Things that annoyed me today

Things that annoyed me today

1) Playing tech support for HB.

Yesterday morning, HB called and had a question for me. The night before, we'd been talking about his internet connection. It's been rather flakey, and despite calling the service provider several times, the connection hasn't improved. While talking about it the night before, I happened to ask him if his roommate was having similar problems. He thought it about it a bit, and replied, "no."

Um. So why have you been calling the service provider? Obviously, if your roommate who uses the same internet has no problems, the internet's not broken. Something's wrong with your computer. That really annoyed me. It's such a simple and obvious concept that he just didn't get. So I told him to look into updating the driver for his ethernet ports and controllers.

So that was the question I woke up to yesterday, "How do I backup my existing driver before I install this new one that I downloaded?" First of all, I don't know, I'm not tech support. Secondly, I don't think you can backup a driver that's already installed. You can only back up the install file. And last but not least, I kinda doubted that he'd even downloaded the right drivers. But I wasn't going to mention that and be roped into a 10-minute conversation helping him to find the right driver. So I said I was late for a meeting (which I was), and hung up.

This morning, he called with a new question. He got a domain name and host and wants to make a webpage. Red flags immediately go up in my head. Ugh, new issue for me, his non-tech-support-tech-support. He asked what I use to make my page.

-Wordpress.

-But I don't want a blog.

-Okay, but wordpress can do pages too, and it has an easy interface.

-But it's still blog-based.

-Fine, most of the themes are blog-centric. You can try Dreamweaver or another editing program.

-Okay, I'll go download Dreamweaver.

-Umm, Dreamweaver is not free like Wordpress. You'll have to either buy it or pirate it.

-Oh.

I just don't have the patience to sit there and walk him through making a webpage. He claims to know simple HTML. Yeah, I bet he knows the bold tag or something, which is obsolete. I didn't want to even start getting into FTP or stylesheets or tell him that back in the day, in the age of static pages, I coded my own site. I don't want him asking me any more questions about webpages.

Funny thing is that if I were actually there, his internet connectivity problem is one that I probably wouldn't mind figuring out for him (FOR him is the key, not WITH him). I'd spend an evening or something looking up drivers and screwing around with his network settings to see if I could improve anything. (But I wouldn't do the webpage for him, unless he wants to pay me).

Ultimately, I am repulsed by his general lack of tech-savviness. It really really bothers me. I have to constantly remind myself that he is different from the people around me here in grad school. He has other talents that I need to learn to appreciate, like being able to pick up a musical instrument and pretty much pick out an ad-hoc tune. Actually, that's the only talent of his I can think of right now. I'm definitely entering negative-HB mode.

And damn it! He's the guy! He's supposed to be MY tech support, not the other way around. Broadway was always so good at that.

2) Being told "I wish I could pull off short hair."

My labmate came up to me and said, "Man, I wish I could pull off short hair." My response: "You can." To which she said, "no way, you have no idea."

Umm, have you ever chopped off your hair? You probably haven't, in which case, you have no idea whether or not you can pull off short hair. Stop saying that to me just because you don't have to guts to go short.

I've gotten that a few times since chopping off my hair about three weeks ago. My friend buzzed the sides of my head (not completely, maybe left 1/4 inch or so), and we left the top at about 3 inches so I could spike a mohawk. But day-to-day, the longish hair at the top just sits, and I look like I have a punkish boy cut.

I like it. It's different and actually kind of empowering. But I get really annoyed at comments like the one my labmate made.