There are two kinds of people who aren’t good with technology but have to report a computer problem. One kind will immediately say they broke it and aren’t sure what they did. The other kind will say they have no clue what happened but know they fiddled with something thus causing the problem. To use nice terms, it’s usually the oblivious versus the fibbers. The oblivious can’t give us any information because they don’t understand what they’re doing. The fibbers keep helpful information from us to avoid admitting anything and being embarrassed.

Every now and then there’s a third kind. An androgynous sort as we’re unable to tell if they’re oblivious or a fibber…

We got a call from a girl that her buddy list wasn’t working anymore (Yes, remember the days of AIM and buddy lists?). The ticket didn’t say if Internet Explorer was still working so I didn’t know if the problem was AIM, her connection or something else entirely.

I arrived at her room and a girl answered the door while on her cell phone. She showed me her computer- a Dell desktop. I rolled my eyes. I opened Internet Explorer and up came a webpage without a problem. I knew it wasn’t her connection which was a good start. She continued to yap loudly on her phone to another girl (who spoke back loudly) while sitting on her bed not paying any attention to me.

Knowing she was connected, the next step was to open AIM and see where it failed. I was thinking she had an older version or needed to re-install AIM due to a corrupted file. I just needed to run AIM to find out. If I could find the icon on her desktop. But I couldn’t. She didn’t seem to have that many icons but I figured I was just overlooking it. And then it was obvious.

I had to go to her room because she accidentally deleted the icon from her desktop? Why couldn’t she have just told us that on the phone? All she had to say was that she couldn’t find the AIM thing on the desktop to click. A few more thoughts went through my head but I’ll keep them to myself.

I navigated through her folders to create a new AIM icon but when I got to Program Files I didn’t see an AIM folder.

Hmm.

I searched around looking for any resemblance of AOL or AIM but found none. Nothing in Add/Remove Programs and no results when I searched for any history of AIM. At first I thought she couldn’t find her icon but I quickly realized she never had AIM installed in the first place.

The fix was simple, I downloaded the latest version and installed it. It opened fine and connected without a problem so I motioned to the girl to come over. While still talking to whoever she hopped off the bed and came over, putting in her information and signing in. When it worked she was excited and told the telephone that ResCom fixed her computer. She mouthed thank you and continued on like I wasn’t there so I grabbed my things and went back to the office.

There were many questions I wanted to ask her. Looking at the facts, there were only two possibilities:

• She was oblivious she never had AIM installed on that computer and didn’t know what to do.
• She was a fibber- she uninstalled AIM or never had it but lied to make it sound like it used to work.

In my opinion, after seeing her system I’d say she was oblivious. There didn’t seem to be any trace of AIM and AOL as a company was notorious for leaving files after uninstalling.

The best part? This girl lived in the honors wing.