(no subject)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Dear Supermarket Laptop Salesman,
Do NOT try to out-techie me. Especially don't try to out-techie me when you clearly don't understand that there is a difference between desktop and mobile components and that they have not, in fact, fitted 'that huge card' inside the laptop. I realise I'm younger than you and female and so it breaks your little brain, but you've probably used a machine I installed and am responsible for and you're reminding me of myself ten years ago.
I realise that I'm hardly the average customer, and I get that you understand far more than your colleagues, but still. If you really *must* try to out-techie me, *accept defeat* when I start looking peeved and point out that I have more experience than you.
Here's a hint - 'accepting defeat' does NOT involve flirting with me. Here's another hint - That bloke who I was talking to just now before he wandered off to take a support call from a friend? The one who's a good 8" taller than you and several stone of muscle heavier? He's NOT MY DAD. Plus he knows more about laptops than you and he cuts down trees for a living.
No Love, Me.

(no subject)

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

Dear old redneck guy,

1. I can't help you if you spend time talking over me and yelling at me rather than listening and following my instructions.
2. No, you can't speak to my supervisor. The president of the company has other things to do than listen to your drunken rants about our software.
3. Downloading an installer from the Intertubes does not mean it's installed on your PC. It means you downloaded the installer. I don't really care what you think you've done. If you want the problem solved, you will do as I say.
4. Profanity, insults, and other childish name calling generally isn't going to get me to bend over backwards to help you.
5. No, my fingers are not in my ass, thanks. Maybe you should get your penis out of your ear so you can effectively listen to my instructions.
6. You have no idea what I do in my job. You don't need to tell me how to do it. My job doesn't involve answering phones usually, and certainly doesn't involve taking abusive language from a customer who spent a whopping $30 on our online store 2 years ago.
7. Yes, you are one of maybe 1,000 who manage to be so illiterate that you can't follow the instructions for installation on our web site. You are part of an elite group: Only about 1,000 of over 2 million users manage to not have such a grasp on the English language. Most of those 1,000 are foreign nationals who do not speak English as a primary language.
8. Hanging up on won't solve your problem. But I suppose it's for the best. Saves me the trouble of terminating the call for you being an asshat.

Where to next?

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

It's no secret that most techies hate their jobs (or communities like this wouldn't exist). I got into what I do (tech/sysadmin) because that's how it happened, and I'm pretty good at it. I never studied any kind of tech, but I know it. There comes a time, though, when you realise that learning Vista, helping stupid people, fixing group policies, testing backups etc. simply doesn't do anything for me. I'm 25, sick of what I do, and I want to move on. Not to another ten years in a bigger, better server room, but to something completely different, something less meaningless. So, I'm posing the question, what?

Some people here must have had the same thought, and either done it themselves, or know others who have done it. So, please, share stories about the day you swore never to touch a computer for money again, and did something you've always wanted to. Bonus points if you admit you're happier now.

Wow. Just Wow.

[ptstech.livejournal.com]

Dear $User,

While I can appreciate (almost) the fact that you wanted to "back up" your data, there are a few bits of info I feel you are missing that might be of use:

1.  Your documents folder is mapped to a drive on our file server.  (Backed up every single day.  Weekends too.)
2.  The little message you get every single time you log on or off the network?  That is synchronization, a pixie-dust filled, magical process that copies your mapped network folder down to your laptop so that you can access your files when you take your laptop home.
3.  I painstakingly explained #1 and #2 the day you started here two months ago (but apparently, not in your native tongue).
3.  Your attempts to back up this data by copying it to your desktop would do you no good should your hard drive actually die, since THAT IS WHERE YOU COPIED THE DATA.
4.  Yes, this is the primary reason why your hard drive is full.
5.  No, it had nothing to do with our server.
6.  Yes, I'm SURE.
7.  You took "computers" in college?

( Image placed behind cut after being blasted for jacking up the Friends page... )

WHERE did you take them, and could you mayhap take them BACK?

Please to be expiring in an epic conflagration,
ME

(x-posted to my journal)

(no subject)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

So, having spent most of the weekend faffing around with getting XP and Vista to play nice on the same laptop, with one or the other of them deciding to be non-bootable most of the time (out of coffee error, mostly, combined with '100 miles from tools CDs') what I did *not* want to deal with this morning was some silly cow having managed to nuke her desktop - one which has 500GB of vital yet un-backed-up data on it - while trying to create a bootable USB key.
Desktop Tom told me to fix it myself.
It seems that our little tool tries to be clever and automatically homes in on the smallest drive, or rather, it seems, partition. See where this is going? Yep, it took out the 'hidden' 2GB OS restore partition at the start of the drive, and rendered the machine non-bootable. So, it could have been a lot worse as all I *actually* had to do was nuke that partition and edit the boot.ini, but it took me a while to realise quite what had happened. Time to break it: 10 seconds. Time to fix, including taking the drives out to edit the boot.ini on Assistant's machine? 3 Hours. *grrr*
I *knew* I shouldn't have got out of bed today, let alone tried to make a bootable USB key...