The Work Order Nobody Wanted: ‘The Predator’
Accepting Novelty Work Orders Occasionally Goes Wrong
Morning meetings were mandatory. My boss, Omar, droned through the previous day’s tech issues: printer jams, frozen screens, password resets. These had been elevated to work orders that required in-person visits. Most techs jumped on these because they were easy. The newer techs, eager to impress, went for the harder jobs, still convinced their efforts would be rewarded.
I was unmoved by any of it until I heard something unusual: “Must pound keyboard to get Excel to work.”
I raised my hand sharply. “I’ll take that one.”
My other boss (I had 5) looked up quickly at me, clearly shocked by my enthusiasm. “Really? It’s Jim Prediger.”
Jim was one of A.C.T’s most infamous computer users. When his name was spoken attached to a work order, the floor suddenly became quite interesting, evidenced by all eyes in the meeting plummeting downward. Feet began to tap in discomfort, and the longest silence would precede sympathetic bargaining from Omar.
“C’mon, guys. Someone needs to take this.”
More silence and averted glances.
“He’s not that bad, guys. C’mon. Please someone just take it so we can move forward.”
It was a wonderful display of guilt threshold disparity. The silence continued until a defeated, limp arm would rise in reluctant compliance. And Omar thanked the poor soul who accepted the task. Our team handled hundreds of work orders each week, but we were only ever thanked when Jim was involved.
Jim Prediger was a balding, older, ex-military man who communicated with others as if he was still in the service. His answers were short and confident, his spine was long and straight, and his level of patience, particularly for technology, was just a few ticks below rage. In military terms he was a landmine with dirt already weighing down his trigger.
He’d started at A.C.T. what must have been several hundred years earlier. On his first day, his office came equipped with a window shade, a file cabinet, a bulletin board, and a typewriter. As the years went on and the company soared into the golden age of information, upon Jim was thrust a 486 computer, equipped with the 4th and fastest generation of Intel’s x86 chips, capable of running the first “end user” graphical operating system, the glorious and obscenely luxuriant Windows 3.1, complete with solitaire.
Jim struggled to make these repeated technological transitions but handled them, for the most part, with composure. It was when the company decided to upgrade all users to Windows 95 (in 1998) that Jim debatably “lost his shit.” Work orders for Jim became constant. He seemed to be calling the help desk at the slightest frustration, regularly reporting somewhat violent solutions to his computer issues. Other techs had been berated, yelled at, and banished from his office.
In the IT department Jim was affectionately known as “Prediger the Predator.”
I was excited to meet him.
I first called Jim from my office phone to notify him of my visit and assure that he was not in a meeting or otherwise engaged. I asked him as politely as possible if it would be alright if I came now?
“Might as well,” he replied, clearly annoyed already, “I can’t do anything until one of you guys comes to fix this thing.”
I tucked a spare keyboard under my arm in case he’d smashed his beyond functionality. I trotted up the floating stairs toward the testing department, where Jim spent his days exercising his multiple PhDs, writing tricky test questions which would decide teenagers’ fates.
At Jim’s open office door, I paused outside.
He sat facing away from me. The skin on the back of his mostly bald head seemed very tan, bunched up in the strangest little fatless rolls as if the skin had slid off the back of his skull and landed at his neck. He was still, silent, seemingly hypnotized by the slow pulsing of his monitor. His arms were down at his sides. He had no files open on his screen. He just gazed into the default, muted-teal Microsoft Windows desktop, dotted with a smattering of icons.
I knocked.
In one swift motion, he swiveled around in his ergonomic office chair, and erupted from the seat, presenting to me the broken computer with one raised arm as a Barnum & Bailey Circus ring leader would present to an audience a hula-hooping elephant.
I cautiously thanked him, sat down and with a single index finger began pecking at various keys on his keyboard.
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“So what’s going on with your computer?” I asked.
“It’s all right there in the work order,” he said sharply. “Shouldn’t be anything else you need.”
He tucked his arms neatly behind his back and stood at attention behind me, just like his old military days. It was a fractional attention, though, the intensity of which I felt was proportional to the amount of respect he had for me. Maybe 75 percent, which was fair.
He leaned in while I was clicking until his head felt like a parrot on my shoulder, each of his breaths uncomfortably humid against my neck.
I had the perfect remedy for this. I used it often.
Opening the start menu on his computer, I clicked Run, then typed “command.exe.” This opened up the DOS prompt. I carried on about my business in DOS in pure text, which certainly was a foreign language to him. I wasn’t really doing anything, just making this work order less interesting to observe.
Jim stood back, watched for a minute, then became frustrated.
“I don’t know what the hell you are doing there. I’m going to go get more coffee.”
“Okay,” I replied.
As soon as he was out of sight, I closed the DOS prompt. Some keys on his keyboard weren’t working, a product of him angrily smashing his fists on them. I turned the computer off, swapped the keyboard, and restarted. Problem solved. Not such a bad guy, I thought.
I sat there at his desk while the computer restarted, browsing the few pictures on his wall. He had several of a beautiful handmade wooden canoe. My father built cedar-strip canoes, so I perused the photos with much interest. Magnificent craftsmanship, I thought.
Jim came back with coffee just as I was logging him back in. I vacated his chair.
“All yours again,” I said as he sat down and turned his back to me again.
But I wanted to say more and was hesitant to leave. For God’s sake, we both liked canoeing.
I knew exactly what I intended to say, and the words that I wanted to use. I wanted to go easy, like “hey, nice canoe. Did you build it?”
But what actually came out for some reason was, “hey nice kayak. Did you build it?”
There is a longstanding rivalry between canoeists and kayakers. Kayakers say things like “nice barge” and “half the paddle, half the brain,” while canoeists claim to be able to get the job done with half the paddle, and challenge kayakers to get a moose quarter in their hull. This banter dates back to the late 1800s when the boats transitioned from tools of indigenous people to tools of identity by American and European recreationalists.
Jim, I was about to learn, clearly identified as a canoeist.
He set his coffee down slowly and calmly, and I could see the flaps on his neck changing to a deep reddish purple, like the dynamic camouflage displays of a cuttlefish.
Suddenly he slammed both fists down on top of the brand new keyboard that I had just installed, sending a splash of coffee over the lip of his mug and onto his desk.
He turned halfway toward me in the chair, deep red in the face now. With gritted teeth and furrowed brow, he gripped hard the arm rests of his chair.
“It’s a canoe!” he growled gutturally.
Then silence as I searched for words. I knew the difference between a canoe and kayak, damnit! How many miles of river had I canoed? My dad built these boats!
I opened my mouth but in the face of his rage, nothing came out.
“Leave my office!” he commanded.
I did and never returned. Jim’s work orders continued, including one for another keyboard.
