Why IT is fun again

This is the title of an article in ITWorldCanada that arrived last week, in which they expound on why IT professionals are excited about going to work every morning. Their first points is:

The Users aren't clueless

At that point I chucked the magazine into the trash. But a few times since then I've caught myself thinking about it. Really? You'd think they'd interview someone like me who was called off-hours to troubleshoot why a manager couldn't log onto our network or the internet:

"So where are you in your house right now? You have wireless, right?" I asked.
"I'm at my son's soccer practice right now."
"Wait, wait. You're outside? You're standing in a field right now?"
"Yes."
"And your first born is playing soccer?"
"Yup."
"Good. Pay attention to the game. And cheer hard!"
"What?"
"I don't know how to tell you this: You're in a field. You don't have a mobile internet stick. Your home laptop will not get a signal. Have fun, you can connect work when you go home."

Today the same article arrived in my inbox. Yay ITWorldCanada for recycling!

Perhaps the reason why IT is fun for me is because, in fact, the users are totally clueless. It's not usually funny in the moment when they're righteously indignant about how many mouse clicks it takes for them to do their job, or when they can't figure out where the high-pitched whining is coming from for themselves, or making other ridiculous statements, but looking back on it they are hilarious.

Swine Warning

Let's just say I warn you right now not to click to zoom in on this image. Don't do it! You will quite possibly throw up... and I wouldn't want to do that to you like I did to Connie when I brought it to her and stuck it right up into her face and said, "can you believe so-and-so is this filthy??"

Waving like crazy!!

Anyone else get on Google Wave yet?? I'm waving like crazy, but the only people on it so far are a bunch of knitters. What dorks we are! Tee hee! And we're having so much fun.

If you get on it you'd better add me to your contacts.

So sweet

A guy at work told me he just bought a brand new computer that had a terabyte hard drive. A terabyte! He was so stoked: "Woo! I didn't even know they made drives that big!!" :fist pump:

I wanted to hug him. Some days I wish I didn't know that either.

How can it be.

Someone brings me an email printed out with the message trail from 2 previous messages. The new email is at the top (with the message header including time and date) and the reply (with the message header including time and date) and the original email (with the original message header including time and date).

I just want to pause to point out that there is time and date on each message in this thread. Repeat for emphasis: time and date.

Today's complaint is that the bottom most message says it arrived on Friday, but it JUST CAME.

HOW CAN IT BE.

Aha! You see? QED: there is something not quite right with the system.


HEADDESK>HEADDESK>HEADDESK>HEADDESK

PS and her colleague M texting me from the United way kick off downtown

---

PS&M: Mike Sobel is at the United way opening, one can only hope he won't be involved for the entire 2 hours.

• Me: Oh! you are so lucky to be within rotten fruit throwing distance! DO IT! Our childhood saturday cartoon mornings demand it!

• Me: Also you're lucky it's not Bob Layton and his wooden ventriloquist puppet. ASK ME HOW I KNOW.

PS&M: I almost feel as though being pelted by rotten fruit wouldn't hurt his career at this point he's already made the descent from tv host > meteorologist > radio host on his own.

PS&M: We also feel that a wooden puppet would be a more captivating host than Mike Sobel. OH NOES HES LOOKING THIS WAY!!!1!

• Me: He sees your age and knows you pity him!

PS&M: If the president of our company wasn't standing 10 feet away we would totally be getting our pix with him.

• Me: DO IT! The prez will be so impressed by your enthusiastic spirit!

Teh Funniest!

Picking crab apples off my lawn (and picking them off the tree before they sully my perfectly manicured lawn because I'm German!) I noticed my neighbour had a queen-sized bed in his pick up truck. Coming or going?! Ugh, having another teen move in would quadruple the noise their 2 rowdy children, 4 yappy dogs and 7 wind-chimes produce at every hour of the day and night. The kids are too young to be moving out. (le SIGH) Hopefully, I hoped, it was just a replacement bed... and not their 17 year-olds' boyfriend moving in.

Eventually he came out with a measuring tape and started grumbling about how he was gonna fit the dang bed in the dang house in the dang boys' room. I asked about the bed. His niece had to move home because she couldn't afford the rent after her boyfriend dumped her, because she felt she was entitled to a new car, a cellphone, some cable tv, new clothes and going out, but couldn't buy food and pay rent. The bed wouldn't fit into her room at her parents, so there you go.

Talking to the neighbours is like getting sucked into a vortex of verbiage. Not sure how we got talking about home decorating or realtors next but we did and I mentioned I enjoyed going to see other people's houses to see what weird things they'd done, like for example a condo I viewed where the closet doors had been taken off and the bed jammed into the closet. It was the single weirdest thing I've ever seen. I couldn't imagine waking up with my head in a closet/cave. I can't believe people have a closet as a headboard. WEIRD. And by weird I mean wrong!

