"I don't know what this file is" does not fucking equal "I can delete it"

The BBQ Pit
1

Gnnnn… it’s my boss again; I’ve finally worn him down to the point where I can get email onto people’s desktops and share the broadband across the LAN (previously if someone wanted to do email or web stuff, they had to go to ‘the email machine’, which was deliberately isolated from the system, but anyway…), so I installed various bits of security software throughout, because I know how badly he will react if some security problem arises.

So what happens next?
“I don’t like all that stuff cluttering up the system tray, so I got rid of it” Congratulations, dumbass, one item of ‘that stuff’ was your antivirus task.

“What are all these files in this folder here? I don’t recognise them, so I can delete them, right?” Wrong. This isn’t fucking Windows 3.1 matey - you can’t just arbitrarily delete things and still expect your system to work.

“Why isn’t my computer working properly?” I honestly don’t know, other than it’s something you’ve pissed about with; two weeks ago it was a brand new XP box, bang up with all the Windows and Office updates and latest drivers, it was rock solid when I handed it over, now it’s less stable than an old Win98 box.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Dummy.

2

Fetch a broken television and put some pictures of icons on it. Glue them on, if necessary. Get an old shoe and tie one end of the lace to a cardboard box with some slits in it, and the other end to the shoe itself. Get the most beat-up keyboard you can find and use that for the keyboard.

Or, if you think that might not go over so well, can you make the files red-only that you don’t want him fucking with? Or simply hide them? If he can’t find them, that makes messing them up somewhat more difficult, I’d think.

I suppose giving him an old Tandy with a B&W monitor and telling him it’s “to cut cost” wouldn’t go over well either…

3

“When life imitates Dilbert”

4

I was looking under the hood of my car, and there was this thing bolted in there that had all these wires and tubes running out of it. I had no idea what it was, so I took a crowbar and yanked that sucker right out. Now my car don’t run. WTF?

5

I can only pat your back and nod my head in sympathy. I feel…ohhhh how I feel your pain. Only my boss(es) don’t go the delete route. I guess I am lucky in that respect, because they don’t know how.

Oh no. They download and try out every damn thing on the entire internet and guess what?? They’re eat slap up with viruses, spyware and god only knows what else. My Junior Boss (Big Daddy Boss Joe’s son) is the only one semi-computer literate, except not really. If something is flashy and pretty and could possibly show him nekkid hotgrrl pics, that baby’s on his machine as fast as you can say “DSL”.

Then comes the cries of, “OH NOOOOOO!!! Sylkynnnnnnn!!! HELP!!” So I then go down the hall, whip his blotter off his desk and beat his head in with it for the thirtieth time in a week.

And this is just one boss. The others do more things by accident (because they don’t pay attention to me and because they are stupid, too) but it’s a long, daily, uphill battle.

I definitely know your anguish. Just be glad you have one dipshit for a boss instead of four. (sigh) And people wonder why I drink…

6

Probably not; truth is, I don’t know what half of them are; you have to install so much stuff on a computer nowadays, and hard disk space is so cheap, that it just isn’t worth manually trawling the drive to see if there’s a 4.3kb file here and there that maybe can be deleted. Last thing he tried to delete was the quarantine folder for the virus guard (not that it matters much when you’ve disabled the software that uses it, I suppose.

7

Yep, I get that one too (although not from the same guy); “But it said ‘click here’, so I was supposed to click on it, wasn’t I? Why would it say ‘click here’ if I wasn’t supposed to click on it?”

Honestly, it’s a wonder some of them manage to sit the right way up in the chair.

8

Heh. And these are our bosses. We are doomed.

Funny thing is, I absolutely love my job, and all my bosses. They’re great! They really are. They’re just…sheep. The “It said to click it” thing made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I think Boss Jr. lies awake at night thinking up new ways to destroy his computer.

Ah well, at least I still have Big Daddy Boss Joe. He still has to have me come check his email, and show him how to “get this thang to go backwards, dammit!” (go back on the browser) after eighteen months.

Yes, we are doomed. Valium, anyone?

9

You know, I have conflicting empathies on this matter.

On the one hand, it’s just so incredibly tempting (and easy for that matter) to slag off Microsoft till the cows come home. I mean, seriously, if you wanted you could find things about Windows x.xx to rant about for weeks on end, and you’d only be scratching the surface.

But then I stop and ponder other computer Operating Systems I’ve known over the years as well… SCO Xenix, Unix, MS-DOS, Macintosh, TANDEM Mainframes etc etc. And if you’re honest, in reality, all of 'em are fucking fragile and complicated in some capacity or another. So I’ve thought about this, and here’s what I’ve come up with…

Here’s Boo Boo Foo’s theory of CPU relative empathism…

Basically, the computer industry is driven by the desire for corporate success - that is, it’s an endless cycle of Research and Development closely followed by rushing barely tested hardware and software into the market place. In short, it’s an industry which somehow survives IN SPITE of itself due to the sheer necessity for massive data crunching in this modern era.

