Welcome to my nightmare, whoah-oh-oh-oh...

I've spent the last week in a period of self-reflection. In all honesty, I probably could use longer, but I'm not able to take more time off from work and money will become an issue if I linger much longer.

Ever since the trip to California, I've been weathering a lot of discontent. The majority of my ability to cope with the life I've been living has been due to a false assumption that the level of discomfort I had was largely universal. That there really wasn't anything out there that was much better. This is demonstrably false. I was inspired, and I've accomplished some great things since then.

But there's also been a bit of a slide. Hope, it seems, can be somewhat toxic when its held just out of reach. I'd also let myself have too much of my self-worth get tied up in elements of my life that simply don't matter. I'm looking to resolve these things, but it is a new war now. Last Monday, I lost a battle in that war, and I've been recovering. I don't know if I'm going to be able to weather, psychologically, that battle again, but I'll find out soon.

Alice Cooper put it well.

In unrelated news, I bumped the back of my bumper against a post, scraping the paint today. It is an irritation, but hopefully I can touch it up and it won't be so noticable.

-Trent

Everything is Different

To those who want to know how Trentmas went, don't worry, I'm going to be reconstructing a full account shortly. I have other more pressing concepts pressing on my brain in the meantime. Foremost of these is this:

Everything is different.

Normally, Trentmas is a much needed break. For a few scant days I'm kind of a big deal, and then I go back to being just some guy on a phone. The process leaves me refreshed and ready to weather the storm until my next Botcon. I dream about it. I long for it in my metaphorical heart. The friends, the events, the sense of freedom and joy... they all mix together with the sense of unbridled discovery of an unknown place.

This year, however, Botcon/Trentmas isn't a much needed break. It is a sea change.

There has always been this lingering, nagging voice in my head. This voice would say that every place, every life, would be roughly the same, and as such weathering my current existence was the best I could hope for.

But I've seen, first hand, that there are better things. My humid pit of misery and failure is a unique prison, and there are things beyond it, greater in scope and magnitude, that I have but to reach out and grasp. My soul-crushing job is a fetid, meaningless lie that is beneath me. And in this realization, the shackles begin to crack, and my ascendancy begins.

As such, I reintroduce myself to everyone here.

Hi, I'm Trent, maybe you've heard of me. I'm kind of a big deal.

The newest Winner - "But it couldn't have been my pets..."

I didn't take this call. I wish I had. This one comes courtesy of one of my coworkers, name withheld to protect the innocent:

Caller calls in. Laptop is showing a blank screen, but when its closed and then opened the machine is, like magic (I won't say which kind), covered with a yellowish, crytalizing liquid.

Now, the caller was quick to point out that it couldn't have been her animals that did it.

How did she know? She tasted it.

I told my coworker to pass this on that if the caller felt strange in any way to immediately contact poison control. Mmm... liquid crystal. I wonder what DPI she gets on her liver.

-Trent

A Worktime First:: Caller Brings Back the Classic Crazy

There comes a point in every skeptic's life when he is confronted by the ultimate abortion of skepticism: the conspiracy theory. I'm not talking about a 'found some wackaloon talking about this on the interwebs' kind of confrontation. No, what I'm talking about is speaking to someone who casually brings this kind of thing up as if it were fact.

Now, there are conspiracies in the real world. At the core, however, they are unglamorous, dirty affairs that crumble and are exposed by the ineptness of their fellows. Insider trading is a form of conspiracy. A religious cult is a conspiracy that may contain others. And there are conspiracies of governance as well. Say it with me: "Nixon".

But these are painfully mundane conspiracies. They're limited in scope and for the truly devoted headcase, they lack the glamor and spectacle that makes the horrible mundaneness of their lives worth living. Price fixing in the oil industry is just simple greed. It doesn't make a bland middle-aged accountant the subject of attention from sinister external forces that perceive him, inexplicably, as a threat that must be observed and silenced.

Today's caller of note seemed like a regular call with a nervous new user. His new computer won't shut down, it says 'installing updates' and sits there. I informed him that the first batch of Vista updates (complete with the service pack) can take hours. Comforted and ready to wait 5-6 hours for it to update, he seemed ready to go. Until I asked him if there was anything else I could help him with.

