It never fails.

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we've all had this exact same anecdote a dozen times, but it's no less frustrating every time.

Luser: "I tried signing up on the website and the $URL said page not found"
Me: "Strange, I just tried typing it exactly like that and it came up just fine. Try it again just in case it was typo'd?"
Luser: "I did 7 times"
Me: "What about just $BASE_URL, does that come up okay?"
Luser: "let me try"
(several minutes of waiting)
Luser: "i tried that and it brought me to a whole list of differsnt ones to click but not the $SITE"
Me: "Sorry, I don't have any idea. If you've tried it seven times that makes a typo awfully unlikely, but nobody else has had a problem getting in, so I'm not sure what it could be."
Me, thinking: Quit typoing it, retard.
Luser: "ill try it again"
Luser: "maybe its the search engine im using"
Luser: "which one do u use aol,google what"

*headdesk*

What did it ACTUALLY say?

[mouser.livejournal.com]

My latest pet peeve - people that can't answer the following three questions coherently:

3) Why do you think it's not working? ("Wrong results" ONLY works if you have a CLUE what the RIGHT results are!)

2) What were you doing? (No, "Nothing" isn't valid.)

1) What was the ACTUAL error (not "I think it said...")

Make up your damned mind

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

My wife had some problem with her MacBookPro, so I suggested booting from the Leopard DVD and running DiskUtility. 30 minutes later, she's sitting in front of her MBP ranting "I can't find the keystroke to boot from the DVD anywhere! All I can find are pages that say `To do this, you should boot from the installation disk'. I pick up her Macbook, and change her google search from "How to boot from macintosh installation disk" to "mac boot cd" and of course the first hit is a list of mac boot keystrokes, including "c" to boot from the CD. Then she's ranting "You snatched it away from me just as I was going to click on that link". I hit the back button twice to go back to her google search and said "fine." Obviously that information wasn't anywhere on that page of google results.

Next time she says she's having problems, I'm just going to tell her I wouldn't presume to prevent her from finding the answers herself.

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.