Oh, for the love of puppies and kittens, SHADDAP already!!!!!

This has been the day from Hades..... Tonto, feel free to sacrifice your IT twit to the gods of pen and paper. I will round up a few Apple-employed, numbnutted little fresh-faced semi-adolescent children who tell you that there's nothing wrong with the router that spontaneously shut down for no reason and add them to the sacrificial fires on the top of Mount Graphite!

We can serve punch and toss useless pieces of plastic covered wire and chips on to the fire while dancing on their chopped up power cords! We'll erase them by shutting down their damnable Airport, tossing them off the Web for Eternity.

If y'all thought the Rock of Presumptuous Ninnies was bad, then you need to visit my personal version of Tech Hell. That's right. Smarmy tech people will be seated at DESKS on HARD CHAIRS and given SHEETS OF PAPER and PENCILS WITH SHARPENERS and be made to NEATLY WRITE LETTERS IN LONGHAND. Then they will be forced to PUT THE LETTERS IN ENVELOPES, STAMP THEM AND HAND THEM TO THE POST OFFICE!

They will all have to do this for ETERNITY!!!!! HAH!

Oh, curse the computer fairies that shut off one's router just as one is hitting the "Post" button, thus losing the keenest, coolest version of SHADDAP ever! Blast their smarmy little grins! May they foul their pseudo-trendy skater gear with the contents of their neoprene lunch bags. May their cold, sticky leftover tofu sticks grow fangs and go for their throats! May their tacky little glasses break, may their stupid little name tags with the cute smileys melt into their flesh and sink to their tiny, black hearts!

A little justice, if you will....

That said, I've changed the focus of my posts this week to "Blast the fucking morons". Prudie has handed us four of the lamest sissy-assed whiners in recent memory. I find it my duty to re-post even in the face of losing the keenest, coolest version of SHADDAP ever.

In short, I shall Rise Above, so I can Sink Below.....

1. Wow, you are a piece of work aren't you? What utter bullshit you're spouting, dear.....

SHADDAP!

Are you seriously telling us that, not content to control the air your boyfriend of a very short time breathes when he's awake, you want him to breathe your foul CO2-laced morning mouth into his when he's ASLEEP, too? Tell me, is his health insurance good? I'm only asking because he'll need a good emergency room when he throws a clot after sleeping in the same position every night for however long it takes for you to kill his body as well as his soul.

First you "hint". Then you "gently but clearly ask". From there, you fucking CRY?! Oh, that makes a great impression. Women around the world are applauding your efforts to make us all look like whining hysterics, feeding all of the paranoid fantasies of men everywhere.

Sure, be a goddamn crybaby! Now there's a negotiation tool. Stop the presses, we're going to have world peace now. Every time someone goes to a series of talks, they'll CRY! That'll stop everything bad on the planet and then we'll all get our way. Yup, surefire success, that plan.

What are you, four? I bet you go grocery shopping alone and still throw tantrums, right? WAAAAAAAHHHHH....I wanna candy! WAAAAAHHHHH... I wanna Froot Loops! WAAAAAAAHHHHH.... I wanna eat the banana NOW!

See, the crying thing only pisses people off. It pissed me off, and I've never even met you. Having read your letter, I really don't want to meet you. We all, including you, know that not only is it NOT NORMAL to sleep wrapped up in each other like a couple of mating octopi, crying about it makes you look like an idiot.

See, real grown-up women figured out that the romance novels you obviously worship are bullshit before we left Grade 6. Everyone (but you, apparently) has figured out that crying to get our way doesn't work, and that was before kindergarten.

Even if the poor silly fool stays with you for longer than the next fifteen minutes, I can just see how he'll introduce you:

"Hi, I'm Ron and this is my limpet, Clingwrap Whiner. I hate the bitchy remora, but I can't seem to dump her. Sleep deprivation has left me deeply depressed and somewhat psychotic, you see. Please help me. It's like having a barnacle attached to my ass in a spot where I can't reach to scrape it off. I want to die. Can you arrange that?"

2. Oh, Gawd...here we go with the romance novels again.....

SHADDAP!

Wow, you INVITE a woman to join your book club. She starts to think that your domination of the club is driving anyone with a brain nuts. Having had to suffer through being subjected to all of the misery the foul hack that wrote "The Horse Whisperer" inflicted on the planet, she makes the mild and sensible comment, "That's not the book I would have chosen."

Holy Crap, whatever is the world coming to?

You say that you and ONE OTHER PERSON don't like her. There are hints that there may be a couple of other people in your exclusive group of 30 who aren't enthralled with her attitude. Fine. C'est la vie.