What followed wasn't not a question, nor a statement, nor a description. It was some indescribable mutation of language that was fascinatingly insane yet completely incoherent. I will sum up the major points of the caller's delusion here:

1) Zone alarm is actually spyware, integrated into the system by the government.
2) It connects to secret cameras hidden in the computer's fan.
3) This has something to do with the systems being sent over seas for spying purposes. Or perhaps foreign governments are in on this. Like I said, incoherent.
4) These cameras are also hidden in new cars.
5) "Well, maybe I shouldn't be talking about this over the phone."

My first impulse is to debunk these hallucinations one at a time. But this guy thinks a laptop fan has a camera in it. A camera that would point away from the user, possibly down into a desk or into a lap, at all times.

Even if the government was interested in your activities, they wouldn't point the super-secret spy camera at your junk. If they want cheap voyeur shots, they'll install the camera in your shower. Then the antichrist and his one-world government cronies can laugh about your excess back hair at their leisure while plotting to control the banking system and corner the market on fezzes and tiny, tiny cars.

-Trent

I am the Cham-peen of the World!

Today, I cost a man $750 dollars, or so he'd likely tell you.

I was doing my job, which is largely coddling people who, with minimal effort, could solve their own problems. The sterling customer of the day was a fellow who, apparently, was an entrepreneur of some stripe. He did not want to do the troubleshooting. He was thoroughly convinced that his printer was broken beyond use, and he was not going to waste time with troubleshooting because his time was worth one thousand dollars an hour.

I stifled my impulse to laugh mockingly.

Let me just say that I don't think anyone can seriously claim that they are worth one thousand dollars an hour. People may be paid more than that, but really, at that point they should just embrace the fact that they're scamming and deal with it when the annoyances of life (of which I am apparently one), come at them. Screaming at a traffic jam that its costing you roughly 16.67 a minute isn't going to make it move faster.

Well, since I wasn't dealing with some sort of alternate-universe Gillian Anderson who had turned to high-dollar prostitution to keep going after the cancellation of the X-Files, I felt the claim that someone's time was worth $1000/hr was not really worth taking seriously. Personally, I find the implication that I should prostrate myself before the wishes of people who make more money than me laughable. If anything, it makes me spiteful. I am, after all, only human (despite my better efforts). If you really make twice my yearly salary in a week, you have no right to complain about cash related matters.

Nevermind that you aren't worth anything. You make what you make, but you only deserve it if you do the work. A cut in what you expected to make is a disappointment, but it isn't a loss. The money doesn't belong to you by divine right.

I make $11 an hour, no matter if you get troubleshooting or not. What people in general need to remember that it is know-how, skill and talent that is real power. Money just lets you rent know-how, skill and talent from people more capable than yourself. In the land of the overpaid technical inept, the underpaid tech support agent is King. And I can be a cruel and spiteful king when provoked.

Spite, in this case, is not required. I simply informed the penny-pinching dunce that unless he went through troubleshooting I wouldn't be able to dispatch. At this point his claim lost its foundation. A man who really is worth a thousand dollars an hour would have hung up and left me alone at that point, cutting his losses to buy a new printer (also, $199.99 junk printer is really not what someone of such esteemed status should be using, don't you think?). He didn't.

In the end, after 45 minutes, and thus $750 dollars of his fictional fortune, the troubleshooting fixed all the problems. I was right, he did as I commanded, and the problem was fixed. The mighty font of human wealth was forced to grovel at the hourly wage slave's beck and call. A triumph for all persons of the lower middle class.

$1000/hr. Seriously, one wonders how someone who honestly believed that could stand to go to the bathroom. A fifteen minute break for a number two would be a loss of $250 dollars of potential profit from the penny faeries of the Lost Kingdom of Hypothetica! If he's not there to take their lucre, they'll simply toss it in the streets where poor people might use it for booze and condoms!

Actually, not going to the restroom in order to preserve that precious, precious gold might explain his attitude.

-Trent

Today is: Surreal and Somewhat Depressing

Today, we do not have a new winner...

However, I did get a call on the Online Services tech line I work at. It was from a guy named Matthew. See, Matthew works for Circuit City as an on-site tech, and was asking us if he could come work for us.

That's... weird and sorta sad, really.

