Evolution Not Found
on October 18, 2016
at 12:24 am
Realized that any time I explain a computer problem I end up sounding like I only have about a dozen words in my vocabulary. “Bad computer. No work. Fix please.”
Bug Martini
Random nonsense three days a week
“Computer says ‘No'”
Well hey – at least you say “please”, as opposed to, say ,angry screaming. We in IT appreciate being treated humanely. 🙂
I.T. folks pretty much make EVERYone feel like a caveman. I know, I’m married to one. I have a computer degree and still feel like a caveman next to her. She’s part computer. I think I’m married to an AI, or maybe an android. Perhaps a Borg? Only hotter. 7 of 9. I’m married to 7 of 9!
Score!
Nice.
Meanwhile, I ended up having had married the Borg Queen (and not in a pervy, “find her sexy for some reason” kind of way).
There’s only one way I’m aware of to tackle an error code. Stare in disbelief, then weep.
I have seen monitors turned on and computers turned off. I have seen boot floppies stuck to copy stands with magnets. I have seen browsers with so many crap toolbars that there is less than an inch of text available.
But my favorite was a call I got in the late ’80s from an IT person, a mainframe programmer.
“My computer doesn’t work!”
“What was the last thing you did?”
“I needed to change my system configuration so I edited Command.com.”
“I’ll be there shortly.”
Surely she didn’t mean that she’d edited a binary file. So I grabbed a set of boot floppies (both 3.5″ and 5.25″, I couldn’t remember what computer she had) and headed over to the next building. Booted off the floppy, and DIR C:\ showed Command.com with 4096 bytes, and Command.bak with 65k. File was time-stamped just before the call.
She had opened Command.com in Edlin, a text editor. Saw total gibberish, because it was a binary file, so she exited. Which wrote the 4096 byte memory space back to the file name. Had she quitted instead of exited, she would’ve been fine, and I wouldn’t have this story.
Delete command.*, copy command.com from my boot floppy, and all was well.
Whelp as a person who works for IT for an internet company I’d say your doing fine. Its those that believe that their modems are radioactive or possessed is where I get concerned :3 (Both true stories)