So why don't you just SAY SO? It's easy. All you have to do is arrange your next meeting by the monkey bars after school and have everyone there waiting for her. You can pull her hair, rip her clothes and call her names until she runs away. Maybe you can get a couple of people to spit on her and throw gravel.

Or you could just tell her to find another group..... but you won't, will you? You just have to have something to bitch about, so you need to have her around.

3. Here's a really entertaining letter. Really, I laughed out loud...

See, you say that you have issues with your boss's anti-Semitism. You say it's pissing you off.....

SHADDAP!

Why the hell did you wait not weeks, not months, but YEARS to get to this point? What's your problem? You've taken her crap until now, what changed?

I know, you're going to grad school next year...Hmmm. I know! They're going to be interviewing your employer and you want to make sure you cover her in shit and come out smelling like roses when they find out what she's like!

No?

Oh, oh...I got it. You're going to be quitting. That's it! You feel pretty safe now. See, if you said anything before, you were pretty sure she'd find a way to fire you. It wouldn't be hard, if you have no contract, she doesn't even have to give a cause. Not only that, she has to replace you in the next little while anyway!

You need to do some thinking, sugar. What the hell was wrong with you when you were listening to this garbage for years? Not only that, you refer to this racist asshole as a "friend". Is your self-image so bad that you were afraid no one else would hire you? Do you secretly agree with her, but now you need to cover it up?

This isn't about your boss. This is about you. She's happy. You're the one that has to live with the fact that you listened to her hateful nonsense and said nothing.

4. Okay.... I'm loving this one.... You, darling, are one of the most accomplished whiners I've seen in a long time. In fact, I can only think of one whiner worse than you, and that was a guy who said in serious tones to a reporter, "I only have all these DUIs because they stop me when I'm drunk! It's not fair! How come they never stop me when I'm sober?"

It'll come to you.

I'm going to assume you're thirty years old. That's a nice round number and I just want to use it for the sake of the post. I don't care if I'm wrong, so don't bother correcting me, I won't listen.

Your life is over and it has been for two decades (See? Has a nice sound, doesn't it?), ever since your mother said six words to you. There has been NO joy in Mudville, why it's amazing that you flat haven't wasted away from the grief...

SHADDAP!

Your parents went through a rough patch. Your father screwed around, your mother said something stupid, your father apologized, your mother doesn't want to discuss it. Happens every single goddamned day to thousands of people. Fine. I get that. It must have been quite upsetting, especially when you were a kid.

But then, to your horror, you little pain junkie, they WORKED IT OUT. That's right! They went to counseling, they reconciled, they stayed together and you and your siblings got to grow up in an intact home...NOT like the outcome of most situations like this.

You, dear heart, were a lucky, lucky little spud, weren't you? No? Oh, right. Sorry. It deprive you of the chance to blame your failings on your parents' divorce. DAMN them for loving you and your siblings enough to work through what had to be one of the worst times in their lives!

Do you think any of that was EASY, you insufferable little twit? Do you sincerely believe that your mother didn't go through seven kinds of hell to get you the life she thought you needed? No?

Oh, that's right. It's all about you. See, your parents couldn't make things right without SUFFERING. That's what you want, isn't it? They didn't let you see the rest of their pain, and dammit, you feel entitled to watch that! You want to punish your mother, so every time she pisses you off, you bring the whole thing up again and threaten to destroy all of the relationships that she fought to hold together.

I don't blame her in the least for shutting you down every time you bring it up. It's OVER. It was two fucking DECADES ago (Dang, that was a good choice!). What's the matter this time, she didn't pony up with your rent money? If you haven't dealt with this by now, YOU'RE the one with the problem, not her.

Grow up little girl, and realize that YOU WILL NEVER MAKE YOUR MOTHER BLEED FOR YOU! She will not grovel, she will not fall on her sword. Forcing a confrontation with her will only result in her refusing to see you permanently. You can never force her to do what you want. Its not going to happen. Then you could really sit in the corner and cry, right? That would fit right in with this victim mindset you've created for yourself....

See, you don't really want her to apologize. You like having a whip in your hand. You can blame everything in your sorry life on someone else - every time you fuck up in your life, hey, it's because your mother DESTROYED you as a human being.

Grow up and deal, little girl. If you don't want to deal, then shut up. Quit harassing your mother. She will never give you what you've decided you deserve. Get over yourself. You may think you're important to your mother, but if you keep pushing, you will lose your entire family, and for what? Because you, the ADULT, can't look in the phone book under "Therapists"?

