Wednesday, May 19, 2004

What's wrong with change?

Being the PA to the division director, I get the fun duty of being in charge of all the office equipment. People were complaining that the fax machine wouldn't send off large documents b/c it said it was out of memory. What it did was send through all the pages and store into memory and then dial the number and send them. The transmission time took forever but nobody noticed b/c they'd happily see their pages go through quickly. Immediate gratification.

I tried to clear all of the memory but there is some flaw that won't let it clear 37% of it, so it still has problems sending large documents. So I changed it. I set it up to not store every document into memory and do as normal fax machines do. Dial the number, send first page, send second page, etc. It takes the same amount of time, but for the person sending the fax, their pages take longer to go through the fax. This just isn't good for these people.

Ever since I programmed it to do this, every single person who has tried to fax something came to me and said the fax machine was broken. I explained the change and that it just feeds the paper slower but it is taking the exact amount of time. Nobody has patience for it though.

C came into my office with a 12 page fax, "You send this, because I'm sick of dealing with that rusty ol' fax. It just ain't workin' for me." I put the pages in, dialed the number and it sends the pages through. I asked her, "Is that what you wanted it to do?"

"Well, yes." Her head was down.

Why can't people accept change? Why can't they have patience and wait? Why does it always have to be instant gratification. We work with child protection and foster kids, none of that is instant gratification, believe me. Usually there is never any sort of gratification. Why are they depending on the fax machine for their happiness?

Even though these people are as old as my parents, I feel like I'm the office baby-sitter.

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