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Feb. 10th, 2005 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickFucking miserable day at work, mostly because the doing-actual-work part of things cut into my porn time. I hate when that happens. This week has been the fucking attack of the geriatric Win98 boxes. WTF is up with that? I've been up to my ass in spyware-riddled aging crack whores of machines this week. (I suspect this wouldn't piss me off nearly as much if I hadn't just recently upgraded my laptop to absolutely olympian heights of delightful RAMified goodness.)
I give each and every one of the Win98 users who approaches me with a dying computer the same schpiel about how the computer is running on [40/64/128] Mb of RAM where even low-powered modern machines have twice that much. I explain carefully how a [166/233/450] MHz pentium is about half as much as modern GHz processor speeds. I discuss the lack of security updates for Win98, particularly with respect to the STUPID BLUE E. I carefully explain, using analogies that normal humans can understand, that they are going out in a Yugo and expecting to be able to stoplight drag with Ferraris and Jaguars. AND I gently, carefully explain that the street value of these computers is $[20.00/50.00/100.00] and that really, they can buy a brand new spiffy computer for about five hundred, one with modern security that comes with updates and a warranty and enough RAM to actually run three different chat programs [AIM/YahooIM/MSN] at the same time.
And you know what? They want me to fix their piece of shit computers. I blame the economy.
I have to clean them up by hand, because AVG won't run, Ad-Aware won't install, Spybot just grinds and grinds. We go, me over the phone with the computer-illiterate asshole on the other end, slowly and carefully into the task manager to see what all's running on the fucker. We shut down all the "non-virus" programs that aren't really needed. We edit the stuff that starts up at each boot. With the speed and painlessness of pulling out all of my toenails with a pair of needlenose pliers, I carefully guide the clueless user and his or her machine to a peaceful cave where its power animal (Which, y'know, could be a penguin. Sure, it could. And then I'd have to support shit like I lost my root password... Right. I think we won't have a penguin for a power animal, after all.) lives and where the fucking thing can reboot in less than an eternity. We also take off the FUCKING STUPID COUGAR DESKTOP PICTURE AND THE GOD DAMNED SILLY ASS WASP CURSOR. These are NOT original, you dumb ass rednecks. They're not. EVERYONE uses them, and when I see your computer set up with that, I do not immediately think hip, computer-literate nature lover, I immediately think You've got NASCAR bookmarked and you've got at least one trojan porn dialler installled. Also, you've never updated anything. I'm just sayin'... And your fucking piece of shit computer does not have the horsepower to run these dumbfuck enhancements. Put it on windows default -- you do not have horsepower to waste on pretty.
I talk the normal human through using Find, which I will give good odds most home users have never done -- odds based on nine years of working tech support for an ISP. I talk the normal human into booting into MS-DOS and changing the fucking attributes on their hidden system file viruses. I talk them through deleting the shit, which is invariably located in c:\windows\system, a suborbital lobotomy location where poking around with the icepick of incompetence has particularly delightful results, and I make them read back every fucking line, as they typed it, before they are allowed to press enter. If they don't read it exactly (eg. "Ay Tee Tee Are Eye Bee *space* minus-H *space* filename*dot*Eee Ex Eee"), then we erase and try again. They learn to read back properly after the first three or four times. They learn. If you thought that teaching people to identify the running processes with the Task Manager thing on a cripplingly-slow, virus-riddled Win98 box embodied the words speed and painlessness, you ain't seen nothin' until you've tried to teach them about MS-DOS.
And when I get the thing running well enough to get some real tools on it and we run and update those and I go over the little talk about how it's important to keep these tools up to date and to USE them on the computer every two weeks or so... how it's important to NOT click OK on every fucking web optimizer, every damn free-smiley-face popup, every fucking popup claiming you can get paid to surf, every dumb-ass-toolbar-add-on... they smile and nod. They lie, they lie, they lie. I know they're lying. I know that they are going to put stupid shit like WeatherBug and Kazaa and CallWave back on the very fucking instant they get the poor thing online. I know that these things will fuck the machine and I tell the users not to do them. The users say they understand about the need to exercise restraint, about the limited abilities of their computers, but they do it anyway. And they lie to me about it. Then they blame me for their dead computers. After all, I'm the internet provider. It's my fault it doesn't work. Always.
