Russell & Kimmy

So we got three new hires at work last week. I like to assume things, until proven wrong, and I assumed that they were going to keep me busy. Luckily I was wrong; while they seemed timid around the computer they asked intelligent questions and didn’t cause me too much grief work. When the new hires arrived Monday morning I assumed that they were going to drag down their fellow co-workers in my Rock vs. Co-Workers contest; again I was wrong…my problem children did a splendid job of dragging themselves down. It reminds me of that old quote, give some one enough rope ….

A majority of the week was quite and the score didn’t budge in the Rock vs. Co-Workers challenge. Nobody did anything brilliant, but nobody did anything stupid either. I assumed I was going to have a quite week, but by Friday stupidity was running rampant. This brings up an important point ….since I am the judge and jury of the Rock vs. Co-Workers challenge there is a certain amount of bias in what I consider stupid. So I thought I should clarify that ….stupid is anything that makes more work for me. So there are no stupid questions, just stupid people asking questions; but questions don’t make more work for me so I encourage people to ask away. So that is it, pretty much the only thing that gets my co-workers dinged is doing something that makes more work for me. This includes fiddling with something, breaking said something and then asking me to fix it while forgetting to mention that you were fiddling with it and this is what you did. Case in point, one of my co-workers is responsible for dragging down the score. We use wireless headsets in the office; everyone thinks they are cool and love their wireless headsets. I advocated for using the wired kind so people would be forced to stay at their desk and because they were $300.00 cheaper, but since I am a temp my opinion is worth less than a screen door in a hurricane.

There are two problems with wireless headsets; problem number 1, to lighten the load on the headset and the wearer’s ear they made the headset as light as possible. This gives a smaller mike boom so to compensate they jack up the sensitivity of the mike. No big deal unless you have a bunch of sales associates who howl, well like howler monkeys. If you don’t fiddle with your mike’s settings you will pick up a lot of background noise. Insisting that the phone line is broken because you hear a lot of noise does not endear me to you. Having to prove it because your manager opened a ticket makes me less happy and wastes about 3 hours of my time; -1 point. Problem number 2 with wireless head sets. Because we have about 80 employees using them and they all sit with in 50 feet of each other you will get feedback on them if you wander around; this isn’t the phone system’s fault, it does not have crossed wires. Again, dealing with the ticket and wasting 3 more hours of my life; -1 point. Finally after I prove to you that it is your headset and that you need to adjust it, if the adjustment fails don’t send me a vague email telling me your phone is broken, I assume the worse; -1 point for wasting 1 hour undoing your mistake.

So if you have fingers and have been counting; the current score in the Rock vs. Co-Workers challenge is Rock 0 and Co-Workers -4. 

Sweet zombie Andrew Jackson on a pogo stick we passed 50,000 page requests; it happened sometime last week, I wasn’t really paying attention, and now I feel special. Now if only I could get my fraking desktop to work I would be in business. I think I have isolated the issue to be with either my mother board or the bios. Rather than taking the mother board and using it as a Frisbee I am going to try the insane and flash the bios and then update it to see if that works. Since I have never actually flashed I bios, there is a good chance that I will have a $90 Frisbee that flies like crap. More importantly I have to actually find a floppy drive, which may or may not be a pain. Once that gets done, I am looking forward to that new 500 GB SATA hard drive. I don’t currently have 500 GB of crap but I am sure it won’t take me long to fill it; I am thinking the best of Abba.

Luckily the conference call I am on currently give me a lot of time to actually think about what I want to load on my home computer. I still wonder how I got put on this call, I only inject about 5 minutes worth of content and I spend the other 55 minutes waiting for it to end so that I can actually go back to work. Of course I always end up on this call when I have things to do and am behind. Currently am fighting with our support center to give me the executables I need to add some machines to active directory. I could Google how to set up active directory for these new machines but at this point it is a matter of pride and principle; plus it helps me waste an entire day while being able to blame some one else.

