Does... not.. compute.. malfunction..

[morningside.livejournal.com]

If there's one thing that annoys me about tech support - apart from users in general - its those people who call up and when they don't get the answer they're looking for, it just breaks their mind. There's usually a couple at least in each company - they just sort of 'um.. erm.. um...' . You can imagine the wisps of smoke curling from their ears as 'Wrong... answer... have... not... dropped.. everything.. to.. help.. me.. bzzzzt... does not.. compute' bounces around their heads. Worst of all is they keep going to the point where you have just say 'goodbye' to shake them out of their miasma - at which point they're coherent for a moment and then slip back into the 'umm' coma. You just have to put the phone down otherwise you'd be there all day. Even worse is when they stay silent and sometimes won't even acknowledge the answer you gave them because it doesn't fit into the square hole in their heads (and no, I know they're not hard of hearing). There's a skill to getting rid of them, I think, which involves saying goodbye, and putting the phone down without appearing too rude to anyone listening in, but without giving them a chance to prolong the conversation. I'm not getting paid nearly enough for this.

90% of a gig and only 10% as much intelligence as the leading brand!

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Today I encountered a database that would not reindex its largest table unless there was a remainder of 9/10th of a gigabyte free
as in, you couldn't just have x GB of free space on the disk, it had to be exactly x.9 GB.
Otherwise, you got "Insufficient disk space" and a crashed app.
The product's tech support confirmed this and that it was a problem in the Borland database engine they used.
Now I know why Borland named it Paradox.

On an unrelated note, I tried the McPhillyCheez™Steak today.
My expectations of McFood are never exactly high, but when it comes to this atrocity they went WAY beyond the deepest depths I could have ever imagined.