________________________

As to LW #4. I'm not interested in listening to certain people's self interested whinging about the "child abuse" she suffered. Not interested. She's a grown up, she needs to grow the fuck up and deal. No one can do it for her.

I won't be responding to any commentary about that. You know who you are.

Now that's a SHADDUP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I liked the mating Octopi comment!

But I have the right, I have the right!

As my esteemed boss, Sir the Attorney says, "Of course you have the right to do something, but should you?"

Honey, you don't know from abuse! (Not you, you know who.) Makes me puke. Hey, let's play a game! Let's fixate on some random event in our childhood and hieronymous bosch it up in our mind and never get past it and keep groundhog daying it over and over and over and over till you're spewing poisonous anger for every member of your family like the Rainbird of Hate. The first person who can alienate every member of their family wins!

I actually got physically uncomfortable and a little distressed reading the first letter. I'm not sure which was worse, the idea of being held all night or having to do the holding. Here's another game; I challenge anyone, tonight before you go to sleep, grab ahold of something, anything. A pillow, a stuffed boo, your neighbor's pitbull, whatever. Let's see if you are still holding it come dawn's early light. It physically cannot be done, I tells ya! Unless maybe it's a large wad of untraceable bills that you're holding; for that I would gaze rapturously at it all night and love it long time.

I'm a Jew and I work for a Nazi. Of my own free will. Good thing we have decent medical as I was born without guts or a spine.

Help! Someone in our book club wants to discuss books and we don't want to discuss books in our book club, we just want to sit in a circle and nod affirmatively but we have to call it a book club because The Nodding Affirmatively In A Circle Club sounds kind of dirty and it's too long on the name tags.

These are listed in order of stupidity, not publication.

posting another splendid DP criticism, especially in light of your tech headaches. You have my sympathies about the evil computer fairies.

The past few weeks of DP and the related Fray have had me turned off. Name calling, arguing rather than debate, weak letters rewritten in off-putting "Prudie-ese" (maybe "Prudish" really is a more accurate term for her distancing, formal, awkward tone and word choice)

Brains, opinions and voices - why are some women afraid to use theirs (employees with bigoted supervisors?) and others afraid of those who do use theirs (book club members?)

I have offended people way more than once by opening my mouth, but I would rather regret saying something than regret just standing by mutely and seeming to either consent or have no opinion. Not always a popular way to be ... hmm, I was sort of phased out of a book club myself.

Where were you when I was going through a rough patch with my husband? A good SHADDAP! would have saved me six months of grief. I could not stop the psycho radio playing in my head, but you would have been able to cut through my neurotic Gordian knot of misery.

I almost peed myself reading your post. Thank you. Thank God for people like you. You have a fine future as an advice columnist waiting for you, should you harken to the call. If you want to practice on me, let me know. I need help. Seriously.

Smarmy tech people will be seated at DESKS on HARD CHAIRS and given SHEETS OF PAPER and PENCILS WITH SHARPENERS and be made to NEATLY WRITE LETTERS IN LONGHAND. Then they will be forced to PUT THE LETTERS IN ENVELOPES, STAMP THEM AND HAND THEM TO THE POST OFFICE!

I'm not a techie, but surely this is too cruel ? I tried to write something with a - 'pen' isn't it ? - and i looked like my 2 year old playing with her crayons. Painful, really painful, physically and to look at.

On occasion, I wish there was a tattoo on one of my hands that said something like, "Engage Brain Before Opening Mouth".

Yup, I wish that, then I close my eyes until the urge passes. See, keeping silent on the important stuff will make you nuts. I always figured that a lot of the time SOMEONE needs to speak up, no matter what kind of bullshit will follow. After all, what are they going to do? Spank you?

I can't really see the point of book clubs. They tend to be comprised mainly of women and the book choices are almost invariably either smarmy nonsense, or politically correct twaddle. Where are the men? Why aren't they there? Is it because troops of women bore them to death, or have they been made to feel unwelcome?

Nothing, and I do mean absolutely nothing, is too cruel for IT Service Deniers to suffer when they "go to their reward" as that saying goes. Yesterday I found that I can't remove that extra set of drivers (the default printer setting, of coure) for the only printer on the network because that requires higher-level privileges than I have been given.

You know the kind of people whose response to every question is "read the manual"? That's usually shortened to its acronym of RTFM. That advice is useful only for people who can understand the preposterous misuse of the English language in a manual translated from Martian by a non-native-English speaker. Those who chant "RTFM, RTFM, RTFM" like it was a useful approach to resolving a shorted out motherboard are the people we're coming after as soon as we burn our copies of the latest company IT policy manual.

