The Biggest Space Is Between Her Ears

I sometimes try to help nurses at my hospital with their computer troubles. I had a nurse come to me extremely upset and unwilling to even let me try to fix her “problem” because I “probably wouldn’t get it anyway.” Her problem was, in her own words:

Nurse: “I have a tendency when stressed out to rest my thumb on the spacebar and not notice.”

This caused obvious problems for her as she needed to type patient status updates, emails, etc. and they all had huge blank spaces in them where she’d just inserted twenty seconds of spacebar presses.

This, to her, was the computer’s fault because:

Nurse: “It should be advanced enough to know that I don’t want all of those spaces in there. Who would want those?”

Twenty minutes later, I finally convinced her that there was no way for the computer to know if she really wants all of the spaces or not because it relied on the user to enter spaces if they wanted spaces and not enter spaces if they didn’t want spaces.

She still thinks it’s the computer’s fault and is now resolved to “work around the computer’s problem, even if it causes delays for her.”

How brave.