Don’t tell your manager that’s not Excel • The Register
On Call Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register’s Friday frolic through your tales of delightful tech support encounters.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Val” who shared a story from his time as a contractor for a housing association in the North West of England.
“The IT manager was, to be blunt, an insufferable bore,” he told On Call. To make matters worse, he had no people skills and clearly enjoyed bullying colleagues and underlings.
Val wouldn’t put up with it.
“I was already too old and weathered to take that kind of treatment from anybody,” he told On Call.
One morning, Val’s phone rang and he was soon conversing with this magnificent manager who needed help with an Excel spreadsheet – but insisted the request must be kept secret.
Val thought that strange, but the request was easy to follow, so off he went to sort things out.
“As soon as I walked in, he started enthusiastically moving his mouse and said, ‘Look! This spreadsheet isn’t working!'”
Val saw the problem right away. This IT manager was using a table in a Word document, not a spreadsheet in Excel.
“I opened Excel, copied and pasted the data from the table into the spreadsheet, smiled, and left the office,” he told On Call.
A couple of hours later, Val’s phone rang again.
“It was the labor hire company who arranged my contract,” he told On Call. “They told me my services were no longer required, and that I would be paid six weeks’ salary as a goodwill gesture.”
Val had already lined up another gig, so this wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.
Did the ignorant manager cancel the contract after feeling humiliated by Val’s diagnosis?
He’s not sure, but told On Call: “Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?”
Have you found yourself unable to resist sneering at managerial incompetence during tech support sessions? If so, what did it cost you? You know the drill. Email On Call so we can tell your story on another fine Friday. ®
