Well, I’m gainfully employed again, doing the part time thing at a bookstore, though for a couple of weeks I was working for a tech-support call centre (and for a still shorter time I was doing both, which was altogether too much working).
While I didn’t actually get any calls quite as classic as the ol’ “my drink-holder broke off” thing, it was an education to be helping the general public with ‘puter related stuff. (Actually, with “doing your taxes on your ‘puter” stuff, to be precise.) First of all, it seems that nearly nobody knows what version of Windows they are running. Here’s a helpful guide. Does it look like it’s made of drool-proof semi-translucent plastic? That’ll be XP. Is it an absolute steaming pile of shit? That’s ME you got right there. Do something about it.
Some entertaining dialogue overheard from a co-worker in my ‘quad’ of workers;
“…ok, now press that button. …What didn’t disappear? …It doesn’t go anywhere, it’s a BUTTON.”
One final piece of advice. If you’ve called an IT helpdesk, and they’re issuing you with instructions, DON’T JUST GO AHEAD AND CLICK SHIT AT RANDOM WHILE THEY’RE TRYING TO TELL YOU HOW TO FIX IT. Hearing the distinctive ‘error sound’ while instructing someone in a simple procedure which should be entirely without error messages is frustrating, and counter-productive. If you were so fucking clever, you wouldn’t have needed to call them in the first place.
As much as I whinge, though, it actually wasn’t a bad job, compared to some I’ve done, and I met some entertaining locals, as well. The bookstore gig is pretty mellow, too.
Anyway, that concludes this installment in the increasingly infrequent adventures of BWP. In other exciting news, chaff will soon be moving to another blog provider, since this one has started to threaten making us pay monies to continue
here, and frankly if I wanted to pay monies, I’d just pay for hosting and set up some bloggy action of my own with one of the lovely range of utterly free and reliable open-source blog setup things. Similar price, less arbitrary restrictions.
–Posted by BonusWavePilot