A Cursory Complaint

(When I am first starting out in IT, I work for a company that puts computers into grocery stores to do money transfers. These are the early machines, with no mouse and you had to tab between fields. The employees are also getting their first exposure to computers, and some of the terminology isn’t known yet. Example: blinky thing = cursor. This poor woman has a very angry person at her window trying to get money, and the system isn’t working.)

User: *talking over the yelling in the background* “Hi, my computer won’t let me pay out the money.”

Me: “Okay, is there an error message?”

User: *still talking over the yelling in the background* “No, it just won’t go through!”

Me: “All right. Where is the cursor?”

User: *nearly crying* “He’s on the other side of the window, and he won’t stop yelling!”

(It took me a second to realize exactly what she had just said.)