When Monday Isn’t

Rising on a Monday holiday, I have thoughts totally different from other Mondays, even when I awake to a headache, like this morning. First, it’s after noon. Yes, I sleep late…whenever I can. No work day starts so late, though if I worked an afternoon helpdesk shift I might not truly wake up until after noon, but Monday, Wednesday and Friday I have to be alert and ready at 8:00 am, or as soon after that as I arrive. Tuesday and Thursday I get a small break and I man the helpdesk from 10:00 to 12:00. Add to that, one lunch shift every 7 days (not once a week, but 7 work days) and you have the most visible part of my job, and the only part that is scheduled…well, except for 8:00-5:00.

I like my job…sort of. The people I work with are nice…mostly. I just don’t like working…well, even that isn’t quite true. There are only a few things about my job that I don’t really like. I don’t like getting up in the morning. I don’t like dealing with the same stupid question day after day.

“Why isn’t my password working?”

“Because you’ve forgotten it for the 3rd time this week.”

We don’t have anyone quite that bad, but when you are resetting a password for the fifth time that morning for people who call every couple of weeks…well, you get the picture.

Then, there are the people who seem to feel that they are doing you a favor by letting you fix their computer…even when it is their fault, like they clicked on the “would you like to be infested with a virus?” link.

Working an IT helpdesk can give you a very poor opinion of people. They do really stupid things, they never learn, and so you spend your time fixing the same thing that you fixed last week, and they can never understand why things go wrong.

Then you have the people who think they know what they are doing. Obviously, most of them don’t, but you have to be polite. A few of them do, and that can be an even bigger problem, because for each knowledgeable user to shows it by staying out of trouble, you have two who think they know enough to fix the problem, and end up calling after they have really screwed things up. Some say that you need a computer to really screw things up, but that computer needs a thinks-he-knows-more-than-he-does user before it will really get screwed up.

So, on this Monday that isn’t, I am just happy that I don’t have to answer any of those questions this morning.

And now, if only I could get rid of this headache.