I figured you could use a little holiday cheer

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

I once worked for the residential network support group of a university's housing department for about ten years. I'm trying to remember som eof the things I've seen, heard and done so that I can post it here. Give me time, it'll eventually come back to me (that part of my memory is heavily buried right now to protect my sanity). I lost the job because of a stupid manager. I was going on vacation, had already gotten my tickets at least half a year in advance. He scheduled a meeting (introductory meeting for new hires) two weeks before the meeting date (but long after he knew I'd be gone) for the last day of my vacation when I'd be on a plane. Everything in the meeting to be covered was old information, nothing I hadn't heard before. I was terminated for failing to attend the meeting a week before the meeting took place. I suspect I was also pushed out to make his budget worked. I was getting paid well because of my skill and seniority (I was even more senior than he was in terms of years worked there).

We were all students at the same time as we were employed to fix peoples network connections. Prior to the idiot manager, the group motto was "You are students just like they are. Just get it fixed when you can." We could work at 1 AM if that suited us and the client and everything was good. "Fixed" meant we got a ping to the central server. Anything else was the user's problem and it was stated officially as so. The idiot manager was big on reading all kinds of management books and got the idea of "total package" when we started supporting phone, cable TV, and everything else (and I mean "support" in the loosest sense since the old-timers of us could have fixed anything given tools but we were never allowed to touch anything, only one or two of the anointed ones that he picked out by hand could do so). He publicly claimed that fixing things like printers and speakers was a "best effort not to exceed 30 minutes" but quietly it was a "fix it or you're toast" sort of thing. He was a slave to the survey results and we were praised or hung by them (even though no one ever filed out surveys except those that felt the service sucked). So many of the old-timers quit when he got hired since they had all been passed over. I was the last one. Then again, that entire department has a permanent case of the uber-stupids in all areas.

Anyway, for your bit of holiday cheer from my home to yours: I convinced my parents to give up, after over at least two years of arguing, Norton and IE in favor of Firefox (with Adblock and NoScript), Spybot, and AVG. Their first response: "Wow, the computer is so much faster."

Happy New Year everyone. May 2008 bestow kindness upon your livers, permit you to keep the ammunition locked up, and hope anew that someone invents a high-voltage keyboard that administers electroshock therapy to the eternally stupid.

Comments

[adamjaskie.livejournal.com]

I uninstalled McAffe, and installed AVG. Then I installed Firefox, removed the icons for IE, and re-named the Firefox icons to "Internet Explorer". I never heard a word about it.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

I was going to try that when the saga started but they do actually notice things are a little different and it pushes them out of the comfort zone. I explained everything to them in simple terms with examples, showed them how Adblock (with filters preloaded for them) was making things a bit faster, and it just never worked. "I like [specific feature]. Does Firefox have that?" "No, that's a specific feature of IE and not standard." "I want that."

But now their machine was slowing to a complete crawl with Norton 2008 and IE 7. I had to go open a window to look for something and it took over five minutes to load a new IE window just so I could do something. Plus there was a constant banner across the window as Norton monitored everything (not the toolbar, an actual banner in the page area -- it sits inline with the browser and monitors all the traffic). Thankfully I had my own laptop with me to do my own work.

They were always mystified by the way my laptop screams along compared to theirs even though we both have similar laptops (both are Toshiba Satellites) with the same amount of RAM but they have a processor about 300 MHz faster. I showed them how mine was not running any constant virus monitoring (I do have Zone Alarm available for times when I'm on an unsecured network) or email scanning (that peeved me because they were using webmail from their provider so email scanning on their machine was just useless).