Yeah once you've been in over dozen of these kinds of meetings it stops being funny and more of a reason to cry.

Just the other day I was in a meeting because a c-suite at a client needed to use a portal from a supplier but didn't know how. There was one person in their company who had used that portal before, but didn't want to get involved. I had done some work with this supplier, but hadn't really ever done anything with their portal.

This man was aggressively hostile for some reason. He acted like it was somehow my fault he had to use the portal. Like I had personally arranged the situation he was in. I said I had nothing to do with this supplier or the portal. But he said I had worked with them before. Yes that's true, but it's not like I chose this supplier for them, they had worked with them for years before I ever heard of them.

I suggested if none of us knew how to use the portal, perhaps there was a manual available. Or a support department at the supplier? Perhaps they offer training if it's hard to use? The man proceeded to laugh at me as if what I said was a ridiculous suggestion. I was puzzled, like how else are you going to figure out how to use the tool? That's the way people learn, they don't just start using it and know all there is to know, there is a process involved.

In the end we decided to just look at the portal together and figure out if we could do what we needed to do at that moment. The man opened up the portal and used an overview with some filters, but it was very slow and crashed a couple of times. So I suggested opening up the detail page in a new tab, so the overview didn't need to keep reloading constantly. This absolutely confused him, he opened up the overview twice and the portal proceeded to crash again, so we abandoned that idea.

Once we got to the right detail page, what he wanted to do was a simple clear button. Very simple and clearly marked, it did exactly what he needed to do. I was again baffled, like why has this issue been stalled for two weeks, with several meetings and now a meeting with a bunch of people only to do something as simple as that. He hadn't even tried to do it, just made such a fuss about it. Costs everyone a lot of time and money, for something that should have been a 2 minute task. Now I understand why that other dude didn't want to get involved in this, he knew.