The Pictures
I couldn’t understand why it was taking the new guy two hours to upload the pictures. Turns out, he was uploading them one by one. When I showed him he could select and upload them all at once, he looked at me like I was some kind of wizard.
The Message
The new boss left a note on my desk. It was a sticky note saying I should come to his office. The note was pinned to a printed Word document with a screenshot of an email. He’d taken a photo of his own reply to one of my emails in Outlook — a reply he never sent with one click — but instead wrote out, photographed, printed, pinned it to a handwritten note, and brought it up from another floor to put on my desk. While I was still processing how absurd that was, my phone rang — it was him. He asked if I’d received his message, because if so, we could discuss things over the phone. And this was the guy officially tasked with "making the team more efficient."
Struggling
The new guy grabbed an electric sander and started sanding by hand — moving the machine back and forth without even turning it on or attaching sandpaper. He was sanding with the Velcro strip that’s supposed to hold the sandpaper in place.
The Signature
I asked a colleague something, but he told me to wait because he was finishing an email. I watched him type his name and contact info under the email — copying the company phone number from his business card! This guy had to send dozens of emails daily, and I couldn’t believe he was typing all that manually every time. In half a minute, I set up an Outlook signature for him and showed how he could insert it with a single click. He was so grateful, he promoted me. (Yes, he was my boss.)
Blurred Vision
One morning, the marketing girl demanded I replace her monitor immediately because it was blurry. I brought her a new one, but she said it was blurry too. Then she thought for a moment, dug into her bag, and it turned out she’d just forgotten to put on her glasses.
Flat
The new cleaning lady couldn’t use the mop with a pedal and always wrung it out by hand in the sink.
No Space
The new (male) colleague filled a whole page in Word, then looked worriedly at the screen and said he couldn’t type more because there was "no more space." I had to show him he could scroll down. (He also learned the “save” function from me.)
The Machine
The young colleague said he couldn’t go measure because his phone was dead. I gave him a calculator from the drawer and told him to write down the measurements on paper. He turned the calculator over curiously — it turned out he’d never used one before.
Mental Math
The assistant with an economics degree couldn’t calculate in her head what 80% of 100,000 HUF (about 285 USD) was. Right before my eyes, she searched for an online percentage calculator and copied the result from there.
The Killer Spreadsheet
The new female colleague was hired by the boss to join the “older ladies” (that was us, the 38-46-year-old team) with someone young who “keeps up with the times” and is sharp with every office app. We didn’t get it because we all managed systems well, but we were curious about the young talent — who I caught crying in front of her monitor on her very first day. I asked what was wrong, and she showed me she’d entered a formula for the twentieth time but only “gibberish” appeared in the cell. I just widened the cell with one move, and the number appeared. She was amazed at how clever I was. Still, she was a better hire than her predecessor, who calculated things with a calculator and typed them into Excel…
