[hijack]
Hopefully the “experimental” kind!
<GRIN>
Nah, really, I couldn’t do anything like that, but it’s fun to imagine it.
Anyway, when I move up there, you will have to have someone to double-date with us with, so either you find someone or I will!
[/hijack]
“Winners never quit and quitters never win, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.”
Is this the Pit, or a swingers convention?!
Just kidding! 
“Penises don’t belong in the mouth, girls and boys. You’ve got the wrong hole there. Just like you wouldn’t shove pizza up your nose.”
-From the Brother Jed flyer-
I am not a techie, not even close. But I do have many “Dummies” books, and yes, I’ve even read some of them. Believe it or not, I sometimes read computer books for fun. Really. But, I am not a techie - I’m too chicken to open up the case of my PC, and while I have peeked at my BIOS, I could not get any reliable information on what to do, or how to do it. I am brave, but I am not about to reset anything in my BIOS without knowing damn well what I’m doing, 100%, first.
Getting off on a tangent there…anyway, I sometimes get treated with some condescesion by techies. I am a newbie, but not as bad as they assume. They’ll talk down to me, even try to not give me a good deal on something, mislead me (if they are trying to sell me something) because I am a newbie, after all! It’s interesting to see the change of expression on their face when they realize that I am not quite as ignorant as they had first thought.
aha,
Despite bearing a moniker that makes me cringe due to the fact it reminds me of that horrible 80’s band, I dont hold it against you. In fact, I look forward to reading your threads about what pisses you off, and then see you apologise in the next post for saying it!!!
But your right. sometimes we can be assholes, but so would you if you had do deal with the shit we do. It isn’t personal, itsw just that if you were a book seller, and you had to show someone how to turn a page, well, you’d get pissed off sometimes too.
I deal with people who are geniuses at Marketing, or Accounting, or Sales, but put them in front of a computer, and they’re lost. Not everyone is going to know what to do, and I dont mind that.
Its people who contact you and start commanding you to get down to your office to fix their floppy drive that they stuck the disk into backwards.
But Aha, you aint so bad. You at least phrase your vents in a nice way.
[rantmode on]
Califboomer,
you’re a different story. Its your attitude that fucking FREAKS techies out. Im not a cheeto eating, socially inept food tube and I resent the stereotype.
May your harddisk format without backup, you rat-feltching greaseball.
[end rant]
sorry for that everyone, I dont know what came over me…
well, at least one person wants to meet me…
http://fathom.org/polldata/pollcheck.adp?poll=dope-page5&question=62
Cheers!!
I’d be delighted to read the frigging manual, if it only made SENSE. I do read the manuals anyway. Most of the time I could have used that time more productively and enjoyably by watching soap operas. And I HATE soap operas!
Lynn
Adding features does not necessarily increase functionality – it just makes the manuals thicker.
techchick68
Now I AM gonna need a manuel for that.
Yours truly,
aha
One of these days, I need to do a whole “My bizarre life as a support tech” thread and ask the other techs to sign in on it.
Greg, I’m one of those female techs you mentioned. I constantly get comments from my customers about how sweet and patient and helpful I am. Some of the stories I hear from them about how previous techs have treated them make me cringe.
I have no problem when a customer is looking for a little information and isn’t sure where to start, or tried to find it in the user’s manual but couldn’t understand it, or tried a couple things on their own but just didn’t quite get it. I take pride in being able to render confusing, complicated technical informatin into terms that the average layperson can get ahold of. The most satisfying part of my job is when I can hear the lightbulb click on over a customer’s head, hear them start to sound confident about what they want to do.
What I can’t stand, and what makes it enormously difficult to do my job, is when a customer uses me as some sort of punching bag to take their hostility out on. You know, it’s not my fault if you spent $3000 on a computer system without any research and are only now finding that you didn’t get what you needed. It’s not my fault that the sales person told you you wouldn’t have to learn anything about the Internet, FTP, HTML, web design, email, or directory structure in order to put your site up. It’s not my fault computers are complicated or that you can’t do everything you want with a wave of my magic wand.
I also get really irked by the people who refuse to learn anything. It’s too hard (no, it’s not), it’s too complicated (not really!), they shouldn’t HAVE to learn all that (well, no, they don’t HAVE to learn it, but then, they don’t HAVE to put up a webpage on their own either, now do they).
It’s frustrating. Probably 80-90% of my customers are absolute sweethearts. It’s the leftovers that leave me wishing I could commit hari-kari with my keyboard.
Sorry bille nothing personal…hey how about grecian formula or clairol . 
