Thursday, May 3, 2007

Common cents?

I watched a video from “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”. Jay did a segment entitled, “Dealing with the Public”. The episode played calls to 911 which included everything from a lady who was locked INSIDE her car, a man who wanted someone to come down and scrape ice off of his car windshield and a lady who wanted help with a taco.

While I laughed at the video, there was once a time when I would have just shook my head in disbelief and think that they just made it all up as a gag for the show. I realize now that they couldn’t make this up, it just wouldn’t be as funny or as original. I don’t laugh at it as much as I once did because, I deal with the public.

I work tech support for an Internet Service Provider. It wasn’t until I began to work at this job that I started to realize that when they handed out common sense, most people got change for theirs.

Sometimes I wonder if it is because it has the word ‘computer’ associated with it that people get overwhelmed and begin to think that everything needs to be confusing and have a scientific sounding name to it. For example, people think that a support technician may refer to one part as a “wired alternating conversion module”, but instead, it is simply called an electrical cord. For those who are short on change in the common sense area and having difficulty understanding this, think of your toaster for a second, an electrical cord (or power cord) is the part you plug into the outlet in the wall to make your toaster work. This is the same thing you plug into the outlet in the wall to make your computer work.

There are some things which you should never mail in the rebates for and common sense is one of them. Using your common sense is in part, simply just thinking about the situation, quit being lazy and figure it out for yourself. However, this is not always the case. I have known some very intelligent people and yet for as smart as they were, they did not have two pennies to rub together in the common sense area.

So the next time someone calls in to tech support, saying their computer isn’t working and wants me to jump through hoops to fix it and I ask them what is on the screen and they tell me they can’t see it because the power is out, I’ll just make a note of it so I can share it on my blog another time and just assume they spent their last penny in the common sense department.

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