I spoke too soon... (semi-sort-of-rant)

Was it only a few days ago I was saying how relatively stress-free my job is, compared to how it could be? I Should Have Known Better than to say so out loud where Murphy could hear...

Parental Advisory: This post contains scenes of explicit luserishness and other unrecovery-inducing material. You Have Been Warned.

See, today there was an hour at the end of my shift where the only other person on-shift was a new hire who's still being trained, so it fell to me to take most of the calls while she listened in. And the last call of the day... but let me tell you about the call before it first, which made it so much worse by comparison.

Now the penultimate call today was actually pleasant: the user (no 'l') I was talking to had actually grasped the concept of swapping in known-good components to troubleshoot. I was stepping her through a series of swaps-with-good-components, and she actually suggested the next one before I'd gotten to it. Furthermore, that proved to be the faulty component, and I was able to hang up with the satisfaction of having helped someone with actual Clue. Which only made the next phone call, the one from the PEBKAC case, so much worse.

The next call was from someone saying her Resnet connection was down. A little questioning revealed that it had been down ever since she had tried to install All-Ad-Vantage spit^[1]. But that's not all: she'd been recruited by someone else (who would, of course, be paid a commission by TakeAdvantage), and he'd installed it -- in her words, "He sat down at my computer and did a lot of stuff." Mental alarm bells with big red flashing lights started going off, and I decided to just strip out the entire networking component and re-install, as that was the only way to be sure I'd purged whatever the DisAdvantage luser had done. So I started out. As for how the rest of the conversation went, I'll just mention a couple of things. First: I knew this was going to be a long phone call when I told her "Right-click on the Start menu, choose Properties, then open Programs, then Startup". She somehow ended up with Explorer open to C:\Program Files. How she managed that, I Don't Want To Know. Second: the call lasted 40 minutes; in that time, the only positive thing accomplished was the removal of the "C:\Program Files\AllAdvantage.com" folder^[4] and its contents. 1 finally told her to make a service-call appointment: sending someone out to fix this is going to take far less time than trying to fix it over the phone with 50% packet loss on the "Now do this" packets (not to mention 100% loss on the cluon packets).

The only thing that keeps me going is that after I finish this next paper (which is going to keep me up all night, but that's My Own D*mn Fault) I've got multiple sources of recovery avaiable. And tomorrow I'm going to hit all but one of them.

But I refuse to be bitter and cynical. This girl's problem was mere ignorance which caused her to misunderstand my instructions, that's all. And though I don't know how she managed to open the System control panel when I asked for the Network control panel, and then do it again, that still doesn't mean that she's always that way. And neither is the rest of humanity. People in general are not fundamentally stupid: they're fundamentally intelligent, simply with occasional bouts of stupidity that will eventually pass.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.^[5]

[1]	"All-Ad-Vantage: we make you vantage[2] all the ads!"
[2]	If "vantage point" is a place where you stop to take a look at something, then I hereby declare "vantage" to be the verb for taking a look. Yes, like Humpty-Dumpty[3], I'm redefining the English language to suit my purposes.
[3]	What word did he redefine? I remember he said "There's ______ for you!" to which Alice objected that that's not what "______" means, and Humpty replied that words mean whatever you want. I don't have a copy of _Wonderland_ handy to check this.
[4]	Yes, this is the actual folder name. A more clear Marketroid fingerprint I have not seen in a long time. "Hey, let's put '.com' in the folder name, then they'll know what our website is." Never mind that .com is STILL an executable extension, nor what that'll do to extension-parsing programs of various sorts. It's got a .com in it, it must be cool. Aaargh.
[5]	And if anyone has more duct tape to help me remain stuck to it, I'd like to borrow some, because I can feel myself slowly coming un-stuck.

Date posted: 21st March 2000