To give some background info on this - in the library system I work in, those of us who work at the service desk can provide limited computer-use assistance to customers......we aren't supposed to sit down and work with someone for long periods of time.
Yesterday afternoon, I have a man come up to me and ask if I can help his sister, said she was on computer #5. (I'll refer to her as Martha) Martha has a piece of mail from a well-known sweepstakes company, is trying to enter a code on their website, but was having trouble logging into her account.
To make it short, I ended up having to repeatedly explain the following things to Martha:
- I don't have access to account settings on the sweepstakes website, and can't manually reset her password.
- Martha had a "password reset" link that was sent to her G-mail account. She needed to go into her e-mail account to open that message. Martha didn't remember her Gmail password, and I can't manually reset that password for her, either.
- her library card number and password ONLY work for access to our public computers, website, and databases....NOT other areas of the Internet.
Anyhow, I don't know if Martha was just REALLY ignorant about how things on the Internet work, or if she was given the wrong information about what library staff could help her with. Either way, it was a rather sucky and frustration situation.....especially since I could sense she was getting annoyed with me for not being able to help her.
Yesterday afternoon, I have a man come up to me and ask if I can help his sister, said she was on computer #5. (I'll refer to her as Martha) Martha has a piece of mail from a well-known sweepstakes company, is trying to enter a code on their website, but was having trouble logging into her account.
To make it short, I ended up having to repeatedly explain the following things to Martha:
- I don't have access to account settings on the sweepstakes website, and can't manually reset her password.
- Martha had a "password reset" link that was sent to her G-mail account. She needed to go into her e-mail account to open that message. Martha didn't remember her Gmail password, and I can't manually reset that password for her, either.
- her library card number and password ONLY work for access to our public computers, website, and databases....NOT other areas of the Internet.
Anyhow, I don't know if Martha was just REALLY ignorant about how things on the Internet work, or if she was given the wrong information about what library staff could help her with. Either way, it was a rather sucky and frustration situation.....especially since I could sense she was getting annoyed with me for not being able to help her.
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