Return of the Net-Neophyte

On Friday, about 45 minutes before closing, the door opened and a semi-familiar looking woman walked in.

"Oh... You're here again," she said dismally. Now, her tone did not suggest that my presence was necessarily a bad thing. I think instead, her tone actually meant that she would have preferred to have found someone on shift who didn't have quite as much dirt on her as I did, but that I would do in a pinch. I came to this conclusion a few seconds later, after I heard her next words and realized why she looked so familiar.

"Could, um... could you help me set up an e-mail... again?" she asked.

Oh, no, I thought. Not her!

Yes indeedy, the Internet Neophyte had returned. This was the patron who drove me nigh unto insanity back in July by taking damn near an hour to sign up for a Hotmail account--WITH my help! This was the same patron who refused to stop using her dog's name as both her username AND password despite both my and Hotmail's insistence that she cease doing so. This was the same patron who had then refused to write down either of her final username and password choices, despite my repeated entreaties that she do so, and then had that fact bite her squar in the taint when she couldn't get back into her own account after having JUST CREATED IT! Yes, this was the same patron who then had to use Hotmail's I'M A DAMNED MORON AND FORGOT MY PASSWORD link, then, when faced with having to choose a new password asked me to choose one for her. I chose the word orange, the same color as our internet signs, which I hoped would be easy for her to remember. As you will soon see, I was WRONG!!!!!

Ms. I.N. Phyte had just asked me to help her set up a new e-mail account. What she was REALLY asking me, though, was: Would you just do all the work for me since I'm incapable of doing it on my own?

Nuh uh. That was not going to happen.

I told her, "Well, I can put you on a computer and show you where to go, but..."

"But I'd have to do it myself," she finished for me, returning to her dismal tone. "Do I have time?"

I looked at my watch. "You've got 45 minutes."

On the way back to the computers, Ms. Phyte explained to me that she had not been faithfully checking her e-mail at all over the last two months so her Hotmail account was no more. I thought this unlikely, as Hotmail usually only puts accounts in drydock when they've gone unused for a time, but they will allow you back in if you jump through a couple of minor hoops. So I logged her onto a computer and brought up Hotmail for her to try and login anyway. It booted her out saying either her username or password was incorrect. Why were they incorrect? Oh, maybe because she had NO CLUE what they really were! She tried again and again to no effect.

"Errm. I just can't remember my real password," she said.

Barely able to keep the deep levels of frustration and loathing out of my voice, I said, "I do."

I pointed at the orange internet sign, then leaned over and typed "orange" into the password blank. Still, she was denied. This meant either she'd changed her password--not likely given her inability to login in the first place--or she'd gotten her username wrong. I was pretty sure the later was the case, as she'd gone through five username choices when she'd set up the account back in July. I should have just gone up front and re-read my original write up of the event and then I would have remembered it was her dog's name. As it stood, though, I only recalled the password and only because I had a memory-link to it taped there on the monitor itself. Still, I was pretty sure her original one, whatever it was, had three numbers affixed to the end of it and the one she kept trying then didn't.

"Are you sure that's the right username?"

"Oh, yes. This is it," she said.

"Didn't you have numbers in it?

"Oh, no. This one is it."

Yet, wonder upon wonders, it still didn't work! In fact, Hotmail gave no indication that there was any sort of account with that particular username. It didn't even give us the I'M A DAMNED MORON AND FORGOT MY PASSWORD link, cause the password wasn't the problem.

After a few more unsuccessful attempts, I suggested she would be better off starting from scratch. I loaded up the New Account page and then I hauled ass for the front to get a pencil and paper, which I brought to her and, yet again, told her to write down her username and password AS SOON AS SHE HAD CHOSEN THEM. Then I got the hell out of the computer hall so as to avoid any accidental chokings.

I knew running away was futile. Throughout the oh-so-lengthy Hotmail signup process, Ms. Phyte kept coming to find me and drag me back to answer obscenely simple questions for her. Like: "What time zone are we in?" and "What does it mean when it says `Type in the characters you see in the security image'?" While answering these and many other questions, I took a gander at the paper I'd given her to write everything on. She'd written a username on it all right, but it didn't actually match up with the one I saw on the screen which had a _wholeotherword affixed to it.

Dammit, why can't people figure shit like this out? You have to write down the WHOLE USERNAME!!! Not half of it!!! ALL OF IT!!!!

With admirable restraint, I told her this in far more polite terms and with less verbal violence than I really wanted to use.

"I hope I'm not keeping you from anything?" she said after finally writing the whole username down.

"Oh, no," I said. "I have to be here until seven anyway."

At ten minutes before closing time, a full thirty-five minutes after she'd begun the Hotmail sign up process, Ms. Phyte finally finished up. I checked over her work, told her to hit continue, then I personally skipped through all of Hotmail's Spam Sign-Up pages and showed her the new account...

...again.

"Lemme in! I gotta use the innanet!"

Wow. Today was craptastic, bordering on shitacular!

Lots of irritating and bad things happened to me today and most of the worst of it centered around computers. Sometimes it was our new circulation software, which crashed our circ computer twice for no reason then abandoned all its saved settings in the interim. Mostly, though, it was the patron computers--specifically the patrons using them--that gave me the most headaches.

