Lessons at Work!!!

I am a student also working part-time in my college. I am a SQL developer here and I enjoy my job thoroughly. But since my job is also that of an assistant here, I have to take care of support calls.

Today one of the staff of my college called up for help with her Word Document. She is a secretary here since a very long time and I assume that she is now well adept with working on Word documents. She still had some problem which she needed help for and so I went ahead to help her. Her problem was that “Page-Breaks” were not visible on the doc. I just said "You can view the document in 'Normal Mode' and the page breaks will be visible to you as dotted lines". I also demonstrated the same to her. But she was adamant that the dotted lines were not page breaks and that the “Page-Breaks” will show “Headers” that are there in every page. I understood that she is getting confused between “Page Breaks” and “Headers”. Unfortunately her document did not have any headers in it. So I demonstrated a header demo to her in another document. I thought this might solve the problem. But she was as adamant as a mule– She said that the headers in her document are not visible because the page breaks are not visible and I should, somehow, make the page-breaks visible in the doc. I calmly just said that the page-breaks are visible and the headers are not coz there aren't any in the doc. She shrugged and said “I have been working here since last several years and I know how it looks and works”.

Now I had started to get a little irritated by her attitude. She somehow had this in her mind that no one else knows MS Office better than her. Perhaps because of this attitude she was not accepting any solution proposed by me. As one final try I made a header in her document and showed it to her. But she was so adamant that she said that she wants her old header visible and not this new one. I was reaching my threshold by now. I just feared that I should not end up shouting at her and telling her “Inspite of her several years of service, she is grossly wrong here”. I somehow gulped my anger and further tried convincing her that there were no headers in her doc and perhaps she might have forgotten to save her old headers. But guess it was in vain with she being dead adamant about her “Page-Break” crap… Finally I was at my wit’s ends and ended up telling her that I do not have any solution to her problem. I accepted my “so-called” lack of knowledge and directed her to my boss thinking that she might at least listen to him. To my great surprise even he was unable to convince her. Their conversation ended on very heated notes both from my boss as well as from her.

One helluva adamant and rude employee I must say!!! Some people just don’t have a heart to take suggestions from others, especially when they are wrong. They also end up being rude to others because of this attitude of theirs. Two big lessons learnt today – One should be patient enough to handle eccentric people and second, one should know the A to Z’s of Anger Management. For me, I think I did a good job at both today… :)