"My emails aren't opening"

I work with some gentlemen who are on the verge of retirement. These are engineers with bachelor degrees from before the days of inexpensive calculators. They know how to use slide rules.

Now, our IT group has been gutted in the recent years so we're forced to be pretty self sufficient. It's not a big deal most of the time as the requests these guys have are worth about 2 minutes of internet searching and we're good to go. Since I'm only 30, and don't throw my hands up at the first sight of computer insolence, I've fell into the role of "department tech support".

Unfortunately for me, I sit between two such gentlemen. The first guy is a former reservist in the army, we'll call Ernie, and the other is from Kentucky and sounds like Foghorn Leghorn, we'll call him Bert. It's generally entertaining, but can get old since they tell the same stories so much that I can recite them.

Ernie called me over to his desk frantically this morning because his "emails aren't opening". I was a bit busy and I asked him if he even had outlook open. He just installed office 2013 via our autodeploying software tool and can't find the icon sometimes.

Ernie: "Yeah, it's open, I can see all my emails in this list" SOL: "Ugh, I'll swing over" Ernie: "See, I click and they just dissappear" I look over and notice that his right monitor is blank and there's no lights on. He must have bumped the power button yesterday when he left. SOL: "Ernie, didn't you notice your right monitor is off?"

I hit the switch, watch it turn on and display his open email windows. I lean over, tap in on the shoulder jokingly and tell him to get some coffee.

Ernie: "Well shit, that was easy"

I slunk back my desk, happy that I didn't have to solve an actual issue or hear from Bert about how "he didn't grow up with computers".