Have you ever had a coworker complain about how long a task was taking them to complete, but almost immediately you realized there was a much easier way to do the task that seemed obvious to you but never even occurred to your coworker?

The man in this story was in that exact situation, and he made his coworker’s job so much quicker and easier with just a few clicks.

Let’s read all about it.

In the middle of a lake, downloading data

I am the de-facto tech guy at a small educational facility in the countryside of Sweden.

One of the many weird projects we do is surveillance of fish. Track movement patterns, publish data etc.

The fish have a transmitter inside, and we have placed antennas all over the lake system and at some narrow passages in streams.

Pretty cool stuff, but I’m not very much involved.

His colleague took a long time and didn’t get a lot done.

So its time again for my colleague (60+ years, view size 200% in the browser) to change batteries in the antennas and download data.

So he has to get our boat on a trailer, drive to a ramp, put the boat into the water, drive the boat to the antenna, put the antenna into the boat, replace the battery, and then download the data. And then everything in reverse. Half a day, sometimes one day. Ideally, he can do this for many antennas during one trip.

He comes back, exhausted, only able to have done this for one antenna.

“Oh, I think I’ll need more days for this project this year. The download took me almost an hour” he tells me. “Probably a lot of fish data, now that we are tracking more fish…”

He had some questions.

My bs-detector goes off.

“What? How much data are we talking about?”

“How can I know? It’s data for almost a year of detections!”

I try to debug this narrative. “So tell me, how do you download this data?”

“I take the boat to the antenna, open my laptop, which I can’t do on a rainy day, start this synchronisation software, connect to the internet using my mobile phone, then the software detects the antenna and I press download.”

He asked another very good question.

I stop his story: “Wait! What? You are connecting to the internet? Why?”

“I don’t know. Otherwise it doesn’t work. Maybe the antenna uses the Internet to connect to my laptop? How should I know?”

At this point I seriously consider being pranked.

“Give me your laptop! And an antenna!”

He obliges, getting an antenna not currently deployed from our storage.

He decided to try it himself.

I start up the software. Put the laptop offline. Try to connect to the antenna.

It works immediately. It’s Bluetooth, after all! 1.5MB of data available.

Now I try to download the data. An error. “You are currently not connected to the server where you want to store the data.”

Hmm. Server?

There was an easy solution.

Open the settings of the software. Sure enough, my colleagues default folder is on a network server. facepalm I change the default folder to Desktop/fishdata and retry the process.

2 seconds. Finished.

The VPN our laptops are on is pretty shaky, especially via a mobile hotspot out on a lake. An hour for “download” (actually upload) sounded excessive, but it made somewhat sense.

He made his colleague’s job so much quicker.

Afterwards, I quickly saw that the manufacturer had free mobile apps for easier download in the field.

Now my colleague doesn’t need to wait for a dry day anymore.

I sometimes fear for the day I might become this out of touch with current technology.

At least his colleague wasn’t doing anything malicious or wasting time on purpose. It sounds like he genuinely didn’t know there was an easier and quicker option.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

One person admits to being out of touch with technology.

This is a pretty good, and pretty humorous summary of the story.

It really does!

I don’t think this is what’s meant by a data lake.

Another person defends the colleague.

Not everyone is technologically inclined.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.