I Am Not Amused
I have spent three hours on the telephone having an individual repeat a three-letter sequence that I had given to him to type in. During the last half-hour I was beset by three cats inside and a dozen cats outside wondering where dinner was.
Then this individual asks “what does LTP mean?” I responded that I didn’t have the faintest idea, and wondered why he had asked. He responded: “if you don’t know, why do you want me to type it in?” To which I responded: “excuse me, but I have been telling you to type in LPT which is an abbreviation for line printer, which is, after all, what we are attempting to get to work.”
Ten minutes later the cats were being fed.
I would hope you will understand that after that when I read something like BadTux’s Call out the Waaahmbulance! [warning for wingers: Anglo-Saxon verbiage], I really would like to kick something. When did doing your job become an imposition? If you don’t want to do your current job as a journalist, there is produce to be picked and real snow that needs to be shoveled. If you are uncertain what to do, ask a real journalist – Helen Thomas.
Then Bobby makes the point that religion is No Excuse. It doesn’t matter why you are a bigot. The fact that it is based on your “beliefs” in no way ameliorates the harm it causes, any more than it excused slavery.
Moi notes that most of problems are not religion, per se, but organized religion in which the few make decisions that are parroted by the many. If you have been watching groups like the Southern Baptist Convention you would note that the few tend to “discover” revelations that make major changes to the status of groups, like women. I’m always amazed how it took thousands of years before anyone noticed the problem the few cite, but now that it has been noticed it is immutable law, as if Moses had scribbled it on the back of the Tablets on his way down the mountain.
I mentioned the “Christian” business directory earlier. The thing is, obviously Joe Lieberman wouldn’t be in that directory, but neither would Romney, or Obama, or DonoWho. Down here “Christian” somehow excludes a lot of people, but people should accept it because it is based on “belief”, you know, so you shouldn’t question it.
Who sees not how frequently the name of the Church, which was venerable in the time of the Apostles, has been made use of to throw dust in the people’s eyes in the following ages?
The one only narrow way which leads to heaven is not better known to the magistrate than to private persons, and therefore I cannot safely take him for my guide, who may probably be as ignorant of the way as myself, and who certainly is less concerned for my salvation than I myself am.
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration
6 comments
Bryan, you are so calm! My husband tends to have a … volcanic… temper and would have shredded papers and cast them about, yelled incoherently into the broken phone recently ripped from the wall with faintly sparking wires, snapped a few pencils….
Three hours? You, sir, need a medal.
And by the way, what DOES LTP mean?
I make my humble living solving problems for people, and it does no good getting upset about it, besides I’ve practiced mediation for years because I have an extremely bad temper. You control it or it controls you. You can channel it into something useful like building something with your hands.
LTP means that for three hours he has been reversing the last two letters of a one line command that took me 12 hours to find. I even gave it to him as Lima Papa Tango, the military phonetic alphabet, but he was typing it in reversed.
It happens.
Oh my. I don’t know how you managed to keep it together those last 45 minutes when the cats were wondering where their food was. I only have two cats, and when they’re ready to be fed, they get up on my computer desk and start getting between me and the screen and start grabbing my hands off my keyboard with their paws and going “ROOOWWR! Feed me!” and I can’t get anything done until I do that.
Yeah, I think if any wingnut came over to my web site they’d pass out with a case of the vapors. I ought to invest in a company making fainting couches for all these weak-kneed wingnuts who faint at the sight of a good ole’ fashioned four-letter obscenity… odly enough, the same good ole’ fashioned four-letter obscenities that the wingnuts themselves use when threatening to rape and kill two young women. Imagine that. Wingnuts are hypocrits. Who woulda thunk it? :-).
– Badtux the Anglo-Saxon Penguin
ellroon, your husband should take up an information-technology-related career, if he is not already in one. A career in IT teaches one patience, if one has the capacity to learn it… and humility in any case; one has no choice but to learn that.
Like Bryan, I have the potential to be easily upset, as anyone knows who reads my blog regularly. Also like Bryan, I’ve learned to moderate that tendency, because no amount of screaming, pencil-breaking, telephone-tossing, etc. … and I’ve done all of that in times past… ever really contributes to solving the technological problem at hand, and often enough it worsens any human interactions along the way.
This morning, I received an email from the CTO of my current client. The email subject was “Help!!” Fortunately, I was able to do so in a relatively short time; equally fortunately, the CTO is not only a good manager but a not-quite-retired programmer himself. I.e., he has a lot of patience. I like working for and with people like that.
The annoying thing about “bad language” is that these are the original words that were used in what became the English language. It’s the thought that counts, not the vocabulary. When I read the complaints about language I usually react by viewing it as “avoidance behavior”, i.e. they agree with the reasoning, but to avoid admitting that the reasoning is correct, they complain about the words.
Screw ’em, if they keep it up they will trivialize their job to the point that it can be done by a piece of software, and it will be – the “Gannon Bot 2008”. Most of the current crop of the White House press are on the verge of failing the Turing test.
The cats were definitely getting insistent at the end, with Sox continually hooking claws into my shirt sleeve to get attention; Ringo sitting between me and the screen while Dot provided the Greek chorus by her empty dish.
Steve, it definitely helps to work with people who have some understanding of the problems. This client does a lot of downloading which has lead to problems at various times, and it has not been easy to break the habit. The fact that he was unaware that LPT1 was the name of the parallel port demonstrates the shallow level of knowledge and the effect of “plug ‘n play”.