Map Out Your Own “Drive-ing You Crazy” Joke Here

I used to work for a third-party IT company, and part of my contract was that I was the onsite IT person for one of our clients. I was at work one day when a user came up to my desk. I was in the middle of something for a user based out of a different location, so I half-acknowledged her but worked on what I could until I was at a natural stopping point.

Me: “Hey, sorry about that. What’s up?”

User: *Just this side of huffy* “Yeah, you guys didn’t finish [New Hire]’s computer. She’s missing her E: drive.”

Me: “She should have mapped everything when she signed in. It’s on the list of drives that’s sent out.”

Because there were multiple shares used across the company, in their training document, each department had a section with their various drives and links to said drive and then the steps to actually map it. We’d had an automated setup at one point, but before I started, several people raised a stink about it, so it was changed to the training and the links. Don’t ask why that was smarter/easier — especially since nothing was actually locked down (don’t get me started), so it wasn’t like there’d be a permissions issue if someone accidentally grabbed the wrong link.

User: “Well, it didn’t! So, you need to map her E: drive.”

Me: “Okay. I’m in the middle of something, but I’ll be over there when I’m done.”

She seemed to barely refrain from stomping her foot, rolled her eyes, and walked away. I finished what I was doing and headed over to their area.

Me: “Hey, [New Hire], I heard you’re missing your E: drive?”

New Hire: “Yeah, I’ve got all these drives, but none of them are the E: drive.”

Me: “Okay, let me double-check something.”

I grabbed her computer, pulled up the training, and navigated to the path for the E: drive. As I was starting to map it, I noticed something.

Me: “Oh, you’ve got it right here. You accidentally mapped it as the G: drive instead of the E: drive. But it’s still the same drive. See?”

I opened the drive and showed her that all the documents were the ones she needed. The user who’d originally requested my assistance came and hovered over my shoulder.

User: “It needs to be the E: drive. She doesn’t have access, otherwise.”

Me: “Actually, she does have access, see? It’s the same folder; she just saved it to a different drive locally. In this situation, the letter is really functioning as a shortcut or bookmark. She’s still got access to the E: drive; hers just says G: instead. It’s still the same.”

User: “No. She needs to get access to the E: drive. I don’t know why you didn’t do this for her before.”

I was biting my tongue something fierce, trying not to point out that: A) we didn’t actually map any of the drives, B) it was still the same drive, and c) she was actually one of the people upset about the automation, so she was part of the reason why people had to map the drives themselves.

Me: “She does have access; it’s just under G instead of E. The only difference is the letter; otherwise, she’s got all the documents. See?”

I closed and reopened the file explorer to demonstrate, and [New Hire] seemed to get it, but [User] wasn’t having it.

User: “She needs access to the E: drive!”

I didn’t bother arguing with her anymore. I unmapped the drive from [New Hire]’s G: and remapped it to E:. [User] smirked her way back to her desk, and I rolled my eyes as I went back to mine.

I’m not sure what it was, but in the time I was there, I got the feeling that [User] didn’t like me all that much, but I honestly have no clue what I did to set her off. I didn’t bother to find out, either, because I was focused more on getting out of that job. Luckily, I only had to deal with her for about nine months in total.