We were lousy with computer patrons--a full 42 of them by the end of the day, which I think may be a new internet crowd record. At no time between the hours of 1 and 4 were there fewer than three computers in full use with at least one person, usually two, waiting to take a turn. It was amazing and incredibly frustrating.

And yet people kept coming in--often in groups. Yes, sir, they'd arrive, three deep already, with hopeful happy "I'm going to use the internet" expressions on their innocent little faces only to have their expectations crushed by the grumpy "liberry" ass. at the desk.

My oft-repeated mantra became: "Sorry, it may be a while. They're all full right now and there are two people waiting ahead of you. The soonest I could put you on will be 29 minutes from now unless one of them dies or gives up."

One of the computer patrons was an utter newbie to the world of the internet. She signed on as instructed and asked, "Could one of you come put me on the internet. It's been a while since I've used it." I think by "a while" she really meant, "I once saw someone else use a computer.  On TV.  From across a very smoky room."

I logged her on and showed her the Internet Explorer icon, which I activated, bringing up the program. I assumed she knew what to do from there and left her for her half hour. She departed a while later, but came back after a couple of hours to sign on again. This time, I just logged the computer on, figuring she'd been taught about how to load IE already. Well, she did load it, but just barely. After she eventually called me back to help her again, I saw that she had made it as far as our home page and had managed to open up some kind of funky Windows program screen that I'd never seen before. I had to close it all out and double click the IE icon for her, a feat which seemed to delight and amaze her.

As she shortly explained, she was trying to apply for a job somewhere but needed an e-mail address. Someone had suggested she come to the library and sign up for a Hotmail address. They'd even written www.hotmail.com on a piece of paper for her, but she had no clue as to where to type in the address. Only then did I finally realize just what an internet neophyte she truly was.  Still, I'm happy to help educate newbies where I can, so I showed her the address field and instructed her on the minor points of typing in hotmail.com there. Once that came up, I showed her where to click for a new account, showed her around the application screen.  I pointed out the important bits, such as the fact that there was no way in hell she could use her own very common name as the username and not have a five digit number affixed to it. I should have known something was amiss, though, when she seemed to have trouble with the whole concept of passwords. She kept asking me if the password was supposed to be the same as her username.

"Well, I guess it could be, but I don't recommend it," I told her. "Hotmail might not even let you do that."

No, Hotmail most certainly DID NOT want her to do that. In fact, this is exactly what Hotmail was telling her to stop doing when I went back to check on her 15 minutes later. It also didn't want her to use spaces or punctuation in her password.

"I don't understand," she kept saying. "I'm not typing in any spaces or punctuation but it says I can't use that password."

"Is your password your name then?"

"Uh, yes," the woman said, looking at me with an expression that suggested she thought I was some sort of psychic to have guessed her impossible password.

"Don't use your name," I said. "Hotmail won't accept it."

"Oh," she said. She immediately typed in variations on her name twice more and twice more Hotmail refused to accept them.

Over the course of the next ten minutes I struggled to persuade her to stop doing this and to choose something different. I also told her she needed to write down whatever she chose. Did she? Oh, no. Instead, she moved on to the next screen where her chosen user ID of her name was rejected on account it didn't have the aforementioned 5 digit number affixed to it. She didn't like that option, though, so she decided to use her dog's name. This also didn't work, cause there are thousands of other Hotmail users who use her dog's name too.

While sorting this out, she wound up having to go back through the password business again as apparently something had gone amiss somewhere in the process, then back through the username section where she finally settled on her dog's name plus 278. I then made her take my pen and write this down.

Eventually, we got into her new Hotmail account. Knowing how confusing the whole process was for her, I wanted to log her out, then hold her hand and lead her through the login process and show here how to use the damned thing. And, of course, when she tried to log in, Hotmail refused to accept her password.

Another ten minutes crawled by as she tried variations on her name, her dog's name and then capitalized versions of the previous. And because she hadn't written the password down at the same time she wrote her username down, both of which I'd told her to do, she now had no idea what password she'd chosen.

Finally, I convinced her to just use the I'm a damned moron and can't remember my password for five whole minutes link, answer her secret question, (answer: her dog's name), and finally get to choose a new password. Naturally, she tried to use her frickin' dog's name again and screwed it all up!

"Ma'am, you CAN. NOT. use your dog's name, nor YOUR name as a password," I said, practically hissing. "Your username is already your dog's name so Hotmail will NOT accept it as a password. You will HAVE to use a completely different and unrelated word."

"Well, I don't know. You pick one for me," she said, when we'd brought up the new password screen again.

I pointed to our new orange internet sign, flipped back over the top of the monitor.

"Orange," I said.

She shrugged and typed it in.

With that Herculean task finally accomplished, I prepared to leave her to her own devices.

"So now I can just go to the job site?" she asked. I looked and saw her pointing to her piece of paper, where the job site's address was written as well.

"Sure thing," I said. "Just type it in the address line there."

I then left the computer hallway, hauled ass for the circ desk, and told Mrs. C I was going on break.

When I returned, half an hour later, the lady was gone. Mrs. C said she'd had to go back and help the woman twice before finally realizing that the woman firmly believed her new Hotmail username and password would serve as her username and password for the job site. They might have, if she'd had an account with the job site to begin with. Both of them quickly realized that this was not something that needed to be tackled today and the woman left.