friday afternoon

Here were the steps around three o’clock on Friday afternoon…

I went to get a soda from the vending machine…it got stuck.

I looked all over the vending machine twelve times until I’m absolutely sure there’s no number to call.

I ask three people, who all tell me there’s a number to call on the vending machine.

I find another vending machine that has nothing to do with this, and call the number I find on there.  They promise to tell a supervisor, then tell me to visit a receptionist on another floor that will give me my money back. 

I decide to print this info out before going to that floor to get my money back, so I type it up and hit print.  I go to the printer and see that it wants toner.  I look around and see no toner nearby, then find that there’s a hundred jobs to print in front of mine.

I ask several people near the printer and they say you have to call the help desk.

I delete my print job, and go back to my desk.  There’s another printer I can use, in the same room that has the bad vending machine.  I go to add the printer to my machine, but it won’t let me because it can’t find the drivers on the network. 

I go back and forth twice, until I’ve downloaded and installed the drivers to the printer in several different versions to no avail.

I just wanted a soda.  Nobody fixes these things because of getting lost in the very abyss that I’m in now where everything is broken and disconnected and the answer is always somewhere else.

No, I will resolve this, or I will bite somebody.

I call the help desk, which asks me a bunch of questions that don’t seem related to the problem at hand.  What’s my employee id, because my name isn’t good enough.  I give them the number on my picture id card.  Not good enough.  What kind of toner is needed?  They tell me to go back to the printer and look on the screen.

I do, but the error on that screen is now complaining about something else.  I play with it for about a half a minute and can’t understand what its problem is now, and I can’t get back to the original toner error.  I start feeling the stirrings of a world where screaming and biting are the norm.  This is why nobody called the help desk.

I get back to my desk and tell the help desk person that I don’t know what’s wrong but to just come here and fix the god-damned printer and add the driver to this other printer while they’re here.  Can’t do that, it’s a completely different job ticket.  They saved me from biting my own hand by not making me call again. 

I just want my soda.  I crudely write what to do for vending problems on a piece of paper that I stick to the vending machine. I briefly consider adding an anatomically impossible suggestion.

I had to fill out another report for the receptionist that gave me my money back.  She told me to drink more water because it’s better for me.

:0

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