I was on the phone with a phone operator from the NTUC-SEP (National Trade Union Congress, Surrogate Employer Program branch) and an extremely retarded phone conversation occurred, which makes me wonder, in this age where computer usage is so widely rampant, are people really equipped with the skills and knowledge to not only operate them, but fully leverage what these machines can offer us?

I was trying to look for the list of available courses from NTUC (and don’t even get me started on how confusing their website is, with several different listings available, and how different operators tell me different things). Anyway, apparently I got the wrong course, and this man helpfully re-directed me to the list of courses that he had on hand.

That’s all fine and dandy, and I downloaded an Excel spreadsheet with the full list of courses supported by the NTUC-SEP.

I was looking for the “LCCI Certificate in English for Business Level 2″ course, and so the smart thing to do would be to use the CTRL+F search function and type in ‘LCCI’, right?

However, this seems to be disabled. So I commented to the operator: “Wow, the search function is disabled.”**

And he told me, “Miss, this is not website, cannot do search.” (sic)

I questioned him (patience wearing thin), “Have you heard of CTRL+F?”

He asked me, “Er, what you mean control F har?” (sic)

Brilliant. Perhaps NTUC-SEP needs to send its own staff for some “Microsoft Office Specialist – Microsoft Excel” courses.

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** I’m not sure why the search function is disabled (Is it even possible? How? And why would anyone do that?), but later I found out that I can find the listings for ‘LCCI’ by using “Find All” when I type CTRL+F instead of using “Next”. But clicking on the cells don’t work, you need to scroll and manually find the corresponding cell. Bravo. I can’t really decide – does Microsoft win, or does NTUC win, in terms of stupidity?