He slowly remarked "oh, well that's how the boy sleeps now, we put his bed into the closet. That's why this bed might not fit, I have to either take the trim off or enlarge the closet."

"Well. This isn't awkward at all." I thought.

Accents

In our line of work "Canadians" are the minority -- and I guess that is true of all of Canada, schools, workplaces, etc, mostly are made up of people from away. Some with accents you barely notice, some with accents you can only understand with difficulty.

Our receptionists at work cannot understand accents, which I find amusing. Women who grew up in Canada with immigrant parents who speak terribly broken English. So I can't decide if it's practice and training through ongoing exposure or an innate disposition for picking up languages. We went to school at a time where at least half the kids spoke a different language at home -- my cousin who teaches Grade 1 currently says it's up to 80-90% of her kids that never speak English at home.

All this to say that I was told in a hushed whisper that a guy "Korin? CORR... something or other" was here to see me. Karl, from Calgary, via Liverpool over 20 years ago, speaks English. Or something like it anyway.

It changed my life

About 3 years ago I got an electric blanket from my mom (hi Mom!) which was only the best present I've ever received. I know people say stuff like "it completely changed my life" and everyone rolls their eyes, but it has completely changed the way I sleep and, therefore, my life. Going to bed has become the favourite part of my day: crawling into an already pre-heated bed. Warm feet are especially important for falling asleep.

Anyway I just wanted you to know that I put it back on my bed last night and wondered this morning why I'd waited so long. First morning with snow too.

But the blanket is amazing!

Confession

Hello, I'm a PC-user (Hi PC!) and it's been 3 months since my last system-restore.

Back in July I had to give back my precious laptop for an out-of-warranty part replacement. A very generous offer by HP for putting together a laptop with incompatible parts and lousy written drivers, they offered to take my desktop and turn it back into a laptop. Thinking I'd take it down to bare-metal install I scoured the internets for a free backup image software and eventually found a trial *ahem* version which I used to take a backup image. No big deal if it didn't work, but I'd had such pains loading SQL server on it and all my software was configured the exact way I like it and accessing all the right folders. I figured it'd be easy to apply the image after the hardware was replaced. After all, I'm in IT! How hard could it be?

Ha. HA. Ha! You funny!

Yes the image was created on July 7 this year, and last night I FINALLY figured out how to get it to restore. Three Entire Months. Dammit, this software is just not created for IT people!

Ok ok ok, honestly: if my choices in my free time are sitting in front of a computer futzing with backup software or knitting, I'll choose knitting any and every single day, so it wasn't very high on my priority list. But about once a week or so I'd think "gee, I'll try this and see if it works today." Nope nope nope. The problem was that I was trying to overwrite my C: drive which was IN USE at the time, with me trying. to. overwrite. it. Duh. The help file was awful. The internet had no one being useful. I had the stoopid!

Believe me, you don't want to catch the stoopid!!

The boring details: create a recovery disk to boot only to the point where it could access the backup file, which happened to be on an external usb drive. How to create this recovery disk was the tricky business that took the longest. CD/DVD creation software sucks eggs.

Welp, now it's been 3 months of using IE (vomit) and having a plain blue background and not having any of my remembered passwords or favourite programs. Microsoft's IE is truly evil, and the evillest of all is IE8 and Bing and Microsoft Live.

The moral of this story: you should give up on computers since they're just a fad anyway, start knitting mittens and avoid catching the stoopid!

Sharing

So today at work we have a new engineer starting. Very friendly and bubbly and fun. She's from Chile originally and has a very thick accent still but has been at my company for a while and is now transferring to our department.

Where I work, when people move offices their chairs go with them. It's really a good system because otherwise, inevitably, you end up with a random chair that has somebodies long gross hair stuck to it. No matter how much you take off, there is always more. But anyway. Chairs move with their people here.

Earlier this morning she was telling me that they didn't move her chair with all her other belongings and she's using one of the very un-ergonomic guest chairs right now.

Just now someone was in her office (across from mine) setting up the last few things for her. And I overhear the following exchange:

"They dint mooff my share!"

"... Your share?"

"My SHARE!!"

"...... Oh. your chair. "

I couldn't see it happening but I'm quite sure there was a lot of hand gesturing going on.

Too much information

Ever wonder what the heck is going on in bathrooms when people go? Trust me, if you had an office next to the staff bathrooms like I do, you would wonder.

