Some background information:

We have a woman working in my office... she's a good deal older than I am, I'm assuming around 60-ish, and does not understand computers one little bit. We'll call her Tracy.

Now, Tracy, when confronted with a computer issue, will never, EVER try to resolve it herself. Instead, she assumes every error is devastating, and pulls someone else away from their work to attempt to fix it... this normally involves me.

Now, I'm an extremely patient person. I know she's just worried, and I'm her Team Leader, but she's gotten me in trouble more than once because my own productivity suffered.

Today isn't going any better than most Mondays. Thankfully she only works here 3 days a week. So, I come in this morning, and Tracy's already having problems. Her connection keeps freezing, which leads to her getting booted off. My bosses know about this problem. The other hospital Tracy has access to is down at the moment, and probably will be for another month or so until someone updates the software (which, by that time, will be out of date and will start that whole downtime over again). I can't tell her to use another system, and I can't fix her current system, so... I tell her to take it slow, don't worry about productivity, and just get as much done as she can (I'm assuming it's connectivity issues between us and them, and I assume that neither side is going to want to do anything about it).

And... she calls the hospital help desk. Now, this almost never turns out good. Hospital IT guys have their own computer illiterate people to put up with, without having to field calls from people that A) Don't help the hospital in any discernible way, or B) work for another company at a remote location. As such, they typically won't bother with us. And then I heard it... "Why don't I let you talk to my team leader..."

At this point, I imagine my brain leaping out of my head and bashing itself repeatedly on my desk. The skull would apparently offer too much protection in this case. As I sat there, ticking off the seconds, the only thought in my head was "please let her go to someone else... please let her go to someone else... please..." And of course... "Chris... can you come talk to these people for me?" /headasplode.

To make matters worse, as I'm walking over to talk to a person that I know will tell me nothing is wrong on their end (because there probably isn't anything wrong on their end), of course my boss (IE, the person responsible for my continued employment here) just happens to be standing in my path, wondering what the hell is going on, since I'm typically not responsible for this kind of stuff anyway. And of course she looks pissed off, and gives me... the eye.

Thankfully this got taken out of my hands shortly after. Must... find... new... job...

Anyone else want to share some words or phrases that signaled your day going to sh*t?