When it comes to technology, people always want things to be faster and easier, when is good to the extent that it is possible.

What would you do if you had a client who needed help with a specific thing, and you asked them to send you a screenshot, but they wanted you to automate it for them.

That is the situation that the tech support guy in this story was in, and he got frustrated because people ask him to automate one-time tasks all the time.

It feels like the more sophisticated technology becomes, the less willing people are to even do the bare minimum.

Client: We understand that there is a manual function to attach documents to invoices when our client hasn’t uploaded one.

Should be easy enough.

In this case we’d want to attach proof from the email confirmation from our client that the invoice is authorized. Can you assist?

Me: Sure, you just take a screenshot of the email and upload using the “add image” button.

Yeah, get an image of the screen.

Client: Screenshot? You mean print screen?

Me: Yes – so just take a print screen – you can use snipping tool or “greenshot” or a similar app to do this easily.

This really couldn’t be easier.

Then just upload that image against the invoice. That way you just have a nice snapshot of the email the client sent over.

Client: Is there some way we could automate this so that we don’t have to convert the email into an image format? It seems like an extra step that is unnecessary.

By automate, they mean do it for them.

Automate. There’s that word again. We want to automate manual ad hoc scenarios when our standard automatic process doesn’t work.

Can’t wait to develop a way to attach .eml files automatically and then later listen to the client complain that there’s just too much fluff in these files and they really just need a snapshot of the email.

Automation is one thing, but you can’t really automate something that just has to be done once and it is a unique experience.

Read on to see what the people in the comments thought of this interaction.

Now this commenter has a great idea.

This is exactly right.

This should shut them up quick.

People make so much extra work for themselves.

It will take you 30 seconds, just do it!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.