A Day of Drain Circling

There comes a time in every tech's life when they sit down, lean back, and kick the ever living crap out of the bottom of their desk. Today was one such day. It all started with a visit from our warranty repair company. They routinely deliver parts for broken computers days after they promised to, and do so with a smile.

The part was a laptop hard drive. So I needed to get the user's data off the hard drive. Each method I tried to get her data off ended up failing and I quickly decided that the world was against me today.

First, let me explain that I'm not simply attempting to remove her data, because that would have been easy, but I was trying to create an image of her machine, meaning that after the hard drive was replaced, I could restore this image, and the user would not know the difference. Every icon would be exactly where she left it. Every bookmark, background, annoying-ass paperclip guy, and every word she added to her dictionary in Word would be right where she left it. It's easier for the user and for us to do this, because otherwise they ask us the same questions about configuring their machine that they asked the last time they got a new computer. You cannot simply boot up Windows when you're making an image, because when Windows is running, certain files are in use and can't be copied, the swap file is in use and shouldn't be copied, and several other issues that prevent a good image of the machine to be made.

So, trying to boot this machine I pull out my handy-dandy floppy disk and low and behold, there is no floppy. So I go ask the user where her floppy drive is and she claims she never got it.......right. So I decide to pull out the laptop hard drive and hook it to an adapter that will allow it to inside a normal desktop unit. After half an hour of monologue that would make the most ill-tempered sailor blush, I determined that the adapter was broken.

So at this point I can already feel the day swirling around and around.

Now I try to take that floppy disk and burn it to CD so I can boot from a CD and get the sytem to do what I need it to. The software to do it on my machine is completely fouled up, so I go to my coworker's machine. It's not loaded, so I find the disk and we load it. It's keyed for a specific CD-burner, and it's not the one she has. We dig, and dig, and finally find the right version and install it. We get the CD burned. I put it in the laptop, boot up, it's loading, the imaging software come up and......the $*#%in machine is locked up! Reboot, the same!

*Flush*

There goes another day in the life of an IT guy.

Fury...Motivated?

Well, my company has gone and done it. I have been offered the option of not coming into work tomorrow if I go to A MOTIVATIONAL SEMINAR! Don’t they realize that I’m in IT? I’d rather eat sodden pork rinds than attend this anathema to my fury! How dare they provoke me with the thought of a day away from work, then they spoil my delusions of fun with cheesy silver-spooned decriers of pessimism who wouldn’t know hard work from a hard inmate. Basically, I’m reminded of the SNL skit with Chris Farley as a motivational speaker. “I live in a van by the river!” These guys, though, are top-notch cheese-heads, who have success under their belts. Half were born with success handed to them in a big brown paper bag. The rest had it handed to them genetically. How is a quarterback supposed to motivate me, and why should I care what he has to say? You may as well get Mike Tyson up on stage spouting off how hard work pays, and how the little man can become the big man……if he can make a shiv from a cafeteria tray.

So instead of even pondering the thought of a day away from work, I will sit here and be that much more miserable because I was forced to choose to sit here.

Now if they had offered me the day off to go to an IT convention, there would be no contest. A day of talking about new tech, Monty Python, and pilfering worthless trinkets from hapless people whose product I’m not interested in appeals to me on a level far above a day of work, which itself is several spans above a motivational seminar. There’s nothing like taking everything you can lay your hands on, and smiling at the tradeshow folk while you do it. If they try to make you only take one of their pieces of worthless junk, just pretend you don’t hear them and walk away. They’ll never be rude to you, and they’ll never leave their booth. I keep the trinkets I get at IT shows in my office, like trophies of my tradeshow conquests.

Now, assume for a moment that I had decided to brave the motivational seminar. I can see it now, me, a furious IT guy sitting in the midst of Amway salesmen and Mary Kay reps. The parking lot outside is a sea of mini vans and pink Cadillacs. Fists clenched tight, I listen to the applause as Pansy #1 comes onto the stage. Crowds of mindless lemmings nodding at everything he says, urging him to reveal all his success secrets to them, praying that he will take them personally under his wing. One hundred thousand mindless zombies smiling and nodding in unison might cause such an immensely powerful vacuum of intelligence that beside my great density of intelligence the force of diffusion alone would cause my head to explode, thus bringing the average intelligence in the room above that of a retarded chicken and leaving me no better. Needless to say, I fear this scenario.