As I’ve mentioned before, I’m spending my days post-graduation but pre-real-job working as a help desk technician for the school, which means that I occasionally have to interact with students.

Generally I am actually quite a nice person, but today I was presented with a situation where I could not avoid being evil.

A young man walked into my office – bypassing, by the way, the front desk staff that are supposed to keep people from walking into my office, and said unto me, without preamble, “What’s a fuser?”

Now, I have learned to speak the simple, yet elegant language spoken by college students, and I understood his meaning. In English, he was saying:

“Hello, good sir, I am attempting to print a document that is of grave import as it is midterms week, and yon printing device is giving me an error saying something about a fuser that I do not understand as I am a business student and need a technically inclined person to bail me out”

But, that is not what he said, and unfortunately for him I used to work for a Major Printer Manufacturer doing development on laser printers, so I have a reasonably in-depth understanding of the process of printing and the role of the fuser in binding your words to paper, and I explained this at length for several minutes while I watched his eyes glaze over and his soul die and then I took pity on him and went and fixed his printer.

Now that I think about it, I retract my previous statement: I wasn’t evil at all.

After all, the young man in question now has his paper printed out AND a somewhat better understanding of How Things Work, and possibly a valuable life lesson in how to properly formulate and ask a question.

So it was a good day.