Speaking of frustration, here's a little anecdote from my workplace, a department which teaches IT. I am surrounded by technology and I know how it works. Today I wanted to scan a couple of documents.
- I go into the classroom and log on, but the PC which has been attached to the same scanner for last 2 years does not recognise the scanner. It's turned on and connected but just whirrs its little drive belt motor..
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OK. So I go upstairs to another room and try to log on, but the Scanner PC up there won't let me log onto the same network. My password is apparently invalid up here..
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I take the USB scanner downstairs and plug it into my own Win2000 Server. It needs a driver..
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After waiting an eternity for the web pages to load, I eventually find the driver which is going to be a 232MB download! "Probably a 200-odd meg animation and a 300KB driver," grins my wry chum Chris Adams, from over the partition in the Multimedia Camp.
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Slightly offput, I ask around but no-one seems to know the whereabouts of the original HP CD-ROM driver..
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I try to download driver anyway, but all the driver links are FTP and FTP has been disabled through the company firewall..
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Back to square one. I ring up helpdesk to get my password reset but "all lines are busy.."
At this point I usually try to laugh it off and philosophically recognise it as the old 'one step forward, four steps back' scenario, but I haven't even made one single step in the right direction of getting my document anywhere near a scanner.
I might just as well have recreated the whole document in Microsoft Paintbrush in full colour, flaggelated myself raw with a birch twig and then invited a close colleague to shove a red hot poker up my arse to have achieved the same result.
Maybe I should just go back to working in Lunatic Asylums, I'm sure it was a lot less stressful..
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