Yours truly,
aha
My apologies to techchik68 and John Larrigan-two techies who at least bathe
BTW-My harddisk HAS formatted without backup (or deleted some big files). It was a software error (Yardi Systems, Inc.) I spent three days going back and forth with the “techies”, who initially claimed they could recover the lost data. Instead, they used me as a guinea pig for some macabre experiments, and finally came to the conclusion “You’ll just have to re-enter all the data”.
woh man… THAT sucks…
It is possible to recover lost data if you have the right software. I seen a programme on it once about 2 years ago about a guy who works for the police searching for deleted data on criminals computers, but dont ask me for a cite as it was a few years ago and I cant really remember what I did last weekend…
anyway, you have to realise, 90% of our day is good. its the 10% made up of freaks, idiots, and the great unwashed that make our days hard and give the bad reputations to you lesser mortals…
carry on…
well, at least one person wants to meet me…
http://fathom.org/polldata/pollcheck.adp?poll=dope-page5&question=62
Cheers!!
so techchick… fancy a bath?
[hijack]
Im trying to come up with some tech chat-up lines… any ideas?
I was thinking along the lines of
“The DHCP server is going down in 20 minutes, be on it”
or
“Wanna come back to my place and check out my router?”
or
well, at least one person wants to meet me…
http://fathom.org/polldata/pollcheck.adp?poll=dope-page5&question=62
Cheers!!
My boyfriend is a techie. Many of my friends are techies. I, in my ignorance, am a techie wannabe, and am listed as such on my office’s techie web page. I have never had a bad experience with a techie.
All Hail Techies.
Gamera is really neat, he is full of turtle meat, we’ve been eating Gam-er-aaaa…
Sorry bout that cowboy I think they were
A-HA, I just picked aha cause it is exremely easy to type. Anywho I liked “Take On Me”
Yours truly,
aha
Wasn’t me, Aha, 'twas JohnLarrigan. Besides, Awful Bands of the Eighties is a whole 'nother thread.
A cubicle is just a padded cell without a door.
One of the reasons that alot of techies have attitudes, is that its one of the jobs that doesn’t end when you go home. You’d never ask a dentist to come over on saturday to clean your teeth, or expect a gardner on vacation to trim your tree(or at least most people don’t), but as soon as people find out you use computers, you are shown a clicking drive or a driver error. If its someone doing a job on a help line, then its just them being an asshole, but people need to realize we don’t want to spend 100% of our time thinking about computers(the 16 hours a day at our jobs is usually enough).
The real reason folks like aha dislike techies is because they fear us. We hold the Answers, we hold the Keys, we hold the Knowledge of How to Keep Windows From Crashing(*). And what scares them the most is that they think we’re deliberately witholding that information from them. Sheesh. It’s all there. And in many forms, some more palatable than others. All it requires is patience (which aha has already admitted a lack of), and time.
And we talk funny, too. So folks, remember: TANSTAAFL, RTFM, and GOOMF. BOHICA.
-andros-
(* ok, I made that one up, of course)
Oops sorry cowboy,
ANDROS:
Yes you do andros. You guys are smart I must admit but…
RFTM? Well I don’t think that is gonna help much when one of us newbies gets in to the registry by accident and fucks that up, or accidently erases a dll file. I mean there is just soo much time I can devote to learning computers and still have time for my job and family.
I use my electric razor everyday with huge success but I have never torn into the friggin thing to see how it works! How many everyday computer users are out there that are able to tear into dos and fix a windows problem???
Well hell I am getting off on another rant here…
But afraid of you techies??? sheeeet don’t make me open up a 12 pack of whip ass…
Yours truly,
aha
Well, yes, you shave daily. No problem. But you’re not opening the sucker up to make it work better, are you? You aren’t operating it underwater, right? How about using it as a doorstop?
No, no, and no. Duh, of course, right? You know how to use an electric shaver, and you use it correctly.
So why should a computer be any more different? Why are you fucking around in the Windows registry? Why are you deleting .dll’s? You’re not pulling wires out of your razor are you?
Do you seriously mean to say that you expect a machine with 3.3 million transistors and that couldn’t even have existed five years ago to be as easy to use as an electric shaver???
-andros-
Yours truly,
aha
I’ve had pretty good experience with tech support at work. But there are a couple of assholes who act like they are being put out when I (rarely) call them. I’m not an idiot, but I also don’t have time to read a friggin manual when tech support is within a phone call’s reach. I get paid to do accounting, not run defrags and shit. If everyone was an expert, you techies wouldn’t have tech support jobs, would you?
Disclaimer: I’m not ranting about all techies, just the ones that have attitudes.
Mt. Dew habit kicked since 2/21/00!