My first full time job after college was as an administrative assistant at a health insurance company. I did a lot of what you might expect: directing incoming phone calls, keeping our office supply cabinet stocked, answering cries of anguish from distressed colleagues…
One fine afternoon, I hear someone calling my name from across the office. It is definitely one of those cries of anguish. I hurry around the cubicle walls to her desk.
She gestures nervously at her monitor, which is displaying what appears to be an empty word processor document. Uh oh. With panic rising in her voice, she explains the situation in detail:
“The thing disappeared from the thing.”
I take a breath to steady myself. Absorbing her panic is not going to help us here, and things disappearing from things might be Bad with a capital B. She gets up and steps aside, fretting. I sit in her chair and lean in to inspect the situation.
Okay, she’s got a document open, but there’s no text. There’s no blinking cursor either, that’s odd. But otherwise things look pretty normal. I study the screen without touching anything.
I notice the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen. Aha – she’s somehow inadvertently scrolled off to the right of her document. Why is this even an option? Who knows. I click the scroll bar once. The view shifts back to the left. The text she’s been working on reappears.
With a huge sigh of relief, she thanks me and declares me a miracle worker, an assessment based more on her previous level of panic than on my level of skill.
I try to explain what saw and how I solved the problem. I want to teach, so if the thing disappears from the thing in the future, she has the knowledge and skill to solve the problem on her own.
But she doesn’t care about scroll bars. She’s just glad she didn’t lose her work.
Should she have cared about the scroll bars? Would she have been better off, if she’d learned about scrolling to the right, in that moment?
I usually want to know how things work. It expands my ability to troubleshoot in the future. So I wanted her to know, too!
But she just wanted to get her document written and get on with her work. Maybe she’d feel empowered and capable if she could troubleshoot her word processing program. Or maybe this bit about scroll bars would have been useless clutter in her mind, information she’d never use.
After all, the first thing she did once she got her text back was save her document. She was reminded, in an emotionally-charged way, to save early and save often. This might be the more important lesson!
Next time this happened, she could just close the word processor and re-open and maybe she would only have lost a few minutes of work. Or maybe she’d even save a copy of the “empty” document (under a different name, just to be sure she wasn’t overwriting her last save) and she’d open that to find it was all still there.
She could rescue herself from problems where knowledge about a horizontal scroll bar wouldn’t help her at all.
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