Thou shalt not hit on the tech.

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

Occasionally I'll tech support a computer for free. Usually only family, friends and neighbors in the apt building. (Though I do accept pizza and a bit of access time if they have high speed.)

The neighbor down the hallway, (who needs to bathe big time(I needed a gas mask.)) had her modem driver go bad. Don't really know what happened, but a re-install of the driver and a new anti-virus program fixed it. Though I also did a nuke-from-orbit re-install of XP.

The bad part is, the couple's 45 year old friend, decided to hit on 27 year old me. I will no longer help them again without pay.

Moral of the story, don't hit on the tech. It won't work if she doesn't outright slap you.

(Good thing I edited before I posted. All my sentences ended with a semi-colon.)

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I had someone want to exchange tech for a "blind date" with someone that knew and had NO interest in.

"Pimp your friends much?"

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

And the incident hapened just minutes before my post. My poor skin is still red from the hot shower to substitute for my lack of brain bleach. I could only feel worse by writing a nasty program full of goto statements just to annoy my programming teacher. (Should do that anyway for laughs. I hear there is a way in java...)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of something I saw in a Dilbert. Male techies suddenly become attractive marriage prospects in their late 20s, when women are looking for someone quiet, dependable, unlikely to cheat or spend all their time in the pub watching football, and with a decent wage to finance their staying home and looking after the kids. Female techies are irresistible from the age of consent until 5 minutes after clinical death, longer on a warm day.
My own addition to this is 'But only to men who they do not find attractive.'

[mtupyro.livejournal.com]

I met my girlfriend of three years on the campus LUG IRC server.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, Boyfriend V1.0 introduced me to IRC. Nearly all the rest have been located using it. Other than that, alcohol has generally been a factor... I prefer IRC.
I met my on-again off-again bloke of, er, blimey, at least 5 years, on IRC. Well, no, I *met* him when he brought me an antique I bought on ebay, but I knew him from IRC. :)

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

I think its a case of hero worship actually. That and a touch of pedo.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

You might have something there, but as one of my boyfriends is 15 years older than me and the other one 7 years younger, I can't really comment on age gaps. :)

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

I don't mind age gaps, but when they're otherwise creeps, the age will squick me out. But then my dad's GF is only a few years older than me.

[ravenofdreams.livejournal.com]

That's been codified in a Dilbert? Oh man, I need to hang that on my office wall.
Though it is rather - depressing, perhaps - that it will never end. Good gods, if one more eighty-five year old man hits on me, I am likely to do something I shall regret. (The techshop in which I work is within walking distance of apartments for the agéd, so we get a lot of them. A lot a lot. As the only female who has ever worked there, I seem to fascinate them.

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

And I'm the only girl in my programming class. It wasn't until they realized I'm just as big a joker as they, they relaxed and told the dirty jokes just like me.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Yeah, work isn't a problem. I mean, I *know* when $seniortechiemanager wanders over and says "Elo gorgeous, what's the chances of you coming down to the locking basement with me after hours?" he's got some interesting new bit of hardware for me, but we're mates, he'd not say anything like that to someone he doesn't know.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Eh, sometimes the really old ones, it's the only way they know of to be nice. They can't quite grasp that nowadays women don't just want to be told they're pretty.

[ravenofdreams.livejournal.com]

Man oh man, reading this thread, all I see are blinking Errol Flynn's. (Not that I mind much, really. ;) )
And only way they know or not, unhand thy tech, sir!

[alcoholiday.livejournal.com]

ETA: "... and married men."

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's not just me then. That one seems to be alcohol related, though. Get falling-over idiot drunk, the married men start trying their luck.

[alcoholiday.livejournal.com]

Oh no, there have been many a time where I went on a training call, for a younger staff member (older than me though, or about my age) and after about an hour of shameless flirtation mingled with training, noticed the gold glint on their left hand. For shame!

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Ah, I was more talking about the ones I get at work related events who invite me back to their hotel rooms. Which is always amusing to tell everyone about the next day.

[mynameisnotreal.livejournal.com]

I'm 38. Am I too old?

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

*snort*snort*snort*

Sorry, its the icon, made me giggle.

It really all depends on the person. If a person is a creep, then the age gap can be a factor. Otherwise, I have no room to gripe, my stepdad is roughly 42 and my mom is 52. I love my stepdad like I should my real dad. (Down to the point of calling stepdad "Dad" right in front of the bio one.

[mynameisnotreal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well you're probably out of luck anyway, as I'm rather happy with my (much younger) girlfriend.