I can only take solace in the wisdom of my good friend, The Phantom Dictator of the Planet Krankor. "I will arrive tomorrow night at precisely eight o'clock. At that time I shall make my wishes known to you. You will obey them... or die! Have a pleasant night's sleep... HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA!"

That Krankor! What times we had.

Attention: Your insipid giggling demeans us both

I'm accustomed to people not knowing obvious things when they call in for tech support. Typically, when someone calls in, they're aware of their own level of titanic ignorance and there are three common reactions. The first, and most common, is hostility. Confronted with his or her own lack of knowledge, the caller reacts with unveiled hostility and defensiveness. The second, and least common, is to simply accept the lack of knowledge and attempt to move forward. The third is to be apologetic and submissive.

You would think the third option would be the most pleasant for the person providing assistance. It is not. The apologetic ones tend to overlap the "I'm computer illiterate" group. These are the people who have no trouble admitting that they're cretins because they don't want to change. They're proud of it, because it means someone else can do the work. They keep tech support in business, but they also keep the techie's cardiologists and psychoanalysts in business.

Yesterday, I met a new subset of this group. I had several calls that all went the same. The caller, by the sound of her voice, was in all cases a woman in her late twenties to early thirties. In all cases she was utterly ignorant of basic computer processes (the star of this had her computer for eight months and just found out how to turn it off from the start menu last week. Yes, it was vista, but all it takes is one web search to find it out. For emphasis: Eight months.)

And in all cases, they'd make the statement of ignorance, and then they'd giggle. "Oh, I'm pretty much computer illiterate. Tee-hee-hee."

I didn't notice it much the first time but it kept on happening. It dawned on me that this person wasn't giggling nervously. They were attempting to be cute to compensate for being uninformed. I don't know that she was doing it on purpose and I suspect it was simply habit. The sheer gall of the tactic, however, was demeaning in a way the caller did not realize (or at least, I hope she didn't realize). The assumption was that I, as a man, would be lured into a more helpful position if she came across as a helpless twittering little girl. A secondary assumption was that acting like/being a bimbo would cause her mistakes to be more easily forgiven.

Sorry, you're just a user, I assume you know nothing and are are undeserving of both a computer and a share of the planet's precious supply of oxygen. You don't need to be forgiven, because I expect so very little of you.

This person, were I to guess, went through life using a tittering, vapid persona to avoid responsibility and to dodge expectations of competence. People were fooled by this. They were more than willing to let her play the airhead. After a time, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Denied avenues of self improvement by her giggling faux anti-intellectualism, reasonable human expectation far outpaced her dazzlingly stagnant mental abilities. In short, pretending to be a bimbo has made this woman into a bimbo.

So I say to my small audience, please, when something makes you feel unprepared or ignorant, don't try to brush it off with a giggle. It demeans the whole species. Instead, accept the situation and take the time to learn and overcome. You'll find it is far more rewarding.

-Trent

A New Winner

I normally reserve the 'new winner' posts for truly idiotic calls, brand new levels of stupidity that defy belief. Well, today, the level of moronic failure is defined not by the crime, but by the context.

Most people who have a business should have a backup for any system they can't do without. Typically, they don't. Their fax machine is the core of their communication with the outside world but they only have one and they can't comprehend that a warranty replacement process might take time. despite the warnings in the freakin' warranty documents.

So "but our fax is our lifeline! We don't have another!" isn't epic stupidity.

Unless you're Barney Frank's Campaign Headquarters.

Seriously.

-Trent

The New New Winner

Today, I had a fellow, both hard of hearing and somewhat belligerent, call in for service. He had paid for the online services because of problems with his keyboard. Apparently, it would not make the special symbols at the top of the keyboard (! @ # $ % ^ & * and so forth). Fully expecting this to be a problem with stickykeys, I walked him through the excruciatingly long process of linking his system to mine through screen sharing.

Sure enough, my input goes through fine to his notepad. Though he did have trouble finding the number 2 when he typed it into notepad, and when I highlighted it and waved the cursor around it to show him where it was. Then he tried to type an @ symbol. It came up a two.

"Ok, press the shift key and hit the two."
"That's the one that says caps lock, right?"
"No, its the one that says shift."
Another two crops up.
"Sir, are you holding it down?"
"No, should I be?"

