Another day at the office

RantWoman is hereby documenting some of the challenges of providing services at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing.

RantWoman was pounding away on other gigs in her own domicile but she dropped by the Friendly Neighborhood center to meet with a regular there. The receptionist passed along the message that the person RantWoman was hoping to talk to is out with another chapter of medical horrors.

Medical horrors among Friendly Neighborhood Center... regulars are worthy of their own entry. Basically, the Friendly Neighborhood Center runs heavily on a "peer support"model. A charitable way of explaining that would be that a lot of volunteer labor keeps the place open. To a certain extent there are job descriptions but many roles suffer repeated interruptions as the people who fill or are most attached to them suffer round after round of horrendous medical difficulties. These are the sort of horrendous difficulties that make fainter hearts such as RantWoman shut up about many things she might be cross about simply because other people show up in spite of nearly endless ever-mutating forms of awfulness. One downside is that people get really attached to their roles. Another is that there is a severe need for concepts like resilience and cross-training so that needed things continue to happen even when key people are gone.


RantWoman is further meditating about the dimensions of technical support and training needed every time the Friendly Neighborhood Center adds new services. Recently the Friendly Neighborhood Center added video Skype.

This is a HUGE service enhancement but the video Skype and the webcam got installed on one computer and there is no simple documentation. RantWoman possibly has a lot of nerve whining about this since she had to miss the volunteers meeting where this was announced. Well, RantWoman is familiar enough with the Friendly Neighborhood Center to expect that showing up might have made her even more painfully conscious of training issues, but that is a different problem.

Call this communications problems: RantWoman was previously scheduled to be at the Super Duper Powerpoint festival; if the volunteers meetings occur regularly, RantWoman will calendar them, but RantWoman is the sort of geek who like as not will just walk up to technology and start fussing with it based only on her general level of gall and previous life experience.

Today For RantWoman's trouble she wound up:

--rebooting the computer because she started NVDA for trial purposes and did not pay attention to the instructions about how to shut it down before clobbering the screen with the help information.


--Fishing around in Skype limbo trying to call the very person most likely to use Skype, the person who was not where expected because of more medical horrors, one of the people who has a much better time communicating with the sign-language illiterate such as RantWoman if there are aids such as video Skype around.

At this point, RantWoman gave up, went home, caught news of the latest medical mishaps via email, and decided the problems on her mind would keep until tomorrow.