Some take HOURS in the can, no newspaper, no Readers Digest, nothing but themselves in that tiny room... oh... OH! Well anyway, then we have timid tinklers who go in, close the door and run water at full blast for the entire time they're in there. Others fumigate the entire bathroom with green apple scented aerosol so that, after they escape, my office and the entire hallway smells like green apple and poo. If the bathrooms are occupied some people decide to go back to their desks while others come in to my office (uninvited!) and sit while they wait, and others stand cross-legged in the hall.

Mostly I wish I didn't have an office next to the bathrooms so I wouldn't know these things.

Arg!

The kind of people:

• who want you to inexplicably phone a man and ask about a "dongle"
• are racists, but are immigrants themselves
• can't work unless you're watching
• can't solve any problems unless you reason it out for them
  
• will not be where they are supposed to be 99% of the time
  
• will interrupt you working, because if you're there, it must be to visit them
• want you to throw a party and invite them
• want you to get married so you can invite them to the party
• want you to replace all the cables instead of troubleshooting crappy hardware
• send you error messages but don't tell you what application it was for
• send you 4 MB error messages via email
  
• ask you if you heard about a gang swarming but preface it by way of telling you a 15 minute story about visiting a 9 1/2 lb newborn in the hospital
• assume that you have the same interests and hobbies, and if by chance you do, just assume your interest or hobby is at the same level of crazy theirs is
  

Fun shirt

Some people I hung out with yesterday needed this shirt.

I don't understand how people can brag that they don't have a computer at home and cannot google, not even for work because they "CAN NEVER FIND ANYTHING!" :insert double pounding fists ridiculous sulk here:

It is because you do not practice the internet grasshopper. Also because you are a webtard. But it's ok, I still like you. Just not a whole lot.

Self Checkouts

What is the soccer mom with a cart full of goods doing at the grocery store lunch at the self checkouts?? Same with the Grams and Grandpops desperately trying to figure out this new-fangled technology! Seriously, the store employs people that will help you on check-outs 1-15... let the rest of us with a sandwich and a magazine just rush through already!

Spoiled!

This weekend a friend and I were discussing cars we wouldn't buy because they don't have spoilers, and cars that should have spoilers, but for whatever reason came without a spoiler, but shouldn't have. Like a Civic, of any year, looks ridiculous without a spoiler, especially the newer ones which look like eggs.

But here is the one car I wouldn't buy, even though as you can see, it has a very nice spoiler.

www.peopleofwalmart.com

Booyeah!

(click to enlarge)






For real.
Someone saved this song on their hard drive.

Toolbars: collect the whole set!

(click to enlarge)










I see you are missing a few toolbars! You should get on that!

honestly. what is wrong with people?

Done some good today

A former colleague showed my former supervisor (who is the most brilliant developer ever) how to redial on his phone today.

I provided insight to someone on how come their Outlook deleted items folder was highlighted bold and had a (1) beside it. They were sure it was because of a meeting request someone had sent, because it was the most unusual email they'd ever seen. (wow!) But no.

Yesterday a guy left work and called me on his way home to ask if I'd done something to his computer. I denied it. I totally had forgotten that I used his computer for about a minute because he has Acrobat Distiller and I needed a single image from a single page extracted from a PDF file and I'd sent it to myself, obviously using his email. When I clicked send, his email got hung up on our postal code and website address the signature so I added them to the dictionary. Because spell check is freaking annoying! He kept insisting that I'd "done something good" to his computer, something had changed... so he tried to explain it when I realized "oh! Right, I added those to the dictionary without thinking. Sorry, if you don't want that I can reverse that..."

"No no! it's something good! I didn't know you could do that!"

The poor guy has had email for 10 years and never noticed the add to dictionary spell check option. I had to show him how to do it on his own today, so that every time he emails some of our colleagues with interesting names it won't suggest alternate words. I used to work with a lady who's name wasn't in the dictionary and occasionally she'd get emails addressed to "Radish" -- which isn't even close!

Fun!

The concert last night was a lot of fun, and for a good cause. The best part though is hanging out with my sister and some friends all night long. My three favourite things about last night that had nothing to do with the actual music at the concert:

1. Bryan Adams is coming to Edmonton next week for a concert. I've thought he was a wanker since forever. My sister knows this hatred of mine and she agreed that we're boycotting the show. (not that we'd go anyway!)
2. AC/DC is coming to Edmonton tomorrow. In a surprising twist my sister declares her love for AC/DC.
   "Really? You?"
   "Yeah! 'I Saw The Sign' is one of the best songs ever!"
3. It was 10 pm before my sister heard a song she knew. She's the best for sticking it out... :)