End Users

Ok – because I do desktop support for a living, it’s only fitting that one of my first rants be about the wonderful people that I support. For my purposes, these people, who for the most part are wonderful humans with very little technical knowledge, will be known as End Users (code for idiot).

Now, not all of the people I support work for my company. Some of them are family and friends (or maybe not after this post). It is amazing to me that the people who listen to me gripe about some of the stupid questions I have to answer on a daily basis, the mind numbing problems I deal with and the fact that I wish a bus would just hit me in the parking lot, are the very people that call me at home to ask me ……….. COMPUTER QUESTIONS! It always starts with, “hey, let me ask you this” or “my computer is doing this weird thing”. This is usually their round-a-bout way of saying, “could you spend the only free time you have working on my computer”. God love ‘em. So, because I am either incapable of saying no or I am just the most wonderful person on Earth, I always say, “sure, I can look at it for you”. I then spend hours doing something I like almost as much as having a baboon do my bikini wax.

What makes this even better is the fact that all End Users think they know what the problem is. I’ve had, “Well, I was cleaning up my files the other day and there was a folder called System32. I didn’t know what it was so I deleted it. Now my computer won’t come on at all. I bet I have a virus”. Yeah, the virus is called Syphilis and it is eating away at your brain! I’ve had, “I got this pop-up that asked me if I wanted to download a program called ‘trash your data’. Sounded like a cool program and it was free so I did. Now I can’t find any of my stuff. If you’ve got a minute could you find ALL of my data for the past 5 years?” Yeah, I’ve got a minute but that isn’t going to help you.

The good thing about my job is that it allows me to feel superior in a world where I really don’t amount to much. I live in a modest house, drive an old POS car, I’m not famous or even very popular but in PCville, I am like the great and powerful wizard from that movie with the flying monkeys, midgets and some lost girl trying to get home. If she hadn’t been such an End User, Dorothy could’ve looked up Kansas on Map Quest and not had to deal with that cranky heifer with the crystal ball.