Yay! I’ve had my first weird tech call! Today a user called claiming that her new mouse didn’t “click right.” She said it didn’t click “fast enough,” so I showed her where you can change the double-click speed, but apparently that wasn’t what she was talking about. Actually, I have no idea what she was talking about. Keyboards I can understand; people have different tastes when it comes to keyboards. But a mouse? They’re all pretty much the same and they all click at the same rate.
Life
Clueless: Any kind of problem, this person calls us up. Usually, the problem is that the person didn’t read through the instructions or think about what they were doing.
- User: Hi, I can’t find the Plan a Meeting item under the Action menu.
- Me: Make sure you’re in Calendar mode before you click on the Action menu.
- U: Oh. Hold on… OH! There it is! Thanks!
Of course, if the person had bothered to read the instructions, step 1 was, “Click on Calendar“.
This person then called back a few minutes later saying that she had scheduled some meetings, but wanted to know if there was any way to make the meeting occur every X days or so. I taught her how to use the Recurrence feature and we setup a recurring meeting. When she’s done, she goes back to some of the days where she manually entered the meetings and asks, “How did these get here?” Um, because you put them there!
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Work
First off, I’ve got my pictures from my trip to Japan uploaded. You can check them out here: Japan 2006. Let me know what you think!
Second, as the title says, translating is hard. I was on the phone today for about 1.5 hours talking someone through transfering their data from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2000 (exciting, I know). The whole thing was done in Japanese but it really wasn’t that bad. The hard part was walking him through all of the dialog boxes and windows (”Click here”, “Hilight that”, etc). The problem? He was using the Japanese version of Windows XP and I only had an English version. This meant that I had to guess as to what the Japanese version might display. While I saw a screen that had “Add”, “Remove”, “Settings” buttons, he was looking at something that had “追加“, “削除“, “設定” buttons. Or, at least I hoped that’s what he had. One screen had a checkbox, “Include subfolders,” and I guessed “サブフォルダーを含む” and I was right. But 1.5 hours… that’s a long time!
Yesterday I got paged around 7:30PM from one of the offices in Anchorage (it’s one of the main cargo hubs for shipments from Asia) saying that their network was slow. I checked it out and it looked like a Tokyo problem, so I called the system center in Tokyo. That was nerve-wracking. I don’t know why, but there’s just a difference between talking to a Japanese person in the US and talking to a Japanese person in Japan. I guess it’s because in the US I don’t feel as pressured when I’m talking to people; i.e. I feel like it’s okay if I make mistakes because, hey, we’re in the US and they make mistakes with their English so we’re all even. But when I call someone in Japan, I feel like I need to be perfect… I don’t know. It’s weid.
Life, Work
I would expect that if one drives the same roads every day one will undoubtedly see some of the same cars occasionally. In fact, this happens to me quite a bit. There’s the Hell’s Angel-looking biker guy that passes me every morning and there’s someone on a little red scooter looking thing (I didn’t know they were allowed on freeways) that usually passes me on my way home. This really isn’t that big of a deal and in fact it’s kind of fun to see the same people everyday. However, today… the planet’s must be alligned or something because I saw the same two cars both on my way to work and on my way home! What are the chances of that happening? Out of the thousands of cars on the road today, I drive past two of the same cars with 8 hours separating the two events! I wonder what it means…
Life
… are two things that I hate.
First off, when I have to physically carry, open, close, retape, and ship 16 desktop PCs and 16 LCD monitors… that’s not enough to make me hate cardboard boxes. No, what I really hate about cardboard boxes is that they’re almost impossible to keep open long enough for me to put the PC back inside. I somehow manage to usually hit one of the flaps either sending it under the PC or making it so it disrupts the whole structural integrity of the 4 flaps and causes the whole top to close. It’s incredibly frustrating and annoying.
About turn signals. Whoever came up with the bright (no pun intended) idea of replacing the orange/yellow turnsignal light with a flashing, red brake light… is a complete moron. And this isn’t just an old car thing, new cars have gotten rid of the turn signal light and have opted to just flash the brake light. This is incredibly stupid. It takes me at least twice as long to figure out if the person has their turn signal on or if they just pumped their brakes. You literally have to wait for it to flash twice to figure it out. With the orange lights… one flash. Done. It was a turn signal. Easy. These flashing brake lights are especially dangerous in traffic. If your lane is moving faster than the one next to you, you’re not sure if the person ahead of you in the other lane is pumping their brakes, or using their turn signal to tell you they’re going to cut in front of you.
To recap: cardboard boxes, annoying. Using the brake light as the turn signal, downright moronic. (However, not as moronic as not using the turn signal).
Lastly, I’m almost over the flu. My cough has subsided quite a bit and I feel almost normal again. Now I get to begin the process of sending my reciepts to my health insurance company. I hope someone there can read Japanese 
Life