I, uhm, am sort of looking for a PFY of my very own, actually, but… more Bronx, NYish.
**sturmhauke, I must admit (and apologize…this IS the Pit) that I’ve been a little over the top in this thread. As for your test, I know about 2/3 of your list. But that’s not the point! (or my point) You don’t need to know ANY of those things to run a computer.
If you go thru life timid and scared, life will eat you up. On the other hand, if you use a LITTLE common sense, and a little bravery, you can learn to do things you never thought you could! It’s the attiude of the OP that it’s too hard for me that REALLY pisses me off!
For extra credit, explain EBCDIC.
For extra extra credit, use it to respond.
I thought this was a computer list, not a nutty one.
(It’s misspelled.)
…and how they’re related to how you do math.
…and why you’ll never write another one.
And they ain’t no curve.
(FTR, I could explain all but the last to a layman in reasonably cogent terms.)
Well, E-Sabbath, it wouldn’t take much to get me to relocate.
In addition to the ‘get a new job’ goal, I also have this ‘get out of Pittsburgh’ goal.
It’s a Pimply Faced Youth gig. I need an Igor. Means “makes less than I do” and “You get to reboot computers after I say you can.” Insult to you, alas.
It’s a foot in a door. At nothing else, once one has been a PFY somewhere, one can become a BOFH, either there or somewhere else.
Nothing personal, but I take ‘that job is beneath you’ as offensive.
Everyone must start somewhere, and it’s actually quite hard for an engineer to get into any kind of serious admin work because everybody thinks ‘but that job would be an insult to you.’
As for making less than you do, I’m pretty sure that’s the case now. I have to find a new job because I cannot continue survival on the one I have.
Oh. Hell, in that case, wait till I get home. I’ll email. Tech work sucks in NYC right now, but what the hell. Least I can do is pass you a couple names, right? 
Didn’t know how serious you were.
(Second submission, server refused connection first time)
Yeah, pretty serious.
My job right now is nice, but it’s not paying a salary I can even live on.
I’m not too proud to be a PFY, and at least with me, it’s a little better than constant hand-holding of someone who wants to know if you can hotswap the RAM in a P4 running Windows.
Appreciate it.
The whole point of this thread is that Eve’s computer is jacked up. To unjack it, someone has to know the more arcane workings of computers, some of which is not that easy to understand. Your “quit your fucking whining and LEARN, goddammit!” attitude isn’t helping inspire confidence.
Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code
C1 C3D6C4C9D5C7 E2E8E2E3C5D4 4DE2C1D4C5 C3D6D5C3C5D7E3 C1E2 C1E2C3C9C95D E4E2C5C4 C9D5 C9C2D4 D4C9C4D9C1D5C7C5 E2E8E2E3C5D4E2 C1D5C4 C3D3D6D5C5E24B
That’s not explaining it. This is explaining it:
Standards are fun! There’s so many to choose from!
Basically, back in the day when IBM was frantically trying to keep its computers from being compatable with anyone else’s, they decided to use a variation of their punch card programming as a character code. It’s kind of entertaining in that letters don’t always follow one another: A+1 may not equal B. It’s also missing a lot of punctuation.
If you think saving as plain text is bad… this was worse.