Kevin Page: New job, new challenge, same technology fumbles - onions and carrots?

Technology can be be baffling at times, especially when you find yourself in one of those blind leading the blind situations. Kevin Page found himself in one of these recently at the start of a new job. Photo / Getty Images

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So I'm eight days into my new fulltime job and I have to admit to feeling a little stressed. It didn't help my start was delayed two days by a bit of a cold.

Typical isn't it? You go a year without so much as a sniffle but the day before you are to re-enter the workforce your head feels like a base drum and you can't stop sneezing.
Anyway.

All that meant my scheduled 10-day high intensity training session with my retiring predecessor became eight days, or seven and a half if you count the time he had to spend answering all the interrupting phone calls of congratulations and best wishes.
So I've been behind right from the start.

Ordinarily I don't tend to let stress into my world. Or at least I didn't think I did.
My attitude has always been what will be will be and it's really all about how you react to the various situations that arise.

For example, I vividly recall the time a colleague in a busy newsroom who could not get through to someone important, ripped the phone off the wall in frustration and flung it through the window.

That the glass window was closed was bad enough (and the result rather noisy) but the fact we were on the third floor of a building in the middle of a big city didn't help.

Luckily nobody walking the pavement below was injured which, if I recall correctly, was really the only thing he could offer up by way of comment as the firing squad loaded their rifles.

But I digress. As I say, these last few days, I've been feeling the pressure a bit.
The job itself is pretty easy, mainly talking to people, which I enjoy.

Some of the bits that support that talking are a little harder to come to grips with, hence the stress. Bits like the technology.

I make no bones about my general lack of any technological know-how. It is what it is. I think I must have been wagging and trying to pash that cute girl from 4G behind the bike sheds the day of the tech lesson.

Having said that, show me the computer system I need to work on and what I have to do and I'll be a semi expert by the end of the day. And that's what has happened this week.

We've got stuck in to the working system, pressed numerous buttons on the keyboard and somehow it has all come together.

But with the compressed time scale we didn't have time to sort out all the new tech stuff I need before the experts left and so something got missed.

It turned out to be my new phone.

I think my new bosses, all three of who are in their early 30s, figured it would be easy to transfer over contacts and link the phone to the thing in the car - which apparently is so commonplace I don't even know what it is called - even for a 57-year old like me.

What they didn't factor in was my predecessor has another 13 years on me and though he was/is significantly better at phone set up etc than me it was very much a case of the blind leading the blind 10 minutes before he knocked off for good and went off to a well-deserved knees-up in town last Friday.

In the end we did what we could and got his work contacts transferred on to my phone while he set up his own new one on a different number.

Or at least that's what we thought we'd done.

I figured out something hadn't quite gone right when I got a message in the middle of that very night saying my taxi was waiting outside. That was followed by several others over the next hour wishing my predecessor well and thanks for a great night and yes, such and such a bar had worked out perfect for the party hadn't it?

The fun continued throughout the weekend with all manner of messages and requests coming through.

For some obscure reason I couldn't ring him or reply to the messages either so I just gave up, pinning my hopes instead on finding a 12-year-old kid in the office Monday morning who could sort it all out for me.

But just in case, I delivered my predecessor's wife a bag of carrots and some onions late on Sunday afternoon.

She'd messaged him to say she was making his favourite soup and I didn't want him to miss out.

• Kevin Page is a teller of tall tales with a firm belief too much serious news gives you frown lines. Feel free to share stories to editor@northernadvocate.co.nz (Kevin Page in subject field).