Make Way for the IT Professional

I was back at my desk in the research lab when someone I vaguely recognized from upper management burst in through the door. Her dry cleaned shirt was pristine and her high heeled pumps shone like beacons of opulence, but her expression was stricken. I looked up instinctively at the intrusion and she was upon my desk in a flash, as I was the unfortunate soul who sat closest to the door.

At first, I couldn’t remember her name. I smiled awkwardly as she approached and desperately scanned my mind to remember more details about her. She was important, I recalled that much, but I was only in my second week on the job.

Getting the faces and names of everyone who worked in a department at a teaching hospital down that fast was a physiological impossibility. There were far too many people.

“Kiara,” she said breathlessly, “I need your help.”

I turned my smile up to eleven as I silently died of awkwardness on the inside. The only thing worse than forgetting someone’s name was when they remembered your name.

Since she was standing, I stood up to match her sense of urgency. “I’d be happy to help.”

Preprogrammed responses of politeness — I may as well have been spitting out database results.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I heard that you used to help out with computers in the lab back when you were a student worker. Are you tech-savvy?”

I had never in my life worked in IT, but that didn’t seem to matter at the moment. I knew IT stood for information technology and that I could usually make computers do what I needed them to and that seemed like enough.

I looked her over, from her manicured nails to her hospital ID that was flipped backward from her mad rush into the dry lab. She had to be one of the department administrators I heard mentioned in dozens of meetings. I looked at her hair, cut short to frame her face, and that was when it hit me.

Caramel.

Her hair was the exact same color as caramel. I remembered that her name was Catherine Carmel. It sounded like the perfect name for someone who owned a candy company, which I now remembered finding amusing when in a dull meeting one afternoon.

“I know enough to get by,” I said, trying to sound helpful without making too many promises.

“Excellent,” she said, her eyes brightening, like caramel in a freshly bitten candy bar. “Then you know how to use a projector?”

I blinked — who could work here and not know how to use a projector?

“Yes?” I asked lamely, expecting there to be more.

“Fantastic, would you mind coming with me for a few minutes? We have a meeting going on upstairs and they just can’t get the projector going.”

“I can try,” I said uncertainly, hoping to come off as non-committal.

“The meeting was supposed to start at two o’clock. Everyone’s getting a bit tense now,” she said.

I looked at the time on the clock mounted above the door. It was eleven minutes after two. I could certainly see why people with packed calendars and constant back-to-back meetings were getting upset.

I agreed to help and followed her deeper into the lab, which seemed like the wrong direction. Regardless, I decided it was in my best professional interests not to question someone much higher on the corporate food chain.

Helping with a projector was such an unexpected question for someone in upper management to come to a researcher with, but I couldn’t exactly say no.

She led me to a door that I hadn’t paid much attention to in the hallway just beyond the back of the lab. She used her card to unlock the door and I found myself in a stairwell I’d never been in before. I followed her wordlessly and we went one floor up as she told me more about how terribly important their meeting was and how audiovisual equipment never seemed to work well at the hospital.

When we reached the conference room, I was first struck by how much older the room was. It definitely hadn’t been renovated up to the hilt like the lab and clinic.

The walls were a slightly dark shade of bland yellow that reminded me more of vomit than sunlight. The floor had worn out brown carpet that made the room look like it came directly out of an eighties décor magazine.

Though the room was old and unpleasant, it was still packed. The long, rectangular table seated at least twenty people and every tall, leather chair was full. Everyone was well dressed in their very best professional regalia, with women in skirt suits, men in suits, and physicians with their lab coats over neatly ironed shirts.

The projector was at least a bit newer, but it was still a rather hefty model coming down from the ceiling. My eyes first went to the lights on the unit to make sure it was powered on as I made my way up to the podium and the two professionals in suits crowded around it. I saw a man and a woman looking at the computer with knitted brows, but the woman retreated to her seat when she saw help on the way.

“Hi, I’m Kiara Wright,” I said pleasantly to the man who was left behind. “I’m new in the Sleep Therapy Clinic.”

“Will Miller,” he said, his voice coming out like a grunt as he shook my hand.

His hand was sweaty and I forced a poker face smile.

“What seems to be the trouble here?” I asked.

“I’ve tried absolutely everything,” he said as he stepped back. “And I mean everything. Everything. It just won’t work.”

“Mind if I check a few things?” I questioned sweetly.

I was no tech support specialist, but I knew from helping higher ranked colleagues in the past to tread very carefully whenever there were technological issues. Fixing them too quickly or pointing out that it was something too obvious always offended people and made them feel impotent.

