On Jul 25, 2007, at 4:56 AM, Russell McMahon wrote: > * Yes, I too would decline to support such an irresponsible user in > almost any circumstance. Alas, this is the exceptional circumstance > that one cannot easily avoid. Ever start to feel like this guy, Russel? http://www.lifereboot.com/2007/10-reasons-it-doesnt-pay-to-be-the- computer-guy/ I've thought many of these thoughts over the years, and the money and good people and decent perks are some of the plusses that weigh heavily on the other side of the scales. At least for now. The scales haven't tipped yet, but they've come close a few times. Customers that genuinely appreciate your help in bad situations also help, but you can never count on those. That just happens naturally if you're good at what you do. It's also why I've successfully avoided working on Windows products for over a decade, and stuck with Unix. Companies that run Unix for serious business have deeper pockets, and a better overall view of what system administrators "do" and less fuzzy boundaries between you and the end-result. Desktop Windows support truly would be worse than hell, to me personally... but I still do it for family, if I can't convince them to buy Macs. :-) One of my friends and ham radio buddies, just this morning, opened the on-air conversation during my drive to work with, "So can I network a Windows 2000 and a Windows XP machine?"... because I'm the "computer guy". No kidding. I cringed visibly. I wonder what the drivers in the cars next to me thought, as I chided myself for turning on the ham radio, and considered saying that I was stopping for gas and then later saying I had received an important cell phone call from work because I never came back. Then I realized, he'd just find me later on the radio anyway, so no point in delaying the inevitable, even if I could... So, I had to pry out of him that all he wanted to do was file- sharing, and that he'd already done it before XP to XP and 2K to 2K... all he really wanted was a confirmation that the two were "compatible". The conversation took 15 minutes, and every time I keyed up the mic I was filled with dread that it would lead to some deeper, stupider, Windows mystery. It ended with him confident that he could "run the Wizard"... in fact, he came up with that brain- burst all on his own. Amazing... but... I have almost no doubt that a week from now, he'll be asking me over, for free, without even so much as dinner or a beer (if I'm really unlucky), to "fix" his networking problems between the two machines. And I'll find he's got some goofy hardware configuration of the network that blocks the two machines from seeing each other, or he'll not have installation media and the drivers for something not loaded, or his SoHo router, or personal firewall downloaded from God only knows where, or some-such stupid thing, will be keeping him from just copying a file from one machine to the other. Then we'll spend a few hours fixing EVERYTHING wrong with the machine, getting the file-sharing going, hopefully talking about something ELSE while I fix it, and maybe I'll try to do a little training, if I have time and feel like it... and then I'll go home late, and sit down at my laptop which has had a problem saving e-mail Drafts to the IMAP server for weeks... that I haven't had time to fix and curse myself for working on someone else's system -- again. :-) Ahhh... technology and progress. Ain't it grand? :-) I've considered using the standard phrase, "My doctor won't answer questions without an appointment, even if I go play golf with him... and he'll get paid for every second of medical consultation he does, so I'd really appreciate it if you'd have the same consideration if you need me for a computer problem." But I just can't bring myself to be that "mean" to friends and family. I know, it's a personal problem. I'm working on it. :-) I don't ask them how to manage oil pipelines, sell hardware and tools and lumber, coach college football, answer phones and manage a Chiropractor's office, design buildings (Architect), or sell mass quantities of electronic components... all the jobs they do... but I end up "working" at every single one of their houses on their Windows boxes. And I'm not even a "Windows Guy". It's amazingly annoying after about the first hour of "hero" worship... especially after they get used to the fact that I'd rather just go fix it so we can get on with the visit, going out to the pool, having fun, or just watching the ball game on TV, and if they don't pester me with questions, I'll be done in much less time... I've only scheduled two "appointment" computer visits, and both of those were for MOM, ever. One was when she lived locally and wanted a wireless router installed in her house, and the other was pre-planned during a four day visit to their former home in Texas, when they needed help figuring out why their DSL suddenly stopped working. Dad's less needy, and usually can handle everything himself with a question or two once in a while about backups (yeah, he does them! On his own! NICE, huh?) and some bad behavior of Outlook and .PST files. (Again, did I mention I'm not a Windows Guy?) Anyway, I'd force 'em ALL to call GeekSquad if I thought GeekSquad wouldn't completely screw up the machine so bad that during my next visit it would take three to four hours to clean up their mess. Plus I know they'd have no fiscal reason to want to pay GeekSquad, when they can ask the family "computer guy" for