November 2007
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I am The Cyberwolfe and these are my ramblings. All original content is protected under a Creative Commons license - always ask first.
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Holy Crap! This thing is still here?!?

Uh, yeah. Sorry ’bout ‘dat, I really should ramble more.

Entertainment of the Week: 5 (count ’em, 1-2-3-4-5) 45-mile round trips to a rural client. One trip was used to install RAM in 4 machines and replace a power brick on a laptop.

That one was funny all on it’s own. Box was delivered to user and open on her desk when I got there. What was the laptop pluged in to? You guessed it, the bad power brick. Fucking nitwit.

So, what were the other 4 trips for? Rebuilding a single computer.

That’s right, something like 15 hours of labor for ONE FUCKING MACHINE because the owner of the company is such a FARKING PERFECTIONIST that he is truly incapable of using a computer unless it works EX-FUCKING-ACTLY like the previous model.

Okay, some of that labor was spent in an Edisonian pursuit: I found a method to do something that doesn’t work the way I wanted it to. Restoring an Acronis image to another machine can be useful, but when the original machine has a few problems related to Windows, you’re better off building it from scratch. This solution is best used in “Oh fuck! The server is tits-up!!” situations, not mere workstation migrations.

But I swear to you, if I hear that ancient little frog mutter “this is unacceptable” one more time, I’m a-gonna break his legs.

The bitch of it is, the guy retired from an engineering job. I KNOW he has a decent brain in his skull, and at one point in time he was exceedingly capable of figuring shit out. (There is a circuitboard mounted in his living room with about a half-mile of solder trace on it, and he commented once that that board had kept him busy for a while.)

So why in HELL’S half-acre can he not deal with change on a computer?

I think the worst part of this is the fact that the Bossman has been enabling this client for years and not putting the smack down on him earlier. Most of these headaches would be greatly lessened if Bossman had simply said “it will take you ten minutes to learn how to do this differently, and it will take me three hours to break this new machine the same way the old one was. Which is more efficient?”

Of course, Bossman is also the guy who wrote our 398-line login “script” at the office…

One reply to “Holy Crap! This thing is still here?!?”

  1. GreyDuck Says:

    Bossman’s a nice guy. That’s part of his problem. Think of another client, one which never pays its bills on time and recently caused us a bunch of emergency work because they moved offices ahead of schedule without telling us… I’d have told them, “You did WHAT? Well, then YOU fix the problems you caused!”

    But that may be why I’m not a business owner. Hmm.