So we have a grad student who has been working without pay or health insurance or anything else in a very illegal way because the department chair (who was promoted out of most of the management of the department because he's useless) fucked up his contract which was due to be completed about a month before I started here. The main issue holding it up was that the chair didn't have the appropriate role to approve it. I told him this about a month ago and he kept saying he'd fixed it and I kept saying he hadn't and we went back and forth while the grad student got fucked.

Today I had to try and help him navigate his way through the system old person style. First he had to find the role I was telling him he needed and despite my helpful mention of the search for role box at the top right or the ability to ctrl f he went painstakingly through a list of every role until he found it. Then a brief argument over the meaning of the words "training complete" as he triumphantly showed me that it said "training complete" in green letters next to the role. I suggested that he scroll back up, hoping to point out a number of other roles that said both "training complete" and "you have it" next to them which I had seen during his earlier scrolling. Unfortunately he refused. I offered to take the mouse so I could more easily illustrate the issue but he refused that and instead concluded that the problem was solved.

I sat down and waited for a while until he asked for my help again and I again suggested that he scroll up. I then used the existence of the big "you have it" messages on some roles and the notable absence of them on this role to illustrate the problem. I then was able to follow up by winning the earlier argument about what "training complete" meant and why "training complete" was not sufficient.

A little more work and a lot more patience from me got us slowly to the Open Requests section of the website. There we found that he had requested this role some time ago and concluded that it was solved. A message next to the request read "Submitted to department approver for approval". I pointed this out and explained that his request had gotten that far but no further.

"Well then, who is the department approver and why haven't they approved this? I requested this a month ago!"

".... you are"