If you are or were this kind of person, and I hope you are not, there is a chance for you to repent if you actually listen to someone when they call in.

Come down from your imaginary seat on Mt. Olympus and analyze the situation from the point of view of someone that just wants to do their job. Face the fact that you don't really know what their job is and you don't know what computer features would be useful to them. Pretend you care, and watch your tone of voice. It can give away your attitude with a couple of ill-chosen words.

Credit where it's due......

The people at the call center are nice. Really, truly nice kids. Seriously.

Apple definitely has that going for it. There's seldom a long wait to get someone, and once they're on the line, they will happily walk you through your issue, keystroke by keystroke if necessary. I love'em.

At the store is a different story. For example: The Boy's IPod is refusing to download certain CDs in his music library. Not all of them, just a few. He finds this irritating. I took it in yesterday for an appointment at the Genius Bar, the kid looked at it, wiped it, downloaded a CD they had in the store, and declared that it was fine. He tried to tell me that it had to be The Boy's computer, since he obviously doesn't know what he's doing.

Now, The Boy has had laptops since they weighed more than the average Shetland Pony. He travels with them all the time. If something goes wrong, not only can he mess with the software, he will take the thing apart and fix it that way. The man knows his way around those machines.

Not only that, his machine gets replaced once a year at the bare minimum. He ALWAYS has a new computer. His company lives or dies by the technology that their people carry with them. An iffy motherboard can really screw things up. They don't send their computers to the tech guys unless they're in town. If it comes to that, they'll just Hotshot a new laptop to wherever the guys are working.

....but the 15-year-old seems to think that anyone over the age of 30 can't POSSIBLY know what they're doing, of course...

As a program analyst, I need data from a large model. To get the data, I need someone to feed data into the model. Knowing the manual from the developer was too techie, I wrote a simple, straightforward follow the screenshots instruction guide that leads users through the process. I tested it by having folks who had never seen the model before use it and it works. We also trained each user on these procedures.

But I cannot get users to read and follow it. Instead they would rather call my staff (user support is not our primary function), expecting them to take their time to walk them through the very same steps carefully and completely outlined in the instructions. When asked why, the typical response is they just don't have time to look it up themselves, like my staff has all the time in the world to to assist each user individually. I have asked users if their time is so much more valuable than mine that they feel free to call and have me do their work for them. There also seems to be no learning curve whatsoever. We go over the same items with the same users repeatedly.

So I have instructed my staff to ask the users if they have read and tried to follow the instructions. If they have not, they will tell the users to get out the instructions and read them. We will assist after they do so. We have even questioned users by making sure they have the instructions by asking them to read what is on a page, just to make sure they have the instructions at hand. That seems to help a little bit.

But honestly, lazy users are the bane of any support shop.

jburd1:

But honestly, lazy users are the bane of any support shop.

Not just in IT, either. I have people all the time who ask me to find something for them (files). I look, and it's right where it belongs. Sometimes, they forget to look for anything with the same root term (as I've instructed them several times); but many times, they just don't bother to look.

Or they find the drawing, and it's stamped OBSOLETE right on it, and they ask me to make a change to it, or complain that they can't order more. These are internal customers, as that's all I deal with.

....give Messy the thumbs up with a recommend, until I came across your sadistic proposal in regards to technies. After a long long long long post, I am wondering why you dont RTFM to solve your techie problems instead of writin prose.

Yah better shape up Missy, oh, Messy, or I'm tellin your husband.

I am going to be a bit unkind about this, because I think you know better. You're copping out because you won't consider the user's point of view.

I know you have put time and effort into this, but if you are still experienceing user-related problems, the system is not user-friendly. There is a rhythm to the way people do their jobs, and your system has to present questions and accept data in a way that people can follow. If you want good data, you have to make the entry lines flow in a way that's logical to the user. You have to make the screens flow from one to the next, also in a way that's logical to the user. You have to make it difficult for them to go wrong.

You and your tech people have probably got a list of common user problems and have probably created a knowledge base of solutions for the new tech people. You can use that information when you update your system. Make the problem fixes, in lay terms, pop up on the screen when an entry must be rejected on the system, and have the system take the cursor back to the point where the correction is needed.

I use a couple different vendors to design postcards online for advertising. Their systems look similar but one hangs up constantly; the technical support people for that vendor keep telling me to clear the cookies and other caches on my computer, and to try a different web browser. That's the online equivalent of RTFM, and the tech people there probably complain about lazy, stupid users. The other vendor's systems works a lot better and I never need to talk to their tech support people.

The FM was translated from the original Martian by a crew of non-native-English speakers. You know what I mean.