h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have decided to take it upon myself, as a highly (yeah, right) paid, highly (yeah, right mark 2) trained help tech technician to warn you of a danger within your very homes and offices. The danger is this: If computers are left on too long, they begin to form a personality. "Too long" seems to be a period of time directly proportional to the amount of "interesting" or "off-the-wall" information that you keep on them. The personalities seem to take the opposite "type" of their controller, although in some warped cases - few and far between - the computer actually begins to ABSORB their user's personality, leaving the user without any of their own. (Case in point, any person who has called me stating that they cannot receive faxes with our program, after having struggled with it for up to 10 hours, when, in fact, they haven't even activated the darn thing.) Fortunately, this phenomenon seems to be centered on the folks who are not "computer-compatible" to begin with. Computers with personalities tend to chose the most inappropriate times to show their new-found possessions; crashing just as you start your major presentatio in front of the boss and the boss' boss, for example. The best way to avoid this is to TURN YOUR COMPUTER OFF once in a while, for gods' sake. If however you have decided that a computer with personality is not necessarily a bad thing, be sure to cultivate it properly. Spend time with it, talk to it, play with it, but never, NEVER put a pb&j in the disk drive.

You're a help tech, eh? Although I'm sure you probably have some tales of high adventure to tell, let me tell you two extremes I went through recently.

Necessary background: I've been programming since 1980, in various assembly languages, C, C++, primarily doing video game programming. I consider myself somewhat of a veteran that grew up with computers long before the world wide web was around (the first computer I programmed was a Digital PDP-8 with 16K of RAM - it was taller than me and broke down every week). Having said that...

Story #1: I recently got a dial-up connection and I couldn't get the bloody thing to connect to their server. I called their tech support and the guy that answered (poor devil - I can only imagine what kinds of people he has to deal with; see Story #2) walks me through the setup procedure I've gone through a million times before. But when he gets to the username/password part, he actually _spells_my_own_name_to_me_. I tried to interject by, you know, second-guessing him, but he just waited until I stopped talking and then continued with spelling my own name. Yipe.

Story #2: Even more recently I got an ADSL connection. A few days ago the connection went down mysteriously and their DHCP server stop responding. I phone their tech support and the guy that answered spent about forty minutes trying to help me out. My computer chose this particular time to spook on me and it started acting flaky, so I restarted it. When it came up, the guy asked me to run winipcfg and tell him the IP address that comes up. I do so and the program fails with a terminal error. I can't understand why my computer is suddenly so screwed up. Ten minutes later, I'm still trying to make winipcfg work, and then I realise that, when I restarted my computer, I had popped my PCMCIA Ethernet card and hadn't plugged it back in. What did I tell the guy? I said, "_I_ am an _idiot_." He replied, "I'm not gonna say anything."

My, my, we all have our off-days, don't we?

It's always good for us to hear the other side. My current favorite is the poor college student who called me in a panic. Now, we only technically support the PhoneTools program - a program allowing the computer to act as a fax machine, answering machine and speaker phone - but this is the only support number the poor kid can find in his blind panic. He's trying to type a paper and when he moves the cursor to add words, he just types over them. The paper is due by 5 (it is now 3:30) and the guy is almost in tears on the other end of the phone. I explained to him, as gently as I could, that he needed to push the insert button on his keyboard. He did so and proceeded to waste about 5 minutes of his precious paper-composing time telling me how wonderful I was. (We all need an ego boost from time to time. ) My next favorite is the guy who called in a quandry, asking how to install the question mark on his keyboard. I told him where it was, and he hung up on me. You could almost feel the blush through the phone line.

I really like my job and enjoy helping these folks. Stories like these are just icing on the cake. (BTW, the kid got his paper turned in and got a B. He called back, just to tell me that!)

Well, it's nice to know that phone support people get nice calls, rather than the horror stories that everyone loves to relate.

I like the positive stories much better than the negative ones. Gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling!