Tales of the BossLady are anecdotes from my brief career assisting a rather frustrating woman in her real estate business. She claimed to “almost have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science,” but as the months wore on, I wondered increasingly how true that was. This all happened (and was written) a long time ago, but not, as you might think, in a galaxy far, far away.
At one point, while I wasn’t there, BossLady rather arbitrarily decided that she was going to “get rid” of Norton Antivirus on the computer that I use. She had gotten it into her head that Norton was somehow screwing up the email program. (In fact, the email program was fine, but BossLady simply does not know how to configure Outlook Express at all.)
However, after she uninstalled Norton, she found that the computer no longer had access to the Internet. She assumed that she had somehow gotten a virus. And she spent all night and all morning trying to figure out what was wrong, and she downloaded (via dialup) a new, free (and most likely crappy) antivirus program that took three hours to run, only to turn up nothing at all. Duh, she didn’t have a virus. But she was convinced that Norton had fouled something up and allowed a virus in, and she never liked Norton to begin with, yadda yadda.
So she was freaking out, and BossMan was getting pissed off, and BossLady’s shrieking at him that there are “three different problems!” I think one problem was the loss of Internet on my computer, and problem two was the fact that “email doesn’t work on any of these computers,” and I am not sure what the third one was.
I did what I believe was the right thing by just sitting there in my chair and listening to the bickering, knowing that the two of them would be going to lunch soon. Sure enough, they left, with that stupid free program still running. (BossLady is ALWAYS downloading free programs all over the place, using them once, and forgetting about it. The taskbar is chock full of quietly-running programs that open on startup. No wonder the computers get fouled up. I hope the Nigerians never find her email address, because badness will ensue.)
So after they were gone and I had the run of the place for a few hours, I went to the second computer, the one that’s brand new, and configured Outlook Express to run BossMan’s email. And it worked just fine. BossLady just didn’t know what she was doing.
After my computer had finished running the free antivirus program (turning up nothing), I spent a little while poking around in the logfiles, looking at the Event Manager, seeing the exact moment when Internet access was lost the night before when BossLady uninstalled Norton. I couldn’t figure out what to do, so I went to the second computer and did a simple Google search. In a couple of minutes, I found a site that talked about this very problem. Turns out BossLady was right, in a way: When you uninstall Norton, it leaves a few things behind that cause problems like this. But the solution was simple, I just did some stuff in the network connections and my computer had Internet access again. And then I configured Outlook Express to work on my computer too, so by the time BossLady got back I was all, “Yeah, everything’s back to normal again.” And she was grateful, but the fact remains, she didn’t know what she was doing, and still doesn’t.
Just how hard is it to “almost” get a Master’s Degree in Computer Science, anyway?
Let me hasten to point out that no, I don’t know everything. You might get the impression that I think I’m smarter than everyone else; a lot of people have felt that way about me over the course of my life, but it’s not the case. I’m confident in my own abilities and knowledge, but most importantly, I know when I don’t know what I’m doing. I know when I don’t know something, and unlike BossLady, I don’t BS and try to act like I know what I’m talking about when I don’t. I acknowledge my limitations. If I don’t know something or don’t understand something, I will admit it. And I am always willing to learn, hence the Googling in this case.
Of course, I realize that it must be difficult to admit one’s limitations to an employee. But still. Think before you leap, or in this case, before you uninstall. And learn how to use Google.