Baffled by modern technology
My computer finally got up to scratch a few weeks ago, thanks to Dowling cobbling together various bits he had ganked from god knows where.
It’s been a long frustrating process from when I landed back in Oz up until now. I was overjoyed at the thought of all the free time I had upon arriving back in Adelaide in October. Much blog posting and random web searches awaited me. Alas, my poor old computer had died while I was overseas, and several of my tech savvy friends informed me that I ‘d have to buy a new one. I couldn’t afford a new computer, so it looked like I would be “webless” for a while. This caused a mild aggravation to kick in, I had plenty of spare time but no net. I couldn’t update the shoddy blog, couldn’t check emails, couldn’t do online banking. Worst of all, couldn’t watch any sick animation:
I’d had a superfast internet connection in London – but no time to use it. Now I had all the time in the world – but no net connection at all. Fuck you irony. Fuck you in your goblin ass.
A reprieve came in early November. While tinkering with my computer, Dowling came up with the idea that maybe the power supply was the problem. One quick and easy replacement purchase later, and my computer was ready for action. Now for the net connection.
Before I could look into a net provider, I had to re-connect the house phone line that had been dormant for a year. That proved easy enough.
Next thing I went into the office of an internet provider that had been recommended to me (Adam Internet) and joined up – paying the necessary installation and first month fee. The scrawny pale white guy at Adam Internet (who looked like he knew a computer inside out, but had never seen a vagina) told me the installation would take “Five to ten working days”.
A week or so later I was online and loving it. Well, for three days I was loving it – then the line went down. I rang somebody at the Adam internet help desk the next day, who checked the line from his end and said it looked fine. I was back online – for about a day, then the line went dead again. The line was on and off for the next couple of weeks.
Finally I decided to get to the route of the problem after the line was dead for a solid four days, so I rang the help desk at about 8pm on that Sunday night to get this message:
”Our help desk is currently closed. Please call back between 8am – 10pm Mon to Friday, or 9 – 5 on weekends. Or why not send an email to one of our friendly tech advisors?”
Send an email to the help desk? Why didn’t I think of that earlier? Oh yeah, that’s right. MY FUCKING LINE IS DEAD. Dick Weasels.
I got hold of a help desk dude the next day, some guy whose Australian accent was so thick eucalyptus oil dripped out of my phone’s ear piece as he spoke to me.
Five to ten working days.
It’s a term I heard bandied about a lot at my last job, and it’s the ultimate escape clause for slack businesses. You see, the key part of the sentence is “working days” – that drops weekends out of the equation. So “Five to ten working days” really means “We’ll get around to it within the next fortnight. If we can be arsed that is. Good bye, and fuck you.”
By the end of the following week I was back online, and overjoyed. Free to surf the net, free to email and online bank, I was back amongst the fine upstanding people who make up the web community.
But then a few days later my connection died again. For the next few weeks the line was on and off.
I didn’t bother with the help desk this time, but rather got Stranger round to take a look at my problem. He ran an hour’s worth of strange and mysterious checks on the computer, coming to the gracious conclusion that the modem was “kinda fucked”. So that piece of shit went out the window, and a new modem proudly took it’s place. That was in March, and I've had no connection faults since then.
The only other gripe I had, was that the computer was so slow. She was a beauty back in 2004, but was severely struggling with the rigorous demands of 2009. Five years is an eternity in computing, a whole fucking Ice Age. And I have a bad case of ADD when using computers. At any given moment I’ll have Microsoft Word, Photoshop, Youtube, Blogger, several film sites all running – while simultaneously playing a flash game and watching streaming footage of the latest Family Guy episode.
She was struggling for a while there, but now Dowling has upgraded it – and everything is gravy. I’m free to check facebook, free to download music, free to peruse the rainbows puking rainbows website.
I’ll have to upgrade it again in a few months time before I start an online animation course (to handle rendering and all that shit), but for the time being it’s doing fine.
I could have saved myself so much grief during this shit fight if I had even a smattering of computing knowledge. I usually just wait around until one of my "computer mates" drops by. Pretty fucking lazy.
