Office Luddite Thinks Needing Help All The Time With Fucken Everything Is Endearing

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

A city worker has described the unrelenting hell of sharing a workplace with a man who has decided, consciously, that he will never learn how to use a computer.

Kyle Barger, a logistics coordinator at Betoota District Freight & Haulage, says the firm's digital transformation in 2019 has been a resounding success for every single employee except one. Bruce Whittaker, the founder's eldest son.

"He's been here longer than the carpet," Barger told The Advocate.

"Look, his old man started this joint in '74 with one flatbed and a handshake. Beautiful. I respect that. But Bruce has had six years, seven fucking years, to learn a system that a fifteen-year-old work experience kid picked up in an afternoon. He won't do it. Flat out won't. And the worst part is he thinks it's funny. He thinks it's this charming little thing about him. 'Oh, I'm no good with computers!' Mate, it's not a computer. It's a fucking dropdown menu."

Barger says Whittaker, who holds the title of Senior Operations Supervisor despite not being able to locate his own email inbox without assistance, interrupts colleagues an average of nine times per day.

"It's never once been a real problem. It's never a system error or a glitch. It's always 'it won't let me log in' because he's typing his password into the username field. Or he's printed something to the photocopier at the Betoota West depot forty kilometres away because he doesn't know how to change the printer. Every single time he calls you over with this stupid grin on his face like he's your granddad asking you to fix the telly. Cunt, you are not my granddad. You are a sixty-three-year-old man on a six-figure salary, with fucking equity."

Sources inside the office say a recurring fantasy has taken hold among staff.

"We've spoken about it at length," said one employee, who wished to remain anonymous.

"Someone goes to Bunnings before work, buys a 120-centimetre length of 40mm dowel, and it just lives in the corner of the office. Every time Bruce puts his hand up to ask how to attach a PDF or whatever the fuck it is this time, he gets a crack across the knuckles with the dowel. His hand up in the air, I'll whack it like Ricky Ponting's been given some half-track shit from Sajid Mahmood on Boxing Day. You ask me, three days of that and he'd be running SAP like a fourteen-year-old runs fucken TikTok. Bloke's not stupid. He's just never had a reason to learn because there's always some cunt there to help him."

Barger says the situation has only worsened since Whittaker discovered the IT helpdesk number.

"Now he rings them as well. They've started screening his calls. A man making more than three drivers put together whose father's name is on the building, getting screened by IT support. He rang me last Tuesday arvo to ask why his spreadsheet 'looks different.' He'd hit the freeze panes button. That was it. That was the whole emergency. I had a bloke waiting on a container in Emerald and I'm over there explaining freeze panes to a man who's been alive since the Holt Government."

"If he's so fucking clever, and he will tell you he is, don't worry about that, then why can't he just learn like every other cunt? My dog could do half this stuff before she could roll over. Bruce can't find the search bar and he went to a grammar school. Fuck me."

Whittaker is understood to have no plans to retire.

More to come.