Yesterday afternoon I was in the middle of trying to accomplish a few things when suddenly a web page wouldn't load. Firefox gave me an "unable to connect" message. I also lost my Log Me In connection to my laptop. I saw in the lower right hand corner of Outlook a "trying to connect" message, when I realized that it wasn't one or two pages, but our office's entire connection to the outside world that had gone down. I gave it a few minutes until I realized that it wasn't going to come back up right away and went to make sure our IT guy knew that we were down. As I approached his office to tell him, he had just connected with our provider on speaker phone. We used to have all of our external IT provided by a contractor, but our company finally put together it's own IT division, so now our IT is handled by corporate. I stood in the doorway as our IT guy explained to the person on the other end of the phone our situation. The person didn't seem very clear and kept repeating questions. He finally let on that he was an intern and had only been there two weeks, and our IT guy rolled his eyes. I asked if I he minded if I had a seat as this might be good. I was dead in the water anyway.
This experience got me thinking. How many times have I been new at something, and thrown into a situation where I am seemingly expected to have been born with all knowledge necessary to handle the situation that I have been thrown into? Did I appreciate it? Of course not.
During a period of being on hold, I suggested to our IT guy that he be nice to the intern. We've all been new, and there really is only one way to learn. The next time you come across somebody who is new, please be patient with them. Offer helpful suggestions politely if you have any, but above all please just understand that the best way to learn is by doing and maybe if you're nice, this person will one day look back with gratitude on your patience in their learning cycle. It is completely unreasonable to expect a new person to know everything.
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