So either I'm just ignorant of how these things operate or everyone else is.
Yesterday afternoon we had another crisis that somehow everyone decided involved computers. One of our guys in the Resources dept. is leaving and he also happens to be in charge of some certification program for our production staff. He's the only trainer we have for this and his last day is today. In a scramble to get as many people trained before he left as possible we needed to have a bunch of certificates made up for him to sign. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, we just order them from some company somewhere; however, due to the urgent need to do this now that wasn't an option.
So the Resources guy wanders into my office, hands me a copy of the certificate, and requests that I make it into document that he can edit and print. About 3 minutes later my bosses boss sends me an email with an attatchment of a scanned image of the certificate in pdf format requesting the same. This is followed by my feeble attempt at explaining why you can't take an image file stuffed into a pdf doc and make it editable. There are no fields there! It's a giant picture!
ps ~ everyone here has acrobat reader and no they don't understand the difference
This should have been prefaced by me stating that this sort of work is not what I specialize in. I do backend work mostly, server maint., email, SQL, IIS, light prog duty, routers and such. I don't know all the functions of Excel by heart, can't tell you how to do sorted mailings in Word, and my graphics skills are about as good as Drac's. But for some reason everyone assumes that if you know something about computers, you must know everything about anything that has a CPU in it.
I get the same deal all the time from the guys in the machine shop. We have lathes that are loaded with X, Y coords via serial cable from a PC. When it isn't working right, they get all pissed off when I don't have an answer for them. The people in shipping wonder why their digital scale isn't working right, and don't understand that I can't tell them. The CEO of my company is completely befuddled as to why I can't make his PDA/Cell phone work with his car so he can use the voice activation. The best ones are when I get looks of indignation when I can't tell someone why their internet is acting funny at home, when the only information proffered is 'my internet is acting funny'.
For comparison purposes it would be like asking an interpreter to translate a language they have very little knowledge of, asking a drywall guy to frame a house, or asking a mathematics professor to get into an in depth explanation on anthropology.
Someone please tell me that I have no idea what I'm talking about and that the solution to this problem is overwhelmingly simple.
Edited, Jun 16th 2006 at 10:10am EDT by Jacobsdeception