Instructional

This week I received an email asking me how to do something in Word. It was something fairly trivial, but we have recently upgraded to Office 2013 and the process is slightly different, so fair question.

Or at least it would be a fair question, had the instructions for said task not been on the front page of our staff Intranet since the middle of December. You know, the staff Intranet that is set as the homepage for all staff in their browser.

It’s times like this that I really wonder why I bother.

Reading Comprehension

Why is it that the people who complain the loudest about students not reading the question properly in exams are the exact same people that don’t read the instructions properly on anything they click on ever?

“Yes, that field says ‘Email address’. That means you need to fill in your email address, not just your name.”

“The reason that help box popped up when you clicked ‘OK’ is because you actually clicked the ‘Help’ button, not the ‘OK’ button.”

“Do you see this big yellow notice that says the IT department isn’t responsible for fixing the photocopiers? You see, right here in the entire top half of the screen where you filled in a request for me to fix the photocopier?”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE.

Priorities

For 3 days, the attendance system was erroneously reporting to all form tutors that they needed to fill in a missing register for a day during half term.

Exactly 1 person reported this problem to me.

For 3 hours, the web filter was erroneously blocking Facebook access for staff.

I got 16 emails about it.

The Perfect Wireless Solution for your School

Here’s a quick tip for sending me sales emails: if your email is to tell me how Netgear wireless is “The Perfect Wireless Solution for your School”, then you clearly have no idea about a) wireless, or b) schools.

Stop wasting my time.

Only you could have done this

Nothing puts me in a good mood first thing on a Monday like having to traipse over to another building in the pouring rain because a teacher forgot that YouTube has its own mute, and that they pressed it last time they watched a video.

Beep Beepity Beep

The telephone rings.

“Angry Technician, please state the nature of the IT emergency.”

“BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP I think there’s something wrong with my computer BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP it’s making some kind of alarm noise BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP I was just rebooting it and BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP”

Let’s back up a little.

Years ago I attended a call where the user had reported that every time they clicked on a menu – any menu – it flashed up for a fraction of a second and then vanished. When I arrived and sat down at the workstation, the problem was gone.

It took a few moments for me to realise that when I had sat down, I had almost unconsciously cleared the clutter on the desk from around the keyboard, and in doing so, had removed a binder that had been resting on the Esc key.

I never fail to be astonished by how often this sort of thing happens.

“BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP”

“Sounds like you’ve got something resting on the keyboard to me.”

“BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP Oh, hang on, maybe I have BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BE-”

Silence.

“Yep, that was it.”

Plain text emails appear in a white (invisible) font in Outlook 2013

Shortly after upgrading to Outlook 2013 from Outlook 2010, one of my users complained that some of his emails were showing up with invisible text in the message body. He knew there was text there, because he could highlight the invisible text and copy & paste it into Word.

I quickly determined that it was only plain text emails that were affected (rather than those with HTML or Rich Text formatting), which led me to investigate the font options. Sure enough, somehow the font option for reading and composing plain text emails had been set to a white font.

You find this option by going to File > Options > Mail > Stationery and Fonts, then clicking the Font button under Composing and reading plain text messages.

The font colour should normally be set to Automatic, and in our case it was inexplicably set to white. Setting it back to Automatic immediately solved the problem.

Bizarrely, even though the Font color was set to white (as shown in the above screenshot), you can see that this was not reflected in the preview on either the Font dialog or the preceding Signatures and Stationery dialog. I’m also 99% sure the user didn’t change this himself, since the aggravation it was causing him far outweighed the value of doing it to wind me up.