Who Made Whom Look Stupid Here?
This took place about twenty years ago. I worked in the IT department of a national logistics company in Ireland. One of the office women, [Coworker], often boasted about how she knew so much about computers (basically because she knew how to use Microsoft Office) and we humored her; why bother to destroy her confidence, right?
As the IT department, we were having a meeting. It had just started, and [Coworker] interrupted by knocking and coming in. She said she had moved her computer — to clean behind her desk or some other reason — and after plugging everything back in, she could not connect to the network.
Me: “Check that the network cable is plugged in firmly.”
Coworker: *Insistently* “It is! I know that!”
Me: “Okay. I will be there in twenty minutes when we’re finished with our meeting.”
She came back in a few minutes and interrupted again.
Coworker: “Can you come look at it? I have work to do!”
Me: “There’s a 90% chance the cable just isn’t plugged in all the way.”
Coworker: “It is!”
Me: “Okay. I’ll be down soon.”
A third time, after only a few more minutes, she interrupted again, and the IT manager turned to me.
IT Manager: “Just go look at the computer for her or we will never get any peace.”
I was kind of annoyed that she bugged us until she got her own way, but I went down to the main open-plan office where her computer was. The other five or six people there knew what was going on.
I asked her, loud enough for everyone to hear:
Me: “So, you definitely checked that the network cable is plugged in?”
Coworker: “Yes! I already told you I did. I’m not stupid!”
I glanced at the back of her computer to see the network cable plugged into the back of the computer. Then, I slowly pulled the other end of the cable up from behind the computer to reveal that it had just been sitting on the floor. I held it up in front of [Coworker] and demonstrated, in the most obviously sarcastic way I could, the action of plugging the cable into the jack on the wall, and then I walked off.
She was SO angry that she started shouting at me as I walked away. She filed a complaint against me with the IT manager for making her look stupid. I didn’t really get in trouble. He just laughed and told me to try to be more patient with her. Actually, we got along well for the most part, but she annoyed me that day by not waiting for a measly twenty minutes while we finished our meeting.
