Dear IT Guy, can't we all just get along? Source: Supplied
You probably won't remember me, since in your line of work your days are undoubtedly filled placating a never-ending queue of people who need to be physically restrained from throwing their computers out of the nearest window.
Why is it that yelling at the screen never seems to work? Things would be much easier if the silly things would just listen to the pleading of their frustrated users and do what they were told.
And yet I am reliably informed technology has yet to reach that point. Which is why, after much wringing of hands and repeated thumping of head upon the keyboard mysteriously fails to solve my computer's glitches, that I turn to you: The oddly calm voice at the other end of the help desk hotline.
It must be said this is not always a relationship that runs smoothly. For a Luddite such as myself, things can be rapidly lost in translation. Once you start asking for my serial number and network TCP settings, I may as well be speaking to the Ecuadorean Embassy.
And unless a person is in the mood to make small talk with Julian Assange, which I very rarely am, then speaking to the Ecuadorean Embassy is not terribly helpful when all I really want to do is access a document that has inexplicably vanished from my desktop.
Some professions mesh quite well with IT. People from many walks of like are proudly fluent in Tech Speak and communicate with ease when contacting their own help desks. Not so journalists.
While there are of course exceptions to the gross generalisation I am about to make, we are a breed entirely incompatible with the finer details of computer hardware. This struggle to understand one another, it must be said, can work both ways.
Which is why the casual manner in which your kind have been known to mention that a computer will be non-operational for several hours can elicit panic in a journalist who happens to be on deadline.
But hey, if they can achieve peace in Northern Ireland, then there's no reason even help desk staff and stressed-out technophobes can't learn to get along.
Which brings me to my recent call to your good self, which - with the benefit of hindsight - I must admit might have gotten off to a slightly melodramatic start when I suggested every computer in the world was ganging up against me.
Perhaps one too many viewings of Terminator 2, which I consider to be a masterpiece of modern cinema, was to blame.
On reflection it wasn't so much a conspiracy so much as unfortunate timing in that the introduction of a new operating system in our office coincided with my accruement of a new mobile phone and installation of updated software on my home computer. Nothing looked the same.
Trying to navigate my way around any of these suddenly unfamiliar devices proved a complete and utter headache.
It was, quite simply, too much change for a person of my limited technological abilities to cope with.
Knowing that as an unfashionably rusted-on BlackBerry user I was struggling to adjust to an iPhone (I believe this is what they call A First World Problem), a colleague sent me a link to a 1972 training film directed by Peter Weir.
Fifteen years before he would receive his first Academy Award nomination, the Australian film director was tackling the pressing issue of technological change in the workplace in a short film produced by The Commonwealth Film Unit.
As a group of employees gathers around a computer the size of a small tractor, they are instructed how to operate the buttons by a teacher who bears an uncanny resemblance to Greg Brady.
After class ends, the kindly Brady lookalike gives a pep talk to an older staff member who is clearly finding it hard to keep up with the introduction of evolving technology into his work environment.
More than 40 years later it is a struggle that still resonates with many. If anything our ever increasing reliance on smart phones and tablets makes our anguish even more acute when it all goes pear-shaped.
With the contents of our entire lives bundled inside these devices, we fall apart the moment they cease to function.
In manning the help desk I am sure I am not the first caller you have had to talk down from the technological ledge.
You probably sense that the problem doesn't even lie in technology at all, but in the unrelenting pace of our have-to-be-switched-on-and-plugged-in-at-all-times society.
Rather than rail against the systemic failures of the mainframe and obsessing about wasting valuable seconds to an uncooperative computer, maybe you think it would be best if I took a few days off and book a holiday to somewhere nice and quiet.
You're probably right. And just as soon as I figure out how to access the internet on one of my various newfangled desktops, that's exactly what I'm going to do.
Email: sarrah.lemarquand@news.com.au
Twitter: @SarrahLeM
Blog: blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/sarrahlemarquand
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