Today my contempt for the absolute oblivious stupidity of normal humans knows no bounds. Normally I'm not this bad. Normally I don't spend four fucking hours on the phone with two Win98 computers while sitting in front of a third in my office, that one schlepped in by a redneck woman whose anxious face peered over my shoulder and piped useless questions in my free ear while I toggled between the two fuckheads on the phone. I wish people would not ask me questions to which I know they will not understand correct, complete answers.
I hate having to provide dumbed-down answers that aren't exactly correct. I also hate when people ask me if it's POSSIBLE to do blah-blah-blah on a computer. YOU DUMB FUCKS, THAT IS NOT A GOOD QUESTION. It's possible to count every grain of sand on a beach. Doesn't mean you want to do it. Asking what is POSSIBLE is not a good idea. Ask what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's general practice. Don't ask what is possible... you won't like the answer and then you'll think I'm being all smart and stuff and I'm not. You're the one being all unreasonable with the meanings of words, saying possible when that's not really what you mean. Stupid flesh people.
On the phone, I had a bimbo of a girl (chippy cheerleader voice, young twenties, maybe) who couldn't do a damn thing for herself but who could actually follow directions reasonably well and the other an ass of a man (mid-fifties, thinks he knows more than me, which begs the question of why the fuck he is on the phone with me trying to get me to fix HIS problem, which, as it happens, was a teenfuck porn dialler...or a fuckteen porndialler or something. He told me what it was, five or six times like he thought I was supposed to maybe care. I wasn't really listening.) whom I've hated cordially since I signed him up for service some years ago. It was quite the day. I fixed the bimbo and the redneck woman and I could have fixed the ass of a man too, except he had a dinner engagement and had to go do that. He said he'd call me back tomorrow.
My enthusiasm at the prospect knows no bounds.
If you ever wondered why I don't talk that much about work? This is why.
I give each and every one of the Win98 users who approaches me with a dying computer the same schpiel about how the computer is running on [40/64/128] Mb of RAM where even low-powered modern machines have twice that much. I explain carefully how a [166/233/450] MHz pentium is about half as much as modern GHz processor speeds. I discuss the lack of security updates for Win98, particularly with respect to the STUPID BLUE E. I carefully explain, using analogies that normal humans can understand, that they are going out in a Yugo and expecting to be able to stoplight drag with Ferraris and Jaguars. AND I gently, carefully explain that the street value of these computers is $[20.00/50.00/100.00] and that really, they can buy a brand new spiffy computer for about five hundred, one with modern security that comes with updates and a warranty and enough RAM to actually run three different chat programs [AIM/YahooIM/MSN] at the same time.
And you know what? They want me to fix their piece of shit computers. I blame the economy.
I have to clean them up by hand, because AVG won't run, Ad-Aware won't install, Spybot just grinds and grinds. We go, me over the phone with the computer-illiterate asshole on the other end, slowly and carefully into the task manager to see what all's running on the fucker. We shut down all the "non-virus" programs that aren't really needed. We edit the stuff that starts up at each boot. With the speed and painlessness of pulling out all of my toenails with a pair of needlenose pliers, I carefully guide the clueless user and his or her machine to a peaceful cave where its power animal (Which, y'know, could be a penguin. Sure, it could. And then I'd have to support shit like I lost my root password... Right. I think we won't have a penguin for a power animal, after all.) lives and where the fucking thing can reboot in less than an eternity. We also take off the FUCKING STUPID COUGAR DESKTOP PICTURE AND THE GOD DAMNED SILLY ASS WASP CURSOR. These are NOT original, you dumb ass rednecks. They're not. EVERYONE uses them, and when I see your computer set up with that, I do not immediately think hip, computer-literate nature lover, I immediately think You've got NASCAR bookmarked and you've got at least one trojan porn dialler installled. Also, you've never updated anything. I'm just sayin'... And your fucking piece of shit computer does not have the horsepower to run these dumbfuck enhancements. Put it on windows default -- you do not have horsepower to waste on pretty.