Now to the juicy part which I know you have all been waiting for, co-workers vs. rock; I really need to get a logo for this and possibly put it on a computer. Last week the rock was up by two points but my crafty co-workers started to catch up. First one of my co-workers wanted to pirate our anti virus software and asked me how, a big NO NO; minus 1 point…but in a clever turn of events they asked me if I recommended anything for anti virus protection after smacking them down…plus 1 point. That brings the current score rock 0 and co-workers -2. To finish off the week there were still lagging DST issues. Rather than bug me, one of my co-workers asked for instructions on how to resolve the issue himself, clever co-worker…plus 1 point. In a surprising turn of events co-workers narrow the rocks lead; I was quite impressed. So far today, no one has done anything I would actually consider stupid so the score still stands 0 to -1. The way this week is shaping up, I am actually expecting my co-workers to narrow the score and climb into the positive range; although there are a few wild cards that could drag them down….stay tuned for another exciting episode of co-workers vs. rock!

Currently I am on a conference call waiting for a cold front to descend upon Austin and I am trying to decide which is worse, conference calls or a face stabbing. The only problem with conference calls is I am easily distracted and there is literally nothing I can accomplish on this call. It is a wicked melding of apathy and helplessness….currently apathy is winning. Hopefully soon I will be off this project and go back to my happy little existence of local tech support and I can stop being a button pushing server babysitter. The only problem with face stabbings is that they hurt and possibly require stitches. I think the face stabbing is currently more appealing, but only if the doctor agrees to give me drugs.

Let us face it; I really don’t want to be at work. I bought a new SATA hard drive for the desktop and was installing it when the power supply failed. After the power supply I misplaced the bios hand book and then needed thermal paste. I estimate that I currently have spent at least 14 hours screwing with that damn machine and I am almost ready to install the OS….almost. Hopefully after all this is done I will appreciate the new hard drive and will fight the urges to stab myself in the face repeatedly. Next time I am just going to pay some one to do it; sure I could do it myself but it really isn’t worth the frustration. And what the hell is up with my Pentium D chip? It is a thermal paste whore, in order to get the damn chip to boot I have to layer that goop on there like a two year old going nuts with a chip and some dip; messy is the only way to describe it.

Speaking of two year olds I have started my infamous rock experiment; actually started it yesterday. So far the rock is winning 0 to -2. [ RANT ] Okay first, if you loose network connection or you network id craps out, Outlook 2003 sp 2 goes from working online to working offline. If you look at the bottom right of Outlook it has a little red X over the Outlook logo with the words offline next to it. Yes you will have to put it back online to automatically get messages. The first time someone asks…no problem, the second time….sure, but when I have told every one of your cube mates the solution you should know better. Minus 1 point. Further more, statistics do not lie, especially if verified by two different machines and historical data. Accusing the statistics of being wrong and then whining about it implied I don’t know how to do my job. I get really irritated when people point out I don’t know what I am doing…it makes me look bad. Minus another 1 point. [End Rant] Luckily the rock has not actually done anything stupid and is aesthetically pleasing; I considered giving it a point for good looks but that just seemed like sexual harassment; so I decided against it.

BTW: for all of you who are smarter than a rock…I recommend the web comic XKCD.

It was a dark and stormy Monday, Work waited silently in the dark with deep heavy breathing. Naively I strolled into work like Louis the XVI, only to be knocked down a peg. Now its Friday, I have only two hours left of work and the gray skies are finally clearing up. Of course it took me a while this morning to believe that it was actually Friday and not Saturday; the extra two hours in bed was worth it though. It also took me a while to realize that it has been two weeks since I last wrote. I really wanted to write about how Kimmy and I broke into an ancient temple, stole a priceless statue and then out ran a rotund rolling rock only to escape that and be confronted by some mad Mayans and to escape them by jumping into a seaplane. I really wanted to write about that but some one told me that was Indiana Jones and that I was a liar. I responded that it could have been true or maybe I was drunk and imagined it. Speaking of Indian Jones, Lucas Arts has scheduled Indiana Jones the Video Game for release. It is following in the footsteps of the wildly popular Lego Star Wars II. I think Kimmy enjoyed Lego Star Wars II more than I did; she played through the game where I just ran around blowing things up; it was an incredibly violent game but it was Lego violence so it was okay.

I would also like to give a shout out to the Zeppelin, it is 118 years old today. May you 118th birthday be a bang.