Old Guy (an introduction)

One of the primary reasons I wanted to start this blog is so I could have an outlet to talk about some of the people I work with and the irritating/mind-boggling/hilarious things some of them do on a daily basis. So we’re going to start with a guy who I imagine will become the most frequent recurring character in this little exercise. We’ll call him “Old Guy”. This is not his real name.

“Old Guy” is, like yours truly, a Space Technologist. He’s pretty good at the “Space” part, having managed to take up his fair share of it for (I’m guessing) 70 years now. It’s the “Technologist” part that seems to trip him up on a daily basis. You see, Old Guy struggles with technology. And by technology, I mean any object or piece of equipment that runs on any form of electricity. It’s that bad.

Let me backtrack for a minute. Old Guy’s predecessor was a guy named “Jim.” Jim wasn’t the most motivated guy in the world, but he was likeable enough, and he was good at his job. You can tell this because I did not feel the need to give him a nickname. Well, about a year ago now Jim left to take another job at Parts Unknown. Jim’s company (which is actually my company’s competitor- more on this in a later post) decided they could save some money by not replacing him. This was a decent enough plan, but it didn’t go over especially well with the powers that be at the Grocery Store I Work At Even Though I Don’t Work For Them (hereafter referred to as The Grocery Store) and they insisted that Jim’s company hire somebody to do the essential work that Jim did on a daily basis. This issue was debated for several weeks before Jim’s company finally said “You want someone? Fine, we’ll give you someone. Enter Old Guy.

Like I said, Old Guy is roughly 70 years old. He had been retired for more than 10 years when his company came calling and begged him to take their job. He agreed, but on the condition that he could do it part time and only work three days a week. Given that Jim has been a full time employee who worked the full 40 hours a week, you might be able to see how this could become a problem, but since I’m fairly certain they were trying to stick it to The Grocery Store anyway, his company agreed and Old Guy was on board. And immediately, there was a problem.

You see, like in most fields, a lot has changed in the field of Space Technology in the last 10 years: particularly, the technology part. In fact, as recently as probably 6 or 7 years ago, there was really no such thing as a “space technologist”. Someone who does what I do was called a “schematic analyst” or “space planner”. There was very little technology involved beyond paper and pencils, a ruler, a measuring tape and in some instances a non-digital camera. Basically, Old Guy had to learn his job again from scratch. This is not an easy thing for him.

I met Old Guy on his first day, exchanged introductions and went about my business of surfing the internet and pretending to look busy; I’m not particularly social at work. But in the interest of being friendly, I told him to let me know if he needed help with anything while he was settling in. Big mistake. Not 10 minutes later Old Guy peered over the wall between his cube and mine.

“Hey [Bonzi]?” he said.

“Yeah, [Old Guy]?”

“Do you know how to send an e-mail?”

“Um, yes.”

“How do I do that?”

“What do you mean?”

“How do I send an e-mail?”

Turns out that Old Guy has never sent an e-mail before. In his life. Ever. I asked him what e-mail client his company used. He didn’t know. I asked him if they had given him an e-mail address and password. He didn’t know. In fact the extent of his knowledge was that there existed something called e-mail and he was probably going to have to do it at some point. Fantastic.

Now, I imagine in some jobs, not knowing your way around a computer isn’t a crippling problem. Our job is not one of them. Of everything I have to do on a daily basis here at work, about 80% of it requires something computer related, and another 18% is made drastically easier with the help of some computer related utility. So from the first hour, it seems Old Guy is up a creek.

How does Old Guy handle this? Realize he’s over his head and quit? Nope. Contact his boss for more training? Try again. No, he decides to take me up on my offer of help. Over and over again. And because I’m both a nice guy (most of the time) and an idiot (all of the time) I allow myself to become his personal help desk.

Among the questions I’ve gotten from Old Guy in the past several months:

“Do you know how to send an e-mail?”

“After I save a file on the share drive, do I have to e-mail it to everyone else to save on their share drive?”

“Do you know what my password is?”

“Do I have to save my files whenever I close them, or just when I am finished for good?”

And many, many more. And many worse. But those incidents deserve their own posts, and this has already run longer than I planned. Plus, I have to give my reader(s) reasons to come back. So I’ll wrap this up. Until next time…

That’s all I’ve got.