Codesmith

Life, Or Something Like It
2006-01-06 16:16:00 (UTC)

Running Tech Support

It's 0106, Friday. 1100am. No change in weather.

Katie came on lonelymud! It was a fun, but brief chat.

The last week I've been running tech support for Lisa's
parents. Lisa's mother still continually thinks that
fixing computers is something I could put on my resume
when applying for software engineering jobs. I'm still
kind of annoyed by that. It's like a subtle, unintended
put down from an elderly.

The week's two jobs were from Lisa's mother and Lisa's
step father. Lisa's mother wanted to access her address
book available on another computer since her old computer
will be tempoarily out of service while some renovation
goes on in that room.

So I stepped her by the process and we managed to get
stuck on one of the steps. Amazingly, it wasn't one of the
more complicated ones either. We didn't have any trouble
exporting the address book as a text file, or saving it in
the root directory, or giving it a name with a CSV
extension. Nor did we have trouble sending the email to
ourselves, and logging off the account altogether.

No. The problem came from when she actually had to check
her email. I was absolutely perturbed as to how we could
step through a veritable field of "landmine-esque" complex
technical issues, absolutely unscathed, only to spend five
minutes trying to check email.

It's like winning the Iron Man contest, only to die of a
heart attack once you reach the finish line.

After that though we were able to import the address book.
I just wanted to get off the phone as fast as possible so
that Katie could call me. It turns out that she did, and
got a busy signal.

The second tech support issue came yesterday from Lisa's
step father. Apparently, Lisa's mother manage to force the
computer to always print this one page whenever the
printer was to print something. No matter what the printer
was going to print, it would always print the same
something else first, before printing it's queued jobs.

To actually "force" the printer, a machine, to do
something like that would require technical skills I do
not currently have. So after hearing that little miracle,
I found myself in awe of the one who was obviously my
senior in all things technically related.

Well, it turns out that se didn't really do that to the
computer. She just left her previously printed pile (of
many copies) lay where it was printed. So, that, when
Lisa's step father printed ... he would always receive his
printed job, as well as whatever Lisa's step mother had
printed out.

We finally figured it out. Or rather, Lisa's step father
finally figured it out.

I probably would have, too. Since, I was asking which came
first ... the queued print job, or whatever it was that
Lisa's mother had printed.

If it was whatever Lisa's mother had printed first, then
that was just some kind of interesting program running
that forced the printer to give that print job a higher
priority than anything else. If it came last, then that
was something else.

... I don't know why, but I'm beginning to lose my
patience with Lisa's mother.

It's not so much that I hate when people have technical
problems. I mean, I have them too. Just in a different
kind of way. I guess ... my limit of patience is just a
few years.

I don't know. I hope not.




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