techrecovery | Aug. 1st, 2002

A guy comes into my office.
"Can I copy a cd onto a floppy disc?"

Now, questions like this may perhaps make me laugh, but the dont make me mad. Thats why I'm in the IT department of my company. To help people.

So I tell him no. I said cd's are 650-700 megs. Floppies are only 1.4 meg.
You may be able to copy a file or two off of the cd and onto the floppy, depending on size.

"Well how would I do that?"
I told him, well, tell me what your trying to copy first. If its way big, you can put it on the network, because everyone has access to the server.
He tells me its a chess-checkers game.
Oh, I say, then you cant put it on the server. We dont have room for games.

We have lots of room, but screw him for taking up my time to ask me about a friggin game.
He asks me then, what if I email it to them.
I said "Well, you can, but if its really big, its gonna tie up the network for a while until its done, then people are going to complain to me, and I'll have to explain why its slow."

"Well, it doesnt look that big" he says.
I told him to bring me the disk, and I'll look and see, and then even tell him if the guys he wants to send it to can even install it.
The guys who want it have no cdroms in their system, for reasons like this exactly. They're supposed to be dumb terminals, not power machines for games.

He brings me the disk, and I look, and its only 30 megs.
Thats fine, I say, you can zip up the files and send it to them.

Can you guess the next words out of his mouth?

So I show him how to zip it. Open Winzip, select files, add to zip.... blah blah blah.
I actually did it on my machine, so I could show him.
Then I showed him how to attach the file, and send it.

I put his name in my address bar, and showed him that he would put in the guys name he wants to send it to, just like any other email.
He says, well, you already have it there, why dont you just send it to them?

"Because I'm the IT guy, and sending games thru our LAN is not in my job description."
Not in those exact words, but I told him no. That would be up to him.

Well, after 5 minutes of arguing, I finally just told him I would email it to him, and he can forward it off to whoever.

Fine. So i did.

I get a call a few minutes later, "I tried to save that file, and it tells me I'm out of memory."
Oh fuck off. All the trouble for a fuckin checkers game on WORK computers.
So I go and clean his hard drive, and save it for him.

I start to leave, and he says "So, now what do i do with it?"
I'm not gonna start from scratch and teach this guy how to double click a file. It takes 2 seconds anyways, so I did it myself. Unzip to temp, setup.exe, and its done.

Once again, I get up to leave, "Well, how about bob's machine, and steve's machine...."

Finally, I had enough.
I said "Look, this is a game. These are work computers. First of all, your COPYING a game illegally, and putting it on multiple machine, never mind the 5 policies that your breaking by installing your own software, and to top it off, ITS A GAME!!"

Now I have no morals or ethics against copying software.
Microsoft is one of those companies that I would make it a point to SHOW them that I copy their software (Not that I do, *wink wink* Save my ass.)

However, on company machines, when we frequently have federal authorities in here checking random computers, then illegal software is OUT.

So I told the guy "This is illegal, wrong, immoral, and just plain stupid. I do not have time to take out of my day to show you people how to copy, install, and use pirated, illegal, GAMING software. When you have a problem with Word, give me a call."
And I left.

These people, like, do they not have jobs to do as well? Usually, if your bored, you open a copy of solitaire, or go onto the net and open a java game.
But no, these guys have to go as far as to bring in their own games, install them, and then ask IT for help with it?
Screw them.
Bastards be lucky if they see their login accounts work tomorrow morning.