In terms of market penetration, the Microsoft people have been more successful than most primarily because they’ve specialised in “being all things to all people” more so than other more “niche oriented” areas of the computer industry.

Still, I first finished my own degree in Computer Science in 1987, and as you can imagine, I’ve worked in a shitload of different environments over the years. I honestly think it’s going to take at least another 20 years before a company somewhere can make a CPU with a bullet proof Operating System built INTO the CPU itself. When that happens, it’ll simply be impossible to delete mission critical files anymore, because you simply won’t be able to find them anymore. But between now and then? Man, we’re in for so many fucking headaches yet…

10

So I take it that after you rebuild his box again, you’re not going to give him admin-level permissions, thereby preventing him from screwing things up too badly again?

11

Oh god, this reminds me of a former coworker. She didn’t like the “untidy” arrangement of where certain system files were, and decided to sort them into new subfolders. Fortunately she mentioned this to me before she actually did it. God, I don’t know how some people function.

12

Ferret Herder, I’d think you were me, except my coworker mentioned it AFTER moving all her original directories into subfolders, rendering the machine thoroughly inoperable. “Gee, that’s a problem way past my skill, you need to take it to one of the admins.” Whew!

13

I had a programmer do that once.

A computer programmer.

Actually said to me as I was looking at his non-functioning PC:

“Yeah, I didn’t recognize any of those files so I just deleted them.”

(He was talking about stuff in c:\winnt\system32, y’know, that sort of worthless folder)

Sigh.

Well since it’s an XP box that your boss has, just make his account something other than a local admin…standard user or even guest if you’re in a particularly jaunty mood. He’ll be able to do far less damage that way. That’s our setup at work and we have basically zero incidences of people mucking up their own PCs by deleting stuff. Once you’ve got it all set and running smoothly, burn an image of the hard drive with Ghost. If it gets hosed again, just reimage it. Fast and easy.

14

No can do, you see he’s a computer expert and would find that incredibly insulting.

15

Not trying to flame here, but an AOLesque 'tard who would do what you describe is NOT an expert. That goes regardless of what’s on his business card.

16

But if he’s an expert, then surely he recognizes that it’s good policy to restrict the number of admin accounts… for corporate security, right? I mean, there’s that Sasser virus that’s been putting porn on people’s machines, and all the admins are catching hell for having their machines unsecured… did he get that memo? NO? Oh, MAN, you’re not going to tell the I.T. guys this time, but Holy Crap, he should be more careful. Is he suuuuure that he wants an admin account?

:slight_smile:

17

I maintain networks for small companies, and I find that the boss of the company is usually the worst of the lot when it comes to computer problems.

If anybody has virus problems, or spyware problems, or hijacking dialer programs that connect you to the internet via a longdistance connection in outer Mongolia, it is usually the boss.

I’m getting through to some of them, though. They’re finally begining to understand that you must have AV software, and it must be running and it must be current. Some of 'em have even forked out bucks to have more RAM installed so that the PCs still run acceptably fast when you install Norton AV.

Hell, I’ve even got one guy who will call me when something gets past the scanner “Hey, this email says my account will be closed if I don’t click on the link. Should I do that?” Answer is of course NO. This shit shows up in english, supposedly coming from a German ISP. Right.

Anyway, bosses are the worst about this kind of shit.

P.S.

Mangetout:
How goes Birdcam?

18

I’ve posted this before …

Let us not forget Dogzilla’s Theory of Inverse Management Intelligencetm: For each and every promotion higher up the management ladder, a person loses 10 IQ points and one office skill they had as a peon.

For a long time, I was a peon. And then I was promoted to management. And I immediately lost the ability to send a fax. It drove me crazy; I had been an “Administrative Assistant” in the past and I sent faxes for everyone. Now, as a manager, I was humiliated to hand my faxes off to my Admin. Asst. who could make them go through effortlessly on the first try. I felt dumber and had to take a claim check for my soul because they wouldn’t let me keep it in my office.

I looked around at the Vice Presidents and noted how many of them could not use simple basic technology that everyone else has been using for years. Some of them made their secretaries print out their emails so they could hand write response on the paper during meetings and then they made the assistants email back the responses. Some of them couldn’t figure out how to save or read a PDF attachment. Some tried to open PDFs in Word and other such nonsense. So I got out before I forgot how to click “send.”

Guess what? Now that I’m back near the bottom of the ladder, guess what I can do now? I can send faxes effortlessly on the first try. And I understand Quantum Physics again! My IQ is back, I feel better, I’m less stressed out and I got my soul back, because I kept the claim check.

Have mercy on your management. They were once useful and productive peon workers just like the rest of us. They can’t help it they’re so greedy they sold their souls to get into management. It happens to the best of us.

19

Well, if you want to get really hardcore, I know of companies that just do automated rebuilds of all their desktops on a nightly basis. Though from your description of your boss, he might not be too keen on that either.

20

Woosh!!!