When focusing on difficult concepts in job performance, such as trying to appease an interested church member by printing out a summary of all zip codes that attend church regularly, please take note that when focusing so much energy on trying to understand a task that appears to hold no particular value, you may lose some other grounded thinking and you may by complete accident make sundry errors.
Say for example, you discover that as neat as it is to identify attendees via their own personal zip code, you may also notice that the software is not summary friendly, and without your knowledge has taken upon itself to print 272 pages of a full-bodied list of member zips.
If, by unfortunate chance, you are at that exact moment also answering the phone at work, and if, by another unfortunate chance, you happen to be listening to a blind voice speaking broken English, then you may make further mistakes in your multi-tasking.
If , while you are on the phone trying to decipher the question on the other end of the line, you realize that your printer is going AWOL, then, in your panic, you may mistake the printer settings option of 'cancel job' with 'delete printer'. If this happens, please fight the urge to scream, " OH MY GOD. I'VE DELETED MY FREAKING PRINTER. I'VE SENT IT INTO CYBERSPACE and OUR TECH MAGICIAN IS OUT OF THE BUILDING.
You can't be sure that the person on the other end of the phone isn't bilingual, and you really don't want to take the chance of insulting the poor soul who is simply calling to ask for some help or directions.
On the other hand, if the person calling is in reality the same person who has called you every day for the last week asking for the same "assistance" such as fuel for his heater, then the damage is minimal and the time it took you to vent may also clear your head enough to realize that it is a rare occasion for someone to use a heater when it is 102 degrees outside, and maybe the caller is not being truthful in his requests.
See? There's a happy side to this- isn't there? Maybe I should read this again and see if I can find it... wait.. oh, yeah. the happy ending is that the Tech magician Did, in fact return and rescue my precious 6L from cyberspace, and the caller did finally reveal himself as the same guy who had called me every day for the last several days. The accent was a last attempt to get some spending money for the fair. Well, he fessed up, and took the time to tell me that I really shouldn't use such flair and language on the phone and he'll just have to seek help elsewhere, like maybe the Baptist church down the street.
Whatever....
6 comments:
Great post! Hang in there. If members only knew the craziness that goes on in the church office!
LOL, I've had those days....
Love your unique point of view and sense of humor! Welcome to the webring.
Now if you can remember how to do that for the next nuisance calls . . .
Greetings, Church Lady!
Here's my church secretary story: The church I attended back in my university days was across the street from a community mental health halfway house. One day our secretary was in the mimeograph room (remember mimeographs?), cranking out bulletins or whatnot, when she heard a strange clanging sound in the sanctuary. When she went to investigate she found one of the residents of the halfway house, stark naked, doing a dance across the collection plates that he had carefully placed in rows on the floor.
Kinda puts things in perspective, no?;-)
Welcome to the ring!
i like your style, writing ,that is. very funny.but soulful at the same time
atticus (really patti,and almost 50)
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