This is the seventeenth story in our Short Story Sunday series where we read short stories from the Public Domain. This week's short story is The District Doctor - Ivan Turgenev
The District Doctor - Ivan Turgenev
One day in autumn on my way back from a remote part of the country I caught cold and fell ill. Fortunately the fever attacked me in the district town at the inn; I sent for the doctor. In half-an-hour the district doctor appeared, a thin, dark-haired man of middle height. He prescribed me the usual sudorific, ordered a mustard-plaster to be put on, very deftly slid a five-ruble note up his sleeve, coughing drily and looking away as he did so, and then was getting up to go home, but somehow fell into talk and remained. I was exhausted with feverishness; I foresaw a sleepless night, and was glad of a little chat with a pleasant companion. Tea was served. My doctor began to converse freely. He was a sensible fellow, and expressed himself with vigour and some humour. Queer things happen in the world: you may live a long while with some people, and be on friendly terms with them, and never once speak openly with them from your soul; with others you have scarcely time to get acquainted, and all at once you are pouring out to him--or he to you--all your secrets, as though you were at confession. I don't know how I gained the confidence of my new friend--anyway, with nothing to lead up to it, he told me a rather curious incident; and here I will report his tale for the information of the indulgent reader. I will try to tell it in the doctor's own words.
"You don't happen to know," he began in a weak and quavering voice (the common result of the use of unmixed Berezov snuff); "you don't happen to know the judge here, Mylov, Pavel Lukich?... You don't know him?... Well, it's all the same." (He cleared his throat and rubbed his eyes.) "Well, you see, the thing happened, to tell you exactly without mistake, in Lent, at the very time of the thaws. I was sitting at his house--our judge's, you know--playing preference. Our judge is a good fellow, and fond of playing preference. Suddenly" (the doctor made frequent use of this word, suddenly) "they tell me, 'There's a servant asking for you.' I say, 'What does he want?' They say, He has brought a note--it must be from a patient.' 'Give me the note,' I say. So it is from a patient--well and good--you understand--it's our bread and butter... But this is how it was: a lady, a widow, writes to me; sh
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Revolutionary Ivan Kupala: Moustache, Pudding and Red Winter
Event Duration
Main Event: January 11th, 2022 09:00 (after maintenance) - January 25th, 2022 03:00 (UTC)
Pick-Up Recruitment #1: January 11th, 2022 09:00 (after maintenance) - January 25th, 2022 03:00 (UTC)
- 3β Cherino
Pick-Up Recruitment #2: January 11th, 2022 09:00 (after maintenance) - January 25th, 2022 03:00 (UTC)
- 3β Karin
Event Overview
Requirement: Clear Mission 2 Act 3
New Students
| Name | Role | Position | Attack Type | Defense Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3β Renkawa Cherino | Dealer | Middle | Piercing | Light |
| 1β Amami Nodoka | Supporter | Back | Explosion | Heavy |
Please keep discussions about the event contained in this thread and please try to keep spoilers contained in spoiler tags (e.g. >!I am a spoiler!< will show as >!I am a spoiler!<).
Edit: for everyone yelling about the NATO phonetics, I'll remind you of two things:
- This call centre caters to consumers. The super non-technically inclined. Your grandma. That weird co-worker who can't make the number 1 on the keyboard into an exclamation point. They are even more confused by the NATO phonetics than without.
- This service is not in English, where the NATO phonetics make even less sense.
Greetings fellow tech support gremlins! So this happened today not to me but my co-worker, it was your run-of-the-mill lost Mac user password issue that got called in by an average Joe user.
Our tech support is phone calls only - no chats no emails and definitely no one coming in to help you in person. This is relevant because, as anyone who has given customer service through the phone knows, first off - you can't see what the person calling is doing. Secondly, it can be difficult to tell through the phone if a customer said a letter S or F, T or P, etc.
To combat this, when something needs to be spelled out exactly, we use designations instead of letters to spell out say, serials, order numbers, command line commands, and so on. So instead of "W", you say "whiskey" or any word starting with W so you and the customer knows which letter they need to spell. This is especially necessary if you're supporting a customer with poor language skills in the language the support is in.
So example@eg.com on the phone would be said out loud as
Evan Xavier Adam Matt Perry Laura Evan at Evan Gabriel dot com
Now that we know all this - an elder gentleman calls in and explains that they have forgotten their Mac user password. When the usual routes to reset it fail, with MacOS you can help guide the customer into recovery mode and open up Terminal. If you input the command "resetpassword" into Terminal and press Enter, you'll be able to reset your Mac user password from there.
So my colleague had verbally, without seeing what's happening, guided this old man into recovery mode, gotten Terminal open, and guided customer to write "resetpassword" into Terminal.
English was not this customer's language. No biggie! My buddy spelled out the letters for the customer, as you do on the phone. It was as follows:
Roger Evan Sam Evan Tim Perry Adam Sam Sam William (with a "double u") Odie Roger David --> so, resetpassword with all lower case letters and typed together. ('with a w' because "w" is not a common letter in our language.)
The typing t
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