I talk the normal human through using Find, which I will give good odds most home users have never done -- odds based on nine years of working tech support for an ISP. I talk the normal human into booting into MS-DOS and changing the fucking attributes on their hidden system file viruses. I talk them through deleting the shit, which is invariably located in c:\windows\system, a suborbital lobotomy location where poking around with the icepick of incompetence has particularly delightful results, and I make them read back every fucking line, as they typed it, before they are allowed to press enter. If they don't read it exactly (eg. "Ay Tee Tee Are Eye Bee *space* minus-H *space* filename*dot*Eee Ex Eee"), then we erase and try again. They learn to read back properly after the first three or four times. They learn. If you thought that teaching people to identify the running processes with the Task Manager thing on a cripplingly-slow, virus-riddled Win98 box embodied the words speed and painlessness, you ain't seen nothin' until you've tried to teach them about MS-DOS.
And when I get the thing running well enough to get some real tools on it and we run and update those and I go over the little talk about how it's important to keep these tools up to date and to USE them on the computer every two weeks or so... how it's important to NOT click OK on every fucking web optimizer, every damn free-smiley-face popup, every fucking popup claiming you can get paid to surf, every dumb-ass-toolbar-add-on... they smile and nod. They lie, they lie, they lie. I know they're lying. I know that they are going to put stupid shit like WeatherBug and Kazaa and CallWave back on the very fucking instant they get the poor thing online. I know that these things will fuck the machine and I tell the users not to do them. The users say they understand about the need to exercise restraint, about the limited abilities of their computers, but they do it anyway. And they lie to me about it. Then they blame me for their dead computers. After all, I'm the internet provider. It's my fault it doesn't work. Always.
Today my contempt for the absolute oblivious stupidity of normal humans knows no bounds. Normally I'm not this bad. Normally I don't spend four fucking hours on the phone with two Win98 computers while sitting in front of a third in my office, that one schlepped in by a redneck woman whose anxious face peered over my shoulder and piped useless questions in my free ear while I toggled between the two fuckheads on the phone. I wish people would not ask me questions to which I know they will not understand correct, complete answers.
I hate having to provide dumbed-down answers that aren't exactly correct. I also hate when people ask me if it's POSSIBLE to do blah-blah-blah on a computer. YOU DUMB FUCKS, THAT IS NOT A GOOD QUESTION. It's possible to count every grain of sand on a beach. Doesn't mean you want to do it. Asking what is POSSIBLE is not a good idea. Ask what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's general practice. Don't ask what is possible... you won't like the answer and then you'll think I'm being all smart and stuff and I'm not. You're the one being all unreasonable with the meanings of words, saying possible when that's not really what you mean. Stupid flesh people.
On the phone, I had a bimbo of a girl (chippy cheerleader voice, young twenties, maybe) who couldn't do a damn thing for herself but who could actually follow directions reasonably well and the other an ass of a man (mid-fifties, thinks he knows more than me, which begs the question of why the fuck he is on the phone with me trying to get me to fix HIS problem, which, as it happens, was a teenfuck porn dialler...or a fuckteen porndialler or something. He told me what it was, five or six times like he thought I was supposed to maybe care. I wasn't really listening.) whom I've hated cordially since I signed him up for service some years ago. It was quite the day. I fixed the bimbo and the redneck woman and I could have fixed the ass of a man too, except he had a dinner engagement and had to go do that. He said he'd call me back tomorrow.
My enthusiasm at the prospect knows no bounds.
If you ever wondered why I don't talk that much about work? This is why.
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Fixing computers
Date: 2005-02-11 03:55 pm (UTC)I carefully explained that the box was worth maybe $150.00 and a basic, new HP desktop for $450.00 would be twice the machine(at least) plus it would come with updatez.
Upon being refused by the penny-wise, pound-foolish person (who has plenty o' cash), I went ahead and fixed the box, removing all the stupid shit, cleaning the adware, installing AVG, etc. Then I sent him a bill for $150.00 for three hours of my time, which he paid happily.
Putting the check in the bank made me feel better. Perhaps next time (I will surely see this box ag'in) I will throw in the mousepad upgrade.