I also knew from helping my mother install a new printer on her laptop that no one wanted to be asked if they’d already tried turning it off and on again. It was the forbidden question. There were few questions that could be more offensive to someone who thought they knew what they were doing.

I started with the large, white remote for the projector and made sure that the video source was set to the computer, which got the screen on the wall to turn an unhappy shade of solid blue.

That didn’t work.

I looked at the connection and everything seemed quite standard; there was an HDMI cable coming from a panel on the wall and running over to the podium.

I subtly made sure it was pressed in all the way, since checking connections for the wrong person had the same offensive potential as “have you tried turning it off and on again?”

Still, nothing happened.

It was a Windows computer and I jumped into the display settings menu to reduce the screen resolution. The laptop looked pretty recent, perhaps a year or two old, while the projector was probably getting ready to celebrate its tenth or eleventh birthday with a cake made of dust.

What I was doing certainly wasn’t brain surgery, but I still felt the eyes of the crowd on me. I smelled something I could only guess was Will’s increasing body odor from sweating.

It could have been the way he was hovering, but the impatient tension in the room was starting to infect me like stubborn cold bacteria.

I knew that I was just trying to be helpful, so even if I failed, it shouldn’t really matter. It shouldn’t have any actual impact on my job or how my colleagues perceived me. Plus, I probably would never again see at least half of the important suits in the room.

Regardless, they were looking at me like I was some kind of professional at this. I really didn’t want to leave the room as the loser who couldn’t fix the problem.

Reducing screen resolution was no mythical IT secret, but it worked. The laptop’s display appeared on the projector’s screen and Will let out an audible sigh of relief.

Back at the table, Catherine grinned at me and gave me a thumbs up over her thick pile of reports and papers.

“You’re all set,” I said pleasantly.

After a few brief words of thanks, they immediately dove into the meeting before I even made my way to the exit. I found my way back to the stairwell Catherine led me through but discovered that my ID card didn’t get me beyond the locked door.

I grimaced and spent the next ten minutes unproductively getting lost until I finally found my way back to familiar lab territory. Once I was finally back at my desk, I got back to work.

With those small but largely admissible frustrations in my pocket, I returned to my literature search, compiling all the relevant articles I could find on treating sleep issues for patients with schizophrenia.

A little after three, Catherine appeared in the lab again. My gut instinct was a small hint of dread, expecting her to have another odd side quest for me.

“Kiara!” she said brightly.

Exclaiming my name seemed to be her preferred style of greeting.

“Hello, Catherine,” I said, hoping that using her first name wouldn’t be too forward.

She wasn’t a doctor, which made respectfully addressing her harder. Her email signature told me she had a master of arts in communication and a master of public health, which nullified the easiest way to refer to people. I wasn’t sure if she was a Ms. Carmel or a Mrs. Carmel, which just left me to hope she didn’t think I was being too casual by using her first name.

“Thank you so much for your help earlier,” she said gratefully.

“It was no problem.”

“That was a huge director’s meeting. It would have been disastrous to reschedule if you hadn’t gotten the projector going.”

“I’m happy to help,” I said with a smile.

She leaned over my desk a little and lowered her voice to a conspiratorially low whisper. “You know that guy you helped, Will?”

“Right, that was my first time meeting him.”

“He’s the Director of IT.”

I stared at her blankly.

She couldn’t be serious.

“You’re joking, right?” I asked with an uncomfortable laugh, trying very hard not to say anything offensive.

“I wish I was,” she said grimly, shaking her head.

I cringed in my desk chair. No one in the senior leadership of the IT department should have less knowledge about something as basic as using a projector than a dime-a-dozen dry lab researcher like me should.

“I see…” I said blandly.

“This is precisely why none of the audiovisual equipment on this campus works,” she said, shaking her head in exasperation. “Because that’s who we’ve got in charge.”

I nodded, still acutely feeling like I was stomping on eggshells and listening to them crack. I felt too new to be privy to the proverbial hushed, insubordinate complaints of the office.

Catherine thanked me again then left the lab in a hurry, shaking her head the whole while in disapproval of how terrible IT support was in the hospital. It was baffling to think that an organization that existed for over a hundred years had such teetering bricks at the top of its wall, but I was careful not to vocalize anything too controversial.

I decided to persuade myself that there was a bright side. Evidently, I wasn’t just a researcher anymore; I was moonlighting as tech support for the Director of IT.

~

This short story was written for the prompt “write a short story in which a specialist is called upon to carry out a job.” I couldn’t resist putting a humorous spin on that idea.