Fire Alarms and new IT

 

My grumpy mood continues.  I know I should snap out of it but this week is not that week.

We had new fire alarms fitted at work.  The one in my room is directly above my head though, to be fair, given the size of the room, it was never going to be very far away.  They tested them for an unnecessarily long period, as far as my ear drums were concerned, to have to listen to a banshee wailing.  I shall definitely not be hanging around if that goes off again.  

3 hours plus of training for the new IT system took up an afternoon.  There is a lot of raving about the interaction with AI.  It may well be wonderful but so far I’ve found AI needs a good bit of tweaking and in the hands of someone who does not have some inkling can lead to some rather lengthy and/or unexpected answers.  I had to go back and ask my question slightly differently on a couple of occasions a couple of months or so ago when I knew the immediate answer but was after a few bullet points on explanation.  The initial answer I got was the opposite of what I was expecting.  We got it straightened out between the two of us and it proved very helpful but it could have been rather different.

We are also clearly doomed to a future where there is only 1 space after a full stop, have s replaced with z in many words (eg criticize instead of criticise) and the odd c replaced with a s (eg driving license rather than driving licence).  I am terribly prone to picking up these habits and I would rather not.  I am already finding that my punctuation is less an aid to ease of reading/comprehension and appears more as a ‘sprinkling of fairy dust’ over the page.   Phrases I pickup are making the ‘most hated’ lists for the younger generations.  They have no hope of me stopping using “ping it over to me” any time soon.  That is now ingrained.  “Reach out” I am with them on, though, I suspect, not for the reason most might give.  I view that as a desperate attempt to save oneself (or someone else) ie as in reaching out to grab someone’s hand when drowning.  A roll of my eyes is probably the politest I am likely to be in response to messages along the lines of “Fred suggested I reach out to you about a donation to the tombola at the village hall”,  “I’m just reaching out to you all to see if anyone knows where the big stapler is”, I’ve told Freda to reach out to you about drinks on Friday evening”, “reach out to me if you have any queries/need anything”.  The latter might get more than they bargained for in my present mood but other than that it always strikes me as probably the biggest dumbed down phrase in the English language over the last decade or so.

As for the IT training.  I do not have the vocabulary to express how utterly pointless it was for me.  At this point I risk descending into total rant (which I’ve done a few times now).  Others are well ahead of me but then they had been assigned a licence to use it and been sent an email with the necessary link to sort passwords etc.  My licence it turned out, after a good degree of patronising comments from the trainer, had been assigned to said trainer, on a temporary basis, so they could conduct the training.  At the end of the session she appeared to have finally registered this, faffed with something, gave me an address for web based access (which proved unworkable unless one has Administrator privileges - I don’t) and my in box was then flooded with emails re the changes she had made.  

I now have access via the web (no one has the app yet) but it took some effort, faffing and the inspired assistance from the department IT (and cake baking) expert and I suspect I may have to spend some time at the weekend trying to play catch up with YouTube tutorials.  This is going to be tricky as the calendar highlights for the weekend include:  replacing the blades on my parents robot mower (not the obvious time of the year but the app is growing ever more insistent) and painting the bathroom (a blind is due to be delivered and despite my bold assertions that the house is now sound there are a couple of patches around the window that appear to be auditioning for a documentary on poor housing conditions).  Then there are the usual weekend things…..  We do, however, have an extra hour this weekend which may well be pressed into action rather than sleep.

I find myself being belatedly sympathetic towards a former colleague who was furloughed for 5 months in lock down.  During that time those of us who worked throughout, where I was then, had access to as much first rate IT training and support as we needed to help us work remotely.   When they came back they found themselves on the back foot and decided to retire early.  I thought at the time it was a bit of an over reaction.  Not any longer!  I’m trying to remind myself that IT (and AI come to that) is a tool to help us do the job but it is feeling like a very high brick wall topped with barbed wire reinforcements, that I have to get over, at the moment.

So need to snap out of it!