I had to leave the office early the other day. I took off around 2pm. I didn't know it at the time but there was a major issue being addressed.
I come in the next morning and there is a brand new Windows 7 tablet on my desk. (See THIS POST for the reason we have a Windows tablet in the first place.) There is a note on it from my boss. He needed me to get it connected to the wireless network and that if I have any questions I should call him. My first question would be: How do you still have a job? You can't do this? Really, my girlfriend who is not technical at all could handle this in about 5 minutes, easily. My boss, his rock star comrade and the new desktop guy spent "the whole afternoon" (his words) trying to get it connected to no avail. Wait. What? The three of you spent a whole afternoon on this? Who was curing cancer or searching for intelligent life in the stars then? I wouldn't normally be so surprised but i built a wiki just for things like this that is only available to the people in IT. There is literally a document with step by step instructions on how to connect to our wireless network. Did I mention it has pictures too? Yep, I even took screenshots.
It's really quite disturbing. The levels of ineptitude that I'm surrounded by is enough to break most people's spirits. I don't know what bothers me more. The fact that they were too dumb to figure it out, the fact that my boss and his comrade each make at least 40k more than me, or the fact that they were all too lazy to spend two minutes reading the instructions. Either way I had to waste a full three minutes of my day fixing this major issue for them. Glad i was there to save the day. It's just too bad there were no 4th graders around to do it instead.