Administration Of The Frustration Station

This is my last posting of 2007, and what a year it has been. My nearly blind client who had a heart attack the night after I set up his new computer is out of the hospital and being very active. He called me to come over to help him with some problems. When I arrived, he started off by being angry at me. This is not good for a recovering heart patient.

While he was in the hospital, his wife had asked me for some help. She was having difficulty using the screens he had made with extremely large letters for the seeing impaired. She is not very computer literate, but uses one at work and definitely wants to learn more. I almost proposed that she take lessons, but first things first. The solution to her immediate problem was simple. I created another user. They each had their own screens and displays. Not a problem. They also both had access to each other’s files, so no compatibility was lost.

He was livid. At some cost in time, he unscrambled what I had done and re-consolidated everything into a single user. He asked me why I had done that since they always did everything together. I said that it was a convenience to her so that she could have a display suitable to her without inconveniencing him. He snapped back that she could make the letters smaller with a single click (not true or even close to solving her problem, but that is what he said). He went on to say that she did not really need to do extensive work on the computer because they shared an address and he sorted out all her mail and put it in a special folder for her. When I innocently told him that she was capable of much more and that she seemed to want to learn, he just stared at me with eyes unable to focus on my face.

Did I mention that he feels very proprietary toward his computer? He spends most of every day on it with extensive email communications and chess-playing. When he is playing chess online, he is as good as anyone. He is not the crippled up diabetic, half-blind, nearly deaf hulk that must occasionally leave his keyboard to attend to physical matters. He is also a retired Marine officer who does not take kindly to his diminished physical strengths. He dislikes being dependent on the kindness of strangers.

We should not dismiss this man as a grumpy male chauvinist. He still has a good mind and is coping as best he can. In his heart, I am sure he knows he is being a pill. He got angry and frustrated at me while trying to explain that he was not online and could not get his email. His frustration was due in part to a lack of mutual language. Windows insisted that he did have a good connection (at least it did after I removed his telephone answering machine from the DSL side of the filter). So why did IE fail to open his home page? As I started to investigate, he got more frustrated and insisted I was not listening to him. At that point, my own lifetime of experience dealing with employees, children, and ex-wives kicked in. I simply mellowed out and sat. When he was done explaining, he said, “You are going to do what you want to do anyway, aren’t you?” I replied that what he had just said shortened my investigation and was very helpful. He had managed to get into the connections area and totally hosed everything trying to get something that looked like his old machine.

Shortly I had him working again, but he still complained that his email was not working. I asked if he had set up an account on the new computer as he had said he preferred to do by himself the first time we met. He angrily reassured me that was what he was trying to do when his problems started. At this point, his face was alternating between white and flushed and I was trying to remember my classes in CPR. “Look, I am here to help you. I am not here to frustrate you. You are frustrated. Calm down and wait a minute. What is your user ID and password?” The questions are critical. By giving him something to do, it broke the cycle of frustration. He was able to tell me both. I quickly made an account and put a Windows mail icon on his desktop so he would not have to hunt for it. “Click here,” I told him. He squinted, “That’s not the same.” “Trust me.”

He clicked and within seconds had several days’ worth of emails and newspapers stuffed into his inbox. He was quiet. “I guess it’s different now.”

I could not have said it better.

Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.