It’s been a long frustrating process from when I landed back in Oz up until now. I was overjoyed at the thought of all the free time I had upon arriving back in Adelaide in October. Much blog posting and random web searches awaited me. Alas, my poor old computer had died while I was overseas, and several of my tech savvy friends informed me that I ‘d have to buy a new one. I couldn’t afford a new computer, so it looked like I would be “webless” for a while. This caused a mild aggravation to kick in, I had plenty of spare time but no net. I couldn’t update the shoddy blog, couldn’t check emails, couldn’t do online banking. Worst of all, couldn’t watch any sick animation:
I’d had a superfast internet connection in London – but no time to use it. Now I had all the time in the world – but no net connection at all. Fuck you irony. Fuck you in your goblin ass.
A reprieve came in early November. While tinkering with my computer, Dowling came up with the idea that maybe the power supply was the problem. One quick and easy replacement purchase later, and my computer was ready for action. Now for the net connection.
Before I could look into a net provider, I had to re-connect the house phone line that had been dormant for a year. That proved easy enough.
Next thing I went into the office of an internet provider that had been recommended to me (Adam Internet) and joined up – paying the necessary installation and first month fee. The scrawny pale white guy at Adam Internet (who looked like he knew a computer inside out, but had never seen a vagina) told me the installation would take “Five to ten working days”.
A week or so later I was online and loving it. Well, for three days I was loving it – then the line went down. I rang somebody at the Adam internet help desk the next day, who checked the line from his end and said it looked fine. I was back online – for about a day, then the line went dead again. The line was on and off for the next couple of weeks.
Finally I decided to get to the route of the problem after the line was dead for a solid four days, so I rang the help desk at about 8pm on that Sunday night to get this message:
”Our help desk is currently closed. Please call back between 8am – 10pm Mon to Friday, or 9 – 5 on weekends. Or why not send an email to one of our friendly tech advisors?”
Send an email to the help desk? Why didn’t I think of that earlier? Oh yeah, that’s right. MY FUCKING LINE IS DEAD. Dick Weasels.
I got hold of a help desk dude the next day, some guy whose Australian accent was so thick eucalyptus oil dripped out of my phone’s ear piece as he spoke to me.
Dude: I can see what the problem is, your home phone line doesn’t have an ADSL code set up on it.
Me: Huh? But I’ve used the internet already?
Dude:…?.. well it shouldn’t be working at all. Don’t worry, Telstra is our parent company, so I’ll log a request for them to activate the ADSL code. They should take five to ten working days to process this request.
Five to ten working days.
It’s a term I heard bandied about a lot at my last job, and it’s the ultimate escape clause for slack businesses. You see, the key part of the sentence is “working days” – that drops weekends out of the equation. So “Five to ten working days” really means “We’ll get around to it within the next fortnight. If we can be arsed that is. Good bye, and fuck you.”
By the end of the following week I was back online, and overjoyed. Free to surf the net, free to email and online bank, I was back amongst the fine upstanding people who make up the web community.
But then a few days later my connection died again. For the next few weeks the line was on and off.
I didn’t bother with the help desk this time, but rather got Stranger round to take a look at my problem. He ran an hour’s worth of strange and mysterious checks on the computer, coming to the gracious conclusion that the modem was “kinda fucked”. So that piece of shit went out the window, and a new modem proudly took it’s place. That was in March, and I've had no connection faults since then.
The only other gripe I had, was that the computer was so slow. She was a beauty back in 2004, but was severely struggling with the rigorous demands of 2009. Five years is an eternity in computing, a whole fucking Ice Age. And I have a bad case of ADD when using computers. At any given moment I’ll have Microsoft Word, Photoshop, Youtube, Blogger, several film sites all running – while simultaneously playing a flash game and watching streaming footage of the latest Family Guy episode.
She was struggling for a while there, but now Dowling has upgraded it – and everything is gravy. I’m free to check facebook, free to download music, free to peruse the rainbows puking rainbows website.
I’ll have to upgrade it again in a few months time before I start an online animation course (to handle rendering and all that shit), but for the time being it’s doing fine.
I could have saved myself so much grief during this shit fight if I had even a smattering of computing knowledge. I usually just wait around until one of my "computer mates" drops by. Pretty fucking lazy.
posted by Beef at Wednesday, May 06, 2009
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