Yes, friends, I have found a human being who both owns a computer and claims to have used it for stock trading online, who was unaware of how to use the shift key. For reference, the shift key was invented as an innovation to the mechanical typewriter by 1910, which predates ENIAC, generally considered the first general-purpose electronic computer, by 37 years. Being unapologetically 'not an expert' and having 'no intention of becoming one' is not an excuse here.

So we have a new winner. I can only imagine that he is a retiree, most likely from the upper class, who dictated his letters to some hapless, brow-beaten secretary for his entire career and is likely to kill himself through comical incompetence the moment he has to, say, do his laundry or cook a meal.

Well, he did pay $50 to have someone tell him what a shift key is, so maybe there is some justice in the world.

We have a winner, ladies and gentlemen!

My best tech support story ever is now this:

A guy calls in with a laptop problem. Now, this is how about 18%* of my calls in a given day start. So I ask the gentleman to tell me what's happening with the machine. To my surprise, he asks me a question:

"Where are you guys from?"

I answer "Oklahoma", as that's as detailed as we're allowed to get.

"Well, then you wouldn't know much about what we've got here in Virginia..."

At this point, my curiosity is piqued. What could they have in Virginia that would cause specific computer problems? Roving bands of New England hackers? The Wild Virginian plastic-eating marmot? Ol' Qwerty, a civil-war era ghost that steals any object that bears his name? Some sort of chaotic magnetic distrubance eminating from Mount Rogers, the tallest point in all Virginia?

"Ok, well, I was at this scenic overlook..." Oh, I see. When he speaks of 'what they've got in Virginia' he means 'hills.'

Around this time the tale goes from surreal to dumfounding and back again. Long story short, this fellow as at a scenic overlook in Virginia. Taken in by the wonder and majesty of the great outdoors he felt compelled to capture it in an image frozen in time. As a man of the modern age he didn't carry anything so mundane as a 'camera' on his person. Alas, his plans would be scuttled and he would be forced to pay the fifteen dollars for a pack of photographic post cards at the Park Services Gift Shop.

But wait! He had his laptop computer with him! His computer had a webcam! Salvation was at hand!

Perching precariously close to the railing (Or perhaps on top of/over it? Sadly, I was not there.) he leaned in to take the shot. Just as his finger came down upon the 'capture' option, some uncouth fellow bumped him from behind. Our hero's grip failed him and his laptop slipped from his fingers and tumbled, end over end, to the chasm's rocky bottom. There the rocks scattered the fragments of his difference engine into a shower of metallic debris and plastic shards.

Mind you, at this point our photographic McGuyver has failed to procure even his purchase reciept. Thankfully, with or without the receipt, he is up the same creek. I inform him, quite solumnly, that some of the warranties cover accidental damage. How cruel fate and the terms and conditions of the warranty, are! For without the remains of the mechanism, this is categorized as loss, not accidental damage. This was, of course, not what our tepid explorer wanted to hear and shortly after the fifth or sixth explanation he resolved to call back.

It isn't often that one encounters something that can be described as truly amazing. Today, however, we have a new winner and I have been witness to something that boarders on the supernatural.

*Percentage is a total guess and is based on no scientific evidence, whatsoever.

It is well known that my day job is a Sisyphean nightmare of legendary proportions. I provide phone support to the customers of several major retailers. In the process, I've witnessed every mauling of the English language anyone could reasonably expect. Sorry human dignity, you've just gotten 20 years with no parole and people too dim to realize that extended warranties are a scam are your new bunkmate.

Over time, you become desensitized to the normal abominations. The various lazy drawls and hyper active dialects stop impressing you.

It is the cartoon characters that you never get used to. I've had all kinds. People with voices that make Mike Tyson sound like Barry White. People who talk seventy-miles-per-hour. People who pronounce "Baton Rouge" as "Belange'" Heck, I had a guy from Brooklyn call once who literally reversed what words would and wouldn't be plural, just like Sal on Futurama.

And a few moments ago, I had a woman who started every answer to every inquiry with 'uh-huh?' and appended it to the front of random sentences and paragraphs. Every question: What is your name? What is your phone number? What are the numbers at the bottom of your receipt? All answered, yes, but with a vapid "uh-huh" coming beforehand. If the call hadn't