Wednesday, November 25, 2009
I stayed at this job for a year so I could make it to Fest this year. Now that Fest is over and I'm not certain I want to even go next year because it wasn't as spectacular this time around, I just can't bring myself to really try at this job. In my defense, users get stupider every day. I won't even mention dad's computer and how he bought a new one and already, a week in, has a problem with it. Instead, we need to start with the sales guy who came into my office bright and early yesterday and we'll go on from there. Sound like fun? No? Sorry.
The man who looks and dresses like he should be in a Mac ad or a Starbucks ad(read: anything featuring yuppies) comes into my office area and proclaims to anyone who will listen and pretend to give a damn, which is no one, that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who have experienced a hard drive failure and those who haven't. I'm not feeling bad about it just yet because this guy doesn't know a god damn thing about anything, so it's probably not as bad as he thinks, but whatever is wrong is going to require lots of time and patience. I have precious little patience for someone over 30 who should know better, so this guy's fucked.
He comes into my office and tells me that, yep, he was working on it and all of a sudden it shut off and it wouldn't boot so he hit it on the table a few times. I told him I was a little fuzzy on what "I hit it on the table a few times" means, so he needed to define it for me. Turns out it means exactly what I was envisioning and then it started Windows and then the screen went blank.
I'm going to offer this to you, dear reader, as a bit of advice about anything electronic or computerized: Hitting said device on a table or throwing it on the ground or hitting it with a baseball bat or running it over with your car or steamroller or pooping on it or peeing on it isn't going to make the device work and it's generally not a Good Thing to do. If you do wind up trying any of those options, please don't ever call me or harass any other person when it doesn't work because, and I can assure of this, that other person doesn't give a shit, thinks you're a moron, and probably wants to do whatever you did to the device to you.
I got more information from the sales man, including that the hard drive wasn't making any noises that would lead him to believe that it was about to fail, nor was he having any problems whatsoever previously but he does enjoy throwing electronic equipment around(My coworkers tell me he's gone through more than a couple blackberry phones due to "dropping them"[which, to me, should be grounds for termination or, at least, not allowing that person to use such technology]). From what little information I could get and from noticing I could get farther along in the boot process than a dead hard drive should allow, I decided the issue was a dead backlight and that all that needed to be done was to put the hard drive in another laptop of the same model. That worked, but, unfortunately, I'm an idiot and let it slip that I was in the process of working on new laptops for the sales group. This is unfortunate because I haven't distributed any of these to my test group yet, nor have I tested them myself, so one of my testers is someone who smashes computers on tables when they don't work "properly". I regret not telling him that if I find out he hit this one on his table, I'm going to our shipping yard, getting the staple gun that shoots staples into wood, and I'm stapling his testicles to my wall right next to my monthly zombie calendar and the penny arcade comic that makes me smile.
After dealing with the laptop smasher, I got to be a teacher to another one of our baby boomer floor workers who can't quite grasp tabbed web browsing and was pissed at me because now when she closes a window "it closes everything and goes to the desktop and I don't want it to close everything". I tried explaining that the IE7 rollout was required by corporate and I showed her how easy tabbed browsing is(I even left out the part about how you don't have to click the "X" to close a tab, that Ctrl W does the same thing). It could be because I've been using Linux now for almost nine years and therefore have been using Firefox since back when they called it Phoenix, or because I just a terrible teacher, or it could be that baby boomers are just shit terrified of change(How, then, did our president win an election based on the promise of change, one which he has still yet to deliver on?), but this woman was not having any of this and just wants it to go back to the old way. I weep for the poor bastard that has to fix these people's computers because IE7 has been out for three years now, and has been a high priority update for at least one. IE8, which also includes tabbed browsing has been out and been a high priority update for six months, meaning these people don't ever install Windows updates. I will feel no sympathy at all when those people's credit card numbers get stolen. I might just laugh a whole lot.
said Tommy T. at 8:43 AM - #
|
The man who looks and dresses like he should be in a Mac ad or a Starbucks ad(read: anything featuring yuppies) comes into my office area and proclaims to anyone who will listen and pretend to give a damn, which is no one, that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who have experienced a hard drive failure and those who haven't. I'm not feeling bad about it just yet because this guy doesn't know a god damn thing about anything, so it's probably not as bad as he thinks, but whatever is wrong is going to require lots of time and patience. I have precious little patience for someone over 30 who should know better, so this guy's fucked.
He comes into my office and tells me that, yep, he was working on it and all of a sudden it shut off and it wouldn't boot so he hit it on the table a few times. I told him I was a little fuzzy on what "I hit it on the table a few times" means, so he needed to define it for me. Turns out it means exactly what I was envisioning and then it started Windows and then the screen went blank.
I'm going to offer this to you, dear reader, as a bit of advice about anything electronic or computerized: Hitting said device on a table or throwing it on the ground or hitting it with a baseball bat or running it over with your car or steamroller or pooping on it or peeing on it isn't going to make the device work and it's generally not a Good Thing to do. If you do wind up trying any of those options, please don't ever call me or harass any other person when it doesn't work because, and I can assure of this, that other person doesn't give a shit, thinks you're a moron, and probably wants to do whatever you did to the device to you.
I got more information from the sales man, including that the hard drive wasn't making any noises that would lead him to believe that it was about to fail, nor was he having any problems whatsoever previously but he does enjoy throwing electronic equipment around(My coworkers tell me he's gone through more than a couple blackberry phones due to "dropping them"[which, to me, should be grounds for termination or, at least, not allowing that person to use such technology]). From what little information I could get and from noticing I could get farther along in the boot process than a dead hard drive should allow, I decided the issue was a dead backlight and that all that needed to be done was to put the hard drive in another laptop of the same model. That worked, but, unfortunately, I'm an idiot and let it slip that I was in the process of working on new laptops for the sales group. This is unfortunate because I haven't distributed any of these to my test group yet, nor have I tested them myself, so one of my testers is someone who smashes computers on tables when they don't work "properly". I regret not telling him that if I find out he hit this one on his table, I'm going to our shipping yard, getting the staple gun that shoots staples into wood, and I'm stapling his testicles to my wall right next to my monthly zombie calendar and the penny arcade comic that makes me smile.
After dealing with the laptop smasher, I got to be a teacher to another one of our baby boomer floor workers who can't quite grasp tabbed web browsing and was pissed at me because now when she closes a window "it closes everything and goes to the desktop and I don't want it to close everything". I tried explaining that the IE7 rollout was required by corporate and I showed her how easy tabbed browsing is(I even left out the part about how you don't have to click the "X" to close a tab, that Ctrl W does the same thing). It could be because I've been using Linux now for almost nine years and therefore have been using Firefox since back when they called it Phoenix, or because I just a terrible teacher, or it could be that baby boomers are just shit terrified of change(How, then, did our president win an election based on the promise of change, one which he has still yet to deliver on?), but this woman was not having any of this and just wants it to go back to the old way. I weep for the poor bastard that has to fix these people's computers because IE7 has been out for three years now, and has been a high priority update for at least one. IE8, which also includes tabbed browsing has been out and been a high priority update for six months, meaning these people don't ever install Windows updates. I will feel no sympathy at all when those people's credit card numbers get stolen. I might just laugh a whole lot.
said Tommy T. at 8:43 AM - #
|
www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public items from tommytumult tagged with awesometown!. Make your own badge here.
Subscribe in a reader