I’ve been working here for over a year and a half, and I swear, the department head still has no idea who I am. As far as he’s concerned, my name is still “You there, with the tie and the shoes.”
Now I will cut the guy a little slack, as he’s 102 years old and carries a huge amount of responsibility on his shoulders. Still, what a fucking luddite! His idea of checking his e-mail every morning is to have his secretary (aka abused toadie) print out each e-mail, so he can hand write responses, so that she can type them in and send them off. Yes, the guy is a techno-fucking-god.
So anyway, he approached me just a little while ago to see if I could help him fix “this goddam computer.” I asked him what was wrong with it. “What’s wrong with it?”, he bellowed. “The goddam thing is broken!” I tried pressing him for more specific information. After a few rounds of “The damn thing just doesn’t work because it’s a piece of shit”, I finally was able to get him to describe the symptoms. Apparently it would just shut down and reboot at random. Sad, because it was needed for presentations some 14 times per day.
So I agreed to have a look at it.
Egads!
The CPU looked like it had been through a war zone. Coffee had been spilled down the front, half of the case was missing, and its guts were half hanging out. “See, the power is on, but it’s not working”, he said, as he pointed to the amber light on the monitor. He violently stabbed at the monitor’s power button a few times, swore profusely, then kicked the CPU in the exposed guts. While he then started banging on the keyboard with both fists, I reached over and pushed the power button on the CPU. The wounded PC whirred to life. “Goddam it, it just came on by itself again!” He slammed the monitor with his fist.
The PC went through its normal boot sequence, and loaded a version of NT that was probably written in 1942, then sat calmly at a desktop. Boss dude gave a little “hrmph”, then stabbed at the CD tray button until the tray reluctantly opened. He tossed a CD into the tray, but didn’t bother to make sure it was seated right before gently coaxing the tray closed with the mighty heal of his hand. He gave the CPU guts another kick for good measure, then proceeded to open an application. A splash screen appeared. He once again started bashing on the keyboard, exclaiming “Why the fuck can’t I log on?!?” A moment later the logon screen came up. He logged on, then tried opening the CD from the app. “Error in drive D:” was the response.
Need I tell you what happened next between his shoe and the CPU?
I gently suggested that perhaps the CD itself was bad, as it had just moments before been burned with new data. Or maybe it was scratched. He ripped the CD out of the tray and looked at it. “The CD’s fine!!” he yelled, then threw it at a wall.
He stormed out, shouting “I don’t understand why this goddam technology crap doesn’t ever work!”