I’ve had to work with a couple of computer helpdesks recently and though I’m not on the “front-lines” anymore, that was where I got my start. \u00a0I’ve got a couple of good stories to share \u00a0– and by “good”, I mean “terrible”.<\/p>\n
It was getting close to lunchtime and I got a call from a woman who has since retired from the university. \u00a0She told me that someone had moved the icons around on her desktop and she wanted a ticket opened so a technician could come out and put them back where they were supposed to be.<\/p>\n
I paused for a moment before answering to try and figure out if I’d heard her right and decided that, yes, I had heard her correctly.<\/p>\n
“Well,” I told her, “Moving icons around on a screen is very easy to do. \u00a0If you’ve got a minute, I could walk you through the process of moving them back,”<\/p>\n
“No,” she replied, with impatience in her voice, “I don’t have time for that. I just want these put back to where they were and I want someone to come over here and do that,”<\/p>\n
I considered arguing the point that it might be a couple of days for someone to go over and “fix” this compared to the minute it would take to walk her through doing it herself – and the irony that it would actually take longer to create the ticket than for her to move things back. \u00a0But I realized that it wasn’t about the icons on the screen. \u00a0It was instead a deeply held and fundamental resistance to change.<\/p>\n
I know people that don’t like change and I get that computers are “scary” – but to refuse to learn even the small amount that it would take to put things back struck me as tragic – especially for someone that works at a university.<\/p>\n
I went ahead and opened the ticket and gave her the confirmation number. \u00a0I encountered her again years later when I was in a new role at the university and she was as defiantly resistant to learning something new then too.<\/p>\n
I can’t imagine being that fearful of things that change – when Everything is always changing. \u00a0Even our own bodies are in a constant state of change from moment to moment, with each breath we take.<\/p>\n
Makes me glad I’m a web guy – where change is the only constant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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