Note to (l)users

[mathsnerd]

Dear International Students,

I realize you are international students, and therefore from another country. I also realize that your first language may use different characters than English and that it may write right-to-left instead of left-to-right. It's true that Windows has a nifty feature called the "Language Bar" that allows you to type in your native language. However, there are a few points I would like to review with you.

Firstly, it is fine with me if you change the language bar to your native language. If you do so, however, please switch the darn language bar back. It freaks the freshmen and the older continuing education students out when they open MS Word and start typing and it's in Korean.

Secondly, DO NOT tell MS Word to switch the default language to your native language. When I have people coming to me getting all concerned because even when they can type normally in Firefox, Word insists on using the Chinese character system, it frustrates me. I have to go fix it and remind Word that it should default to English. This is not your personal computer, please to not be changing default settings on it.

Thirdly, for the love of God and all that's holy, DO NOT switch the entire computer's language settings to Arabic right-to-left and then log out. Now I have computers that are unable to log anyone in because our poor login server cannot comprehend the entry. In case you don't realize, the login server is not an intelligent being, nor is it bilingual. All it does is match the keystroked login name to the master list of authorized users and then matches the keystroked password to the recorded valid password for said login. IT. DOES. NOT. UNDERSTAND. ARABIC. Thanks to you, the lab is down another computer until one of my techs can go figure out how to deal with it. I have three techs and their boss to support the entire library system's computer systems. They do not have time to get to the lab until the end of the day if they are lucky. We are always full and we are not happy when a computer is down for user-stupidity-induced reasons.

Please go DIAF and I hope that someday your personal computer's language bar gets switched to a character set you can not read or use. See how much you like it then.

No love,
Your friendly helldesk monkey who is not an American herself and really doesn't appreciate rude comments about dumb Americans when she is helping you

I love my Thursday afternoon shift.

[fuego.livejournal.com]

*Sigh* It's a fortunate thing, I only deal with this level of idiocy anymore from 4-8pm on Thursdays. How I do love "It's after hours go away unless you have a 24-hour contract, no sorry you do not have a 24-hour contract" support!

Fuego: "Thank you for calling *company* do you have an open ticket?"

Moron: "No."

Fuego: "Okay, do you have a serial number for the unit in question?"

Moron: "No."

Fuego: "Do you know what model it is?"

Moron: "No."

Fuego: "Are you anywhere near the unit?"

Moron: "No. I need cable pin-out schematics for some cable that attaches to this thing."

(Where said cable could literally be any one of um...fifty or sixty different cables, at least half of them are bizarre proprietary things.)