, and what did I think it could be. What do I think her password could be. Oh lets speculate upon it! I think I have an Ouija board handy let’s use that! By now I am fully confident that I will leave the country if this girl ever gets into our police farce. I can just see her imagining what a sensible career it will be oooh soo sensible, you can get mortgages so easily!!, have you ever seen a poor guard??, and sure they’ll never put a girl in harms way anyways! You can hear the discussions they’ve had, she’s probably applied for each recruitment drive and gotten a big dirty rejection letter each time, but somehow she might get in this time and so she tries her very best resulting in this panicked phone call to me at – its eleven now!! Half an hour wasted. I explain that there is really nothing I can do about the mail password and without really wanting to sound rude I suggest that if the girl was really motivated she should go and find a cyber café and do this herself AND I give them the contact numbers for the site so they can ring and see if there is another method of getting the password. Of course I don’t say that first thing about the daughter as eloquently as suggested up there because I’m a goddam wimp and I can’t tell people what I really think because I wouldn’t know where to stop and might enjoy it too much and it might be like opening Pandora’s box and they’ve sapped my will to live so I really want them to go away. She finally ends the call with the resolve to get the dopedaughter do something about the issue and I go downstairs and make an immensely satisfying sandwich of melted blue cheese on toast (its delicious, try it chumbtime, especially with ham. Ham comes from pigs you now. Pigs that say oink)
She rings back 15 min later with another suggestion for the password which we dutifully try without results. I reiterate my suggestion that it’s basically up to them now and these aren’t issues anybody apart from a bloody yahoo mail administrator can have any realistic chance of troubleshooting for them so they leave me alone and have to wonder if that Smiths song “Heaven knows I’m miserable now” should be made the theme of IT support chumps wherever they may be.
In my life / why do I smile / at people who I'd much rather kick in the eye
