Before I get into the story, I have a question for a mod – are we allowed to rename our JustNos? I named EACW early on and fairly unimaginatively, but now that it has become obvious that she is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of material for posts on here I think I should give her a better one. I have also recently thought of a far better name for her – Derahmah! Is it too late to make the switch?
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EACW was away sick for a few (blissful, peaceful, far too short) days recently. While she was away, one of the part time EAs in our department sat at her desk. This EA had been looking after several specific tasks while the EA who sits next to EACW was on a long period of leave and needed to do a handover now that the other EA was back. Normally this EA sits at a different desk that is further away and we have to email, call or walk around to talk to each other, so the opportunity to be able to sit next to each other and just talk was jumped on. (These two EAs each have had the odd no moment, but it is very infrequent and they are 98% justyes coworkers).
At our company, the phone system we use requires you to log into your phone with a username and PIN number. The most common PIN numbers used are 12345, 00000, or your extension number, although you can set a specific PIN if you want to. Most people don’t.
You can’t use your phone (or any phone) if it is not logged in. Once you are logged in, you can have up to other 30 extensions programmed to speed dial buttons on your phone, and can make and take calls. If you need to move around to work from different desks on different days, you log out of the phone on the desk you left and in on the one you are using, then at the end of the day, back out. This will download your speed dial settings onto the phone you are using, then remove them again. It isn’t difficult at all.
So, on these days, the EA using EACW’s desk logged EACW out and herself into the phone on the desk. When she returned, EACW tried to use her phone and couldn’t, and it took her a minute to realise she had been logged out. Then, she couldn’t log in, and because her drama setting is jammed on 11, she lost her mind.
I was sitting at my desk trying to get my first cup of coffee down. I usually need two cups, straight up, first thing in the morning, as I am not a morning person and need a caffeine boost in order to properly wake up and function. While I do this, I work through a series of routine tasks that I like to get out of the way first thing each morning and which don’t require a lot of brain power in order to complete. So, I wasn’t paying any attention to her at first.
It started with some button pushing. On our phones there is a faint but audible click when you press a button to dial. However, EACW had recently gotten herself a manicure with long, fake nails in the pointy shape that is all the rage at the moment, like these:
http://www.nailsplash.com/news-detail/stiletto-nail-art-at-pretty-little-polish/1413
They look ridiculous on her, and make typing and doing the kinds of tasks an EA does more complicated than they really need to be (an EACW specialty). These nails clacked against the plastic phone every time she hit a button.
This was followed by a rustling of papers that had fallen sideways from one of the many stacks on her desk and landed in front of the phone. The button pushing got more frantic and noisy. Then she started swearing. “Fuck….. Fuck”, and saying stuff like “why won’t yoooouuuu loooooog innnnnn” in that whiny tone that little kids use when their parents are making them do something they don’t want to do and they are about to cry to try and get their way, with an occasional fake huff-sob thing she does sometimes when she is having one of these episodes, interspersed with more button pushing and slamming of the receiver back down. For obvious reasons, this caught my attention.
As I listened over the next TEN MINUTES (yes you read that correctly, this drama went on for ten. solid. minutes.) the button pushing became more frantic, the receiver got slammed back down into the cradle several more times, harder and louder each time, to the point where the actual phone unit itself was pushed backwards several inches across her desk, displacing a wad of random paperwork, and the swearing and carrying on escalated in both volume and frequency.
Now, when she starts carrying on (and I will post more about this in the future because she gives me so much material, I just have to write it up) we normally don’t respond. We don’t want to reward annoying behaviour by giving it any attention as that encourages her. However, on this morning she was becoming extremely agitated and I could tell there would be no end to it until something was done. (I have also, slowly, come to the realisation that she has interpreted our lack of reaction to her antics as us being okay with her behaviour, and over time she appears to be making less and less effort to contain her outbursts. I am going to have to rethink my approach, which is not as simple as it sounds if you will recall her general obtuseness, which I have written about before.)
Another girl who was sitting nearby asked her what was wrong at this point and she started literally wailing about how she couldn’t log into her phone, and I had enough. I stood up and walked to the bench between our desks, looked over the top at her and asked her what the problem was.
She repeated that she couldn’t log into her phone. As I stood there, I got her to attempt to log in again using the standard PIN combinations. No luck. She wanted to call IT, what was the extension, she couldn’t get through. Of course she couldn’t get through, she couldn’t call anyone because her phone was not logged in. That had been what the slamming down of the receiver was about – she was trying to call people, from her un-logged-in phone, to help her log into her phone, so she could call people! I had to explain to her why that was not working.
At this point, I did what apparently had not occurred to anyone else in the vicinity to do. I turned around and walked the one metre distance to the desk of the other EA that sits next to EACW, picked up the logged in phone extension that had been sitting on that desk, in EACW’s immediate line of sight, the entire time she had been carrying on, and called IT.
I told the IT guy what was going on and could he re-set her PIN so EACW could log in. He needed to speak directly to her before he could do that so I held the phone receiver out and told her the IT guy needed to talk to her.
She picked up the phone on her desk again and sat there, staring at it, receiver pressed against her ear, for several seconds before I realised that, despite my literally just having told her that she would not be able to use her phone for calls until she was logged in, she was waiting for me to put the call through to her extension.
I had to tell her, firmly, “EACW, your phone is not logged in and so I will not be able to transfer this call to you, you will have to come over here and talk to IT on THIS phone” before she finally got it and came over to take the receiver out of my hand and talk to the IT guy.
Two minutes later he had her logged in, and I finally got to finish my coffee in peace and quiet.
Submitted September 07, 2018 at 11:40AM by yellowdragonteacup https://ift.tt/2NSVEIU
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