I wish I was making this up...

Okay, I PROMISE I am so very NOT making this up.

This morning was pretty rough at work - the daily sales files weren't making it to our servers for the field guys to pick up, our main server was down, everyone was complaining, the server admin guys were flustered, I had to update management on the situation every 5 min before the poop hit the propeller from a bigwig....

And a little ray of sunshine came across my desk.

Because our users work strictly out of home offices (all 832 of them) we have to be super careful how we send updates to their laptops. So we pretty much set up any updates in a way that hopefully, would not boggle even the most dense individual. KISS is our motto. Well, we've been working to get all of our users up to compliance with an important version of a particular software package they use, like, every minute of the day just about.... so in this case we were ESPECIALLY sensitive to the need to write out every. possible. step. clearly.

Probably most poignant was the fact that the particular issue was forwarded by Satan's minion #1 - and he didn't even blink at it...

Said user sent an email reply back to Satan's minion #1's directive that he MUST comply with the upgrade upon pain of fingernail hanging with the following comment...

"Minion #1, I'm TRYING to comply. But I'm so lost at step number 4. It says to double-click on 'My Computer' but it doesn't say WHICH FINGER!!!"

I simply could not contain myself. I lost it. I'll betcha it took me 20 minutes to get re-composed.

...to make it even funnier, Satan's minion didn't even miss a beat. In his forwarding comments he demanded we escalate an issue to the main Help Desk to be prepared for incidents like this.

It wouldn't have been so funny, if they hadn't been so stinkin' serious about it.

p.s. Everyone wonders why I voted to give them all Gameboys instead of laptops...