You'll find someone eventually...

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

Fortuantly I do have one. If I didn't, I could probably find one easily if I wanted one. (If you see the comment on my dad's GF, she's the county bicycle.)

[alcoholiday.livejournal.com]

Nope!

[crywolf.livejournal.com]

All your sentences ended with semi-colons? You're also a programmer, aren't you?

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

Yep. Have to take a java class at the moment. You should see when I write BASIC goto statements in my email. You know I'm drunk then.

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

I wondered based on the nested parenthesis. Not something you see in written English a lot... but in C, on the other hand...

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

I haven't done C yet, only a second quarter student. But I have been doing basic teching since 2nd grade. (Computer teacher was busy and another teacher needed to know how to load a program on an AppleII.)

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Bah. You should learn C before Java. Silly modern curricula.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

I use nested parens all the time. I can parse it just fine, but it drives my poor mother nuts.

On another note, I've never understood why semicolon was chosen as a statement terminator.. I mean, it's not like period is used for anything else*.


* = Okay, it is sometimes used as a concatenation operator, but so is +...

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

It's also used in things like VB and vbscript where you use it to refer to object.method. I understand that C's not like this, but since we're talking about nested parenthesis in general, not strictly C...

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had monetarily forgotten about that, actually. I've been doing PHP too long, which uses $obj->function().. and then I realized my mistake in posting this when I wrote people.count() out of reflex from playing w/ C#...

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been working with object->function() conventions myself a lot lately.

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

you know, this is just one of those things that is COMPLETELY OPPOSITE if you're a male...

for a male tech, if you're a cute female, FLIRT AWAY, you'll get faster service and probably dinner.

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

And it works too.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

It's a matter of comparing like for like. Would you want to be flirted with by a woman who's old, unattractive, untidy and a bit smelly? I'm guessing not. If *cute* guys want to flirt with me to get better tech, they should feel completely free. However, I invite you to look at any computer expo type event. You will almost certainly find that lads who resemble Johnny Depp are somewhat notable by their absence.

[delta_mike]

... though we do exist.

(He says, modestly.)

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

I'm rocking the Patrick Stewart... bald, sexy, and smelling of "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot"... Because Captain Picard is sexy.

Of course, I seem to have developed a rather Kirk-ish paunch, but hey...

[soruk.livejournal.com]

That's what happens when you spend your entire waking life working on enterprise hardware. ;)

(my coat's that one over there, second peg to the right.)

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

As a former onsite tech who's company charged ~ $100/hour to go out to residential, I can tell you that the ugly, 50 something, smelly, 20 cats, hasn't showered in a week women are the only ones who try to "make you a offer" when it comes to paying the bill...

I have one guy try too *shudder*

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

If I were looking for a cat however, I will accept a kitty as payment. Said payment kitty must reside on my lap during the repair process or be constantly rubbing against me.

Ah well, now to go screw with some other techies and make them go wtf at how I manage to get Phtotoshop CS3 to run on a 512mb vista beast.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Well, there's one advantage of looking like (and being) a big bad dyke; that kind of thing doesn't happen to me too often.

Then there are the (thankfully few) guys who will it on anything female and breathing... and the latter is probably not an absolute requirement. Fucktards.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

And then there's the ones who think they can 'turn you', which I've encountered a couple of times while trying to have a girls night out with a friend. I suspect there's a certain subset of men who are miswired and confuse the 'go away' and attraction signals.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I think there was something about opportunity costs - if a male's 'go away' detector is 99.9% accurate, there will be that one out of a thousand who might say yes. And if the cost to check is only a couple of minutes they wouldn't be doing anything useful with anyway... yeah. When it's biology verses society, the latter doesn't always come out on top. Especially when there's alcohol and/or lack of life experience involved.

[canray.livejournal.com]

Hitting the Tech can also cause flashbacks to Grade and High School, so it's also not advised.

I mean, most of us can't fit in a locker like we used to, eh?

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Well, that is how I started dating my wife... of course, we had been techs in neighboring departments for 2 years, and we would rely on each other for "hey, can I bounce this crazy idea off you", and "how did you get the dumbass Windows machines to automagically update their passwords on the Unix side Samba server PDC when they change it on the NT4 side"? type support. And we would go to lunch. So, I suppose it's not quite the same thing... :-)

[kirolee.livejournal.com]

System.out.println("What programmer doesn't?");

Or lets go old school,

10 print "What programmer doesn't?"

run