A different breed

Attorneys are brilliant people at what they do… until you sit one in front of a computer.

I contract for a law firm as an applications trainer and help desk coordinator. It never ceases to amaze me how much assistance officers of the court need for simple tasks. One more handholding session and I’m filing a sexual harassment suit.

I work for attorneys who can’t see the tops of their desks, let alone navigate to their Desktop. I babysit one savant who doesn’t know how to do anything except hit Reply on an email. There are 180,000 items in his Inbox. He opens his Outlook and it’s like Christmas everyday. You know, the anticipation of getting a Hallmark greeting from everyone you ever knew.

Last week, a partner called and asked if I could recover a Microsoft Word document. Yes, that’s a tricky feat, but with the right skills and luck, I am successful more often than not. “Did Word crash?” I asked. Crashing triggers the easiest file to recover — the automatic backup. He said no. “Well how did you lose it?”

Mind you, the answer is generally right there in front of your face, but attorneys panic. “There was this little thingy,” he said, in non-technical terms, “that I saw for just a second on my computer and I said no.” Being the skilled go-to person that I am, I quickly translated his words in my mind to “A dialog box popped up on my monitor screen and prompted me to save the file. I clicked No like a dummy (that’s the literal translation in IT terms) to close the file without saving my changes.”

Now I pride myself on being a magician. I can multi-task. I can fix a broken document, take a help desk call, profile a computer, and listen to a webinar — all at the same time. I can make a gourmet dinner out of pork ‘n beans, ground round, and tomato sauce. I can hide ten pounds in my not-so-fitted black dress. But I’ll be darned, I cannot bring back text on a page that was closed without saving. If I could do that, I’d certainly take that show on the road.

“Can’t you make it so it doesn’t let me say No?” he continued. I visualized a floating “No” option that evaded the mouse click. But we all knew that would be like programming an attorney to never have a rush job that needs to go out ASAP again.

I’ve got a better idea, I thought. Why don’t you just say Yes when it prompts you to save? You can say yes to I want it now, and, obviously, to those chips and dip in the lunchroom. This is all going on silently in my head, of course, because not only am I skilled in software, I am also very diplomatic. “I’ll call our developer,” I calmly say, “and ask him if he knows anything we can do about that for you.”

I’m sure Bill Gates will take my call and jump right on this request.

Related posts:

1. The idiot behind the helpdesk
2. The corny geek