Is it really too much to ask that he take notes?

Okay, so the NooB has worked here for 7.5 months now and is still not grasping some of the major stuff he needs to know to do his job around here. This may be partly my fault for not covering everything with him in his training, or my co-workers for forgetting a few items along the way when he first started. However, it has become painfully clear that he either refuses to take notes or writes things down on scrap paper and then looses it.

There are things I know for a fact we have covered with him on multiple occasions, and yet he continues to ask the same questions or claims to not know how to resolve an issue we have walked him through multiple times. In some cases, like re-enabling a user’s AS/400 ID after they have locked it up, NooB has been shown how to do it, told to write down the command for future use, and still had to ask me how to do it again a few minutes ago. He is notorious for taking a call from a user, telling them he’ll take care of it and call them back, then hanging up before asking all the questions he needs an answer to in order to resolve the problem. Take the As/400 ID problem for example. There are two reasons a user calls up to get this reset, either they get an error message that says their account has been disabled, or they log in with no errors and get no menu, just a black screen. They are causes by two totally different issues and if you don’t’ ask the user the simple questions of “What happens when you log in?” and then clarify it with “Do you get any error messages?” it’s impossible to know for which reason they are calling. IRRITATING!

Also on the irritating front, school! I am done with Winter Quarter and have moved on to my last six weeks of classes before a much needed long summer break. This session I have two classes, both are general ed’s. Cultural Diversity is a class I never wanted to take in the first place and to make it even worse; I landed an instructor who is a nit picky pain in my grade book! The class is 100% online and all assignments have minimum word could requirements. This I am use to but she has added to the mix the requirements that all discussion questions as well as essays are cited in APA format from our textbook. The first week of classes the Discussion Questions did not require any research at all and were almost entirely opinion based answers. Unfortunately for me this instructor is one who believes that if you did not cite the text in each and every Discussion question, including those that required no research o answer, you get 0 points out of 40. So, after the first two assignments for the week have been graded, I have 10 out of a possible 50 points! WHOO HOO! It’s early enough in the class that I can easily make up those missing points and pull off a solid B- or better (the class is based on 1000 points total) but the fact that she is a nit picky – find any excuse to give you no credit- instructor will make the remaining five weeks absolute torture on me. Lucky for me my other class, Geography is going much better so far, but no assignments have been graded yet for that one so I may find out I missed the boat on something there as well. Tomorrow it will be one week down and five more to go … Counting the days until May 6 when I am done with classes until the end of September!