To redirect, she got serious and said, “so, are you looking for a job for real?”
I looked back and said, “what do you have in mind?” She smiled conspiratorially. “Maybe we should hire you.”
I’ve worked in Academic Technology most of my career, but this is the first time I’ve been tech support to spies. You would think that they are more technologically savvy than the rest of the world, but this one guy on the seventh floor still needs me to print his e-mails. PRINT. HIS. E-MAILS…. but that’s nothing compared to the call I got this morning.
“They just made an announcement that the network is down, and my monitor is blinking on and off. Are those two things related?”
I just stared at the phone and said, “ma’am… I hope not.”
Then one of the other seventh floor bigwigs called and said that he needed Firefox installed on his machine. No problem. I tell him to stop by my office when he’s got a chance. He pops downstairs and says, “do I need to turn my computer on?”
Welcome to my life.
Yesterday, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with an officer who couldn’t figure out why his computer wouldn’t power up. It would have been a two-second diagnosis if he’d turned on his camera. Turns out, he’d plugged the power strip into itself instead of into the wall…. and he insisted every time I asked that he’d checked all his physical connections first so that couldn’t possibly be it.
This afternoon I have to help Jones with a PowerPoint and Smith with a Word document. Neither Jones nor Smith know a mouse from a carburetor, but they’re endearing. They are the people you live to help, because even though it takes an incredible amount of patience, you actually enjoy your time with them. The PowerPoint is about… wait. I can’t say that part. Ditto with the Word document.
That’s the hardest part of my job, having to edit myself when I’ve always been so open. I don’t even blog anymore, but it’s worth it for that sweet government pension when I retire…. if it’s still there when I’m old enough.
I had to scold a case officer earlier because she thought it would be funny to give all her instructions to me in Russian.
Hilarious.
I’m going to Krazy Glue her phone before this is all over.
Of the five languages I’ve managed to pick up, Russian is not one of them.
She knows this.
I don’t need to speak five languages to work in IT. It’s just that CIA has the best language courses in the world and I can do them in my free time, so why not learn? I love to learn, whether it’s Mandarin or French or Swahili or………
It makes up for the sheer boredom in fixing print queues, rescuing data from a dropped hard drive, and telling someone for the third time how to use a VPN while they’re driving down the freeway. I suggested that they might retain the information better if they were sitting at their computer, but they insisted.
They will, in fact, call back.
I can guarantee it.
Stories That Are All True 