After a few years of working with the best I.T. guys around at my old job, I've forgotten what it was like to work on computers managed by meglomaniacs. But a conversation today reminded me of my college days, where tech geeks managed to get on my nerves almost every day for two years. Little did they realize that computers were supposed to be used instead of managed. And did they even know what a Mac was? I'm still not sure.
Technobabble ahead...
These lovely guys would delete all sorts of stuff from the system software in order to... to.. I'm not sure what they were trying to do. "Hmm, the video card driver software takes up 2MB, we could save that space if we just delete it" they think to themselves. Look, the computer still turns on and an images shows up. Great! Too bad a web page takes two minutes to scroll through since the driver is no longer there to speed things up. What's all these extensions and plug-in's inside the Photoshop folder? Who knows, let's just get rid of them since we don't know what they are. They could be a virus! Now that they're gone, I can't find my web safe colors. When I go to ask them to reinstall it, they give me a convoluted workaround involving downloading an image from the web and using the colors from that image. I'm wondering at this point if they are serious or not, but none of them crack a smile. Obviously that experience left a mark and thinking about it five years later still raises my blood pressure.
Onward to the good guys..
I've discovered work computing heaven, and it's at Marketwatch.com. IT guys who would help when needed and leave you and the computer alone otherwise. Now is that so hard?
An aside, just in case some work person stumbles upon this site. This has nothing to do with the IT department at my current job. http://www.dooce.com/ demonstrates why you do not discuss work on your blog.