All I Can Do Is Try…

I’ve already written about this incident, but I feel it needs a recap and a follow up.

So, there was a guy at the place that I used to work at and he displayed the classic symptoms of Short Man Syndrome, or rather the Napoleon Complex.  This guy was a dick.  Plain and simple, there was no other way to describe him than being an absolute twat-faced dick.  He was a short-ass, in fact, he was shorter than me and I’m only 5′ 2″.  He made up for it by having “been in the army”, getting angry at people for no reason, and shouting.  Oh yeah, he also had a sticker up that said “Short people rock”.  Whatever.  Here’s a picture to illustrate it too.  Keep reading, there’s a video at the end!

No they don't.

All it took was saying the word “no” to this dick, and he went off on one.  Apparently, he was trying to “assert his authority”, but in truth he just made himself look like a toddler having a tantrum.  Especially as his face became red.  I was waiting for his wife to turn up and put him to bed to calm down.

One day, he decided that they, in that department, absolutely must have a new departmental printer.  So we ordered him one.  Apparently, it wasn’t good enough because after we’d ordered it, the little dick changed his mind and demanded that we cancel the order and buy a colour one instead.  Dick.  Little did he know what he was about to unleash on himself.

The printer arrived.  We installed it into their office.  It didn’t work.  Yep, that’s right.  It didn’t work.  Mechanically it was fine, and if it was directly connected to one single computer via a USB lead (the way we test them in the department to make sure that they are mechanically sound) it printed fine.  Over the network?  Bupkiss.  Sweet FA.  In fact, the drivers wouldn’t install.  They gave some retarded message over and over again which made no sense.  Different vintages of drivers made no difference.  I even read somewhere to try the drivers for a Citrix server, as well as standard Xerox drivers, and HP’s own vanilla print drivers.  Nothing worked.

As a department, we were so angry.  We weren’t angry because the drivers weren’t working (well, that was a little part of it, it did frustrate us), we were mostly angry because the little twat-faced dick pestered us every single day by either e-mail or in person as to when it would be fixed.  One day I did unleash my beast of anger on him when he came in to ask.  For a short while after that, he left us alone.  Another day, the gods must have been smiling on him because we decided to use a shitty solution: install the full software set on each individual machine.  Time wasting and a pain in the arse, but they worked that way.

For a good while, oh, about 7-8 weeks that is, everything was quiet on the short-man front.  Then one day we get an e-mail.  He asks, and I paraphrase here:

Can someone come and install the printer on the two computers in Xxxx and Xxxxxx?

Our initial reaction is: eh?  We did that weeks ago.  So, I go along.  In one of the rooms sure, the machine cannot print to it.  I fix that.  In the other room…it’s fine.  Absolutely fine.  Every single log on that I try, it works just fine.  WTF was he talking about?!  Really guys, where the hell was he looking for the printer?  Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s above his head, so he wouldn’t see it!  Sorry, I forget when I’m around short people.  Geez, I’m 5′ 2″ people!  C’mon, being short isn’t that bad.

I know this story just passed hasn’t been terribly entertaining but perhaps the next bit will be.

Whenever I was with this guy, if the opportunity arose I always made a point of saying just how much I like really tall men (or just tall things) and how my Husband is a foot taller than me.  Tall guys are great.  I love ‘em.

I present to you a wonderful little clip from a very early episode (I seriously recommend it, it’s called “Jones”) of Criminal Intent that illustrates Goren’s theory about short men.  (I hope the video works it took about 4 hours of fucking around with plugins to get it to work for me!)  I have no sympathy for short guys, because I’m a short-arse, and it’s nothing to complain about.  Get over yourselves.  If your height is your biggest concern then you obviously don’t live in the real world.  I think there’s something legitimate in the theory (and geez could I go on for ages about women’s desire for tall men), but I can only imagine that the aforementioned guy’s wife who was almost a foot taller than him must have to live with…disappointment, shall we say?

(If this video doesn’t work for you, leave a comment saying what was wrong and I’ll see what I can do.)

Oh yeah, and my Husband’s a size 12.

Tags: A Bowl of Stupid for Breakfast, I hate being technical support, I hate my job, I see dumb people, Law and Order, Law and Order: Criminal Intent

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 10:00. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.