Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

July 18, 2021

Amos: I’m a Zoomer now!
Me: What?
Amos: I’m a Zoomer. I’m zooming!

That’s Amos, who works for me. He’s a crack investigator whom I once avoided for 20 minutes by the cleaver ruse of simply walking two feet behind him and slightly to his left.

Amos has a little trouble with technology.

Amos: This cellular phone isn’t working.
Me: What’s wrong?
Amos: I can’t find the antenna. I think it must have fallen off.

I had to set up a Zoom meeting for Amos so he could get some training from an outside contractor.

Amos: That’s what you call people who do Zoomer meetings, isn’t it? Zoomers?
Me: Yup. You’re a Zoomer.

Amos has gone through 4 cell phones since I have known him, about 3 years. They never seem to work right. They all have the same problem: user error. Amos has no idea how to set up a contact, so every time I call him- and during the week I may call him four or five times a day- I have to tell him who’s calling when he picks up since he doesn’t recognize my number.

Amos also cannot receive email on his phone. There is something wrong with the settings on all his phones, he tells me. He’s gone to his local Staples to fix it and they always tell him they can’t find anything wrong. Amos says it is a scam to get him to buy a new phone, which he usually does.

When I want to send a case to Amos, I have to email it from a coworker’s account since Amos has somehow blocked me on his email, which he has to go to Staples to access and someone there has to “pull the email off the computer” for him.

My boss recently bought a fax machine for Amos. That was nearly three months ago. It is still not working. Amos has called in the phone company, the company that made the fax machine, and tech support from a number he saw on a flyer on a pole, and they all agree that there is nothing wrong. Amos is so far behind that he is flailing about like a trout on the line trying to figure out the fax machine, a piece of technology that is nearly obsolete.

Amos does not have a home phone line and is dependent on his cell phone (a disaster in the event of emergency) so in order to set up the fax he needed a phone line put in, which will cost him $30 a month. He asked my boss to reimburse him for that. My boss, who is notoriously cheap, agreed to pay it based on my advice.

I told him why not? The odds are he’ll never figure out how to use it anyway and he’ll send it back.

Go Speed Amos Go!

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Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, bmj2k, Burt Mustin, cell phones, computer errors, computers, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. BTR, technical difficulties, technology, user error