free, even if the computer guy looks like he's ready to rip their eyeballs out of their sockets and flush them every time they ask. They know I can't keep being mad for long! (GRIN) I even created my own disaster by helping my 80+ year old grandfather to have e-mail... at the time, a number of years ago, the sane thing seemed to be to get him on AOL via dial-up. It was that or WebTV, and at least I missed THAT bullet and saw it was a lost-cause before it even started. Yeah yeah, we all know AOL sucks, but after seriously contemplating the options, the user interface was SIMPLE back then, and ran reasonably well on a pretty old/slow machine we found for him, and he was up and running and forwarding HTML laden "cute" e-mails and jokes by the hundreds around the world, in no time. He LOVED it. I don't mean just liked it, he REALLY got passionate about Internet-forwarded jokes... and he sent ALL of them, many of which I really hadn't seen yet. It was amazing to watch him learn how to run the computer. Then the forced upgrades started, and AOL's user interface went completely to shit. Recently he was so frustrated that I spent two hours trying to show him how he could copy an e-mail into another empty e-mail window to forward it when AOL changed things and stopped allowing him to just hit the forward button, since they now strip off HTML from the original in the new message. And damned if I couldn't find a way to put the behavior back the way he'd been used to for going on 7 years or so now. I also tried in vain to explain the concept of stacking "windows" on top of each other, because the Address Book no longer is in a bar on the side of the "new e-mail" window... he liked the ability to click on a name and see it populate the TO: line... now the Address Book pops a complete window over the new e-mail and you have to separate them so you can see the results of clicking on names, and window focus doesn't follow what's going on, if you don't. To someone his age, it's bewildering when things like this change. Me, if I ever meet any AOL software engineers, I'm going to beat them within an inch of their lives with a clue-bat, verbally at least, anyway. %(*@#@%* IDIOTS. Can't you leave well enough alone? Christ... this industry and our "upgrades"... you know what AOL can do now that it couldn't back then... Nothing. It says it's doing more virus scanning and some other stupid shit, but all that's done on the server. They could have left the damn user interface... ALONE. Really. Morons. I thought about trying to find an old AOL disc and reloading a previous version, and then attempting to find a way to stop the nag windows from forcing an upgrade for him, but I realized that was a lost cause, from the start. They'd figure out some way to forcibly download the newer versions. The only way we'd ever found to stop that was to run him completely out of disk space, but that wasn't a very good long-term solution to the problem, and the upgraded computer he got as a present with a larger hard drive and AOL 9 pre- loaded apparently was delivered by one of Satan's minions personally. Me. As a Christmas present. Direct from Dell. I now know that Dell rhymes with Hell, and as far as AOL goes...I should have known... it was AOL after all... there's never anything long-term good out of AOL's small corner of hell. He's truly frustrated by the computer now, after five years of happily using it. And I'm incredibly pissed off at AOL. Dell, not so much - the machine is faster, and the huge monitor we got him so he could see things works pretty well, when AOL's retarded user interface doesn't fill half the screen with ads and/or "news" articles or other BS. At 640X480, and large fonts... yeah, it's screwed up... badly. Even I can't find my way around on the 21" CRT we got him. It USED to work well, but no more. But wait, there's more! Less than a week ago, I had (no kidding) a call on my cell phone, during the workday, from an unemployed engineer ham radio acquaintance in California, who I like -- but get this -- he was asking if I knew any good "computer guys" who could visit a guy's house I don't know well, whom I've only met once at a dinner (I do know he is a vegetarian, 'cause I pay attention to people... I wonder if he knows I hate computer desktop support now that I mentioned it during the phone call!), who lives more than 50 miles from my home, and fix his Windows 2000 machine talking to his five year old laser printer... and the story was the GeekSquad screwed it up and it hadn't printed since they'd been there. They also supposedly "stole" the guy's installation media for Windows 2000. 1/2 hour into the conversation he asks, "OH! Did I catch you at work?!"... Yeah, um... what do you think I do all day, answer technical questions on a completely unsupported, dead, badly designed operating system that multiple people have been screwing around with, that has a printer driver problem for free?! Okay, I didn't really say that -- but boy did I want to! I envy developers. They don't deal with this crap at all, if they don't want to. They can more easily avoid the "computer guy" title in their lives, by just never 'fessing up to it. "I write software", doesn't garner the same gushing "Oh-please-come-look-at-my-computer- something's-broken-and-I-can't-fix-it!" responses from people as, "I support large-scale telecommunications systems and the computers that run them"... and I always thought I was pretty good at avoiding the "I'm a Desktop Support Guy" stigma! But no... even if you leave off that "computers that run them" part, they hear and latch on to "support"... uh-oh. Here we go. Every once in a while when trying to get out of supporting a particularly bad Windows machine, I have pulled out the "I haven't supported anyone running a Windows computer since the days of Windows for Workgroups 3.11", but it still usually doesn't help. They just glaze over, hear the word "Windows" and fire up the rapid fire "please-god-help-me" voice, because they've been stiffed by the last three "computer guys". So off we go again, "So I downloaded this anti-spyware, and another anti-virus, and I got rid of that f-ing McAfee that came with the machine because it didn't work, I'll tell you about those bastards some time and what they tried to charge me because they said I clicked on something I didn't click on, and now the CD-ROM drive won't open when I push the button on it, so I had Best Buy replace it with a DVD burner, but now when I boot the machine it always puts up an error message on the screen that I just click OK to... what, no I don't know what it said... so anyway, then when I try to launch iTunes to play some files (.wma) that I downloaded off the net, it says "unknown file type" and I also can't seem to get some files I *know* I copied onto this USB key back onto my desktop so I can manage my son's little league team! Oh and if you have a chance, could you explain to me how to copy my DVD collection? I hear there's some copy protection thing and I tried to make a copy of my Friends Volume 3 DVD for the neighbor, and it didn't work, but I hear you computer guys know how to do it. And if you're able to, my wife says she hasn't been able to get her e-mail now for a month on her laptop she bought for Christmas. Hey have you tried Skype? It's cool! Can I call you on it if I have any computer questions!?" You can always tell the scary ones, they have enough lung capacity to say all of that with one breath. Okay all vented... maybe now I can keep working on "computers" for a few more months before losing it, snapping, selling my house, and going back to school to become a pilot, or an accountant, or a journalist, or SOMETHING other than COMPUTERS!!!! (BIG GRIN!) "What honey? My pay-stub came in the mail today, and it's just enough to make me want to put up with this stupidity for another month or two? Sweet. Let's go get Slurpees and drive over to the park and watch the sunset. Yeah, grab the iPod, there's some fun podcasts in there from that guy we like to listen to, that interesting Libertarian guy... yeah, his podcast on school vouchers was wild. I'm sure your brother [the Junior High teacher] would have come unglued if he'd have listened to it. I'd love to e-mail it to him and see if his head explodes, but it'd probably crash his computer and he'd ask me how to fix it when we go to birthday dinners with your folks over there in a few weeks. Shit, my cell phone's ringing, and that's the caller ID of the outsourcing company we gave all of our overnight and weekend calls at work to, when they laid off all the overnight and weekend guys who knew what they were doing. Crap, I can't remember if I'm officially on-call this week... so I'd better answer it. Maybe we could at least go get Slurpees and I'll let it go to voice mail for 10 minutes, but if I'm on-call and I don't call back in 15 minutes, my boss will be calling... aww, hell, I'll just answer it, at least it's overtime. Sorry about the sunset and the park, honey. We'll go tomorrow." Step right up kids, glamourous "high tech" job fair in a large convention hall near you -- soon! You can work real hard and if you get REALLY good at what you do, we'll put you on-call for life, in a cubicle some "office manager" will regularly move around the building while changing the panel height and yelling at people about how they should leave their nametags alone in the "corporate standard" location on the wall, and you'll be expected to help all the next generation of guys we'll hire in three years, after we lay off the dead weight guys and scare you half to death that you'll be looking for such a WONDERFUL job as here, in about a year and a half. Did we mention that the company has never missed a quarter in profit, and the CEO cashed out 1.5 million for himself in February? Don't worry, you'll never see that, but we'll give ya a 401K and bennies and just enough to keep you motivated... once in a while we'll bring in cake and let you out of your cubicle for ten minutes to stand around awkwardly wondering what to talk about with at least 10 people you've finally learned a little bit about, and a few friends who've you've gone drinking heavily with who share your concerns that we don't care much about what you do as long as you don't get us yelled at by upper- management and they'll still take us golfing once in while. Best book about the computer biz ever, "The Nudist on the Late Shift" by Po Bronson. The Dot-Bomb days, at their height of glory. LOL! Anyone contemplating a "high tech" job should be forced to watch Office Space, and then be told it's really what computer jobs are like, except you don't actually ever do the embezzlement scheme, and the building doesn't burn down at the end, you don't get the pretty girl in the end, and well... That's Hollywood. LOL... wow... I think I needed to vent! :-) -- Nate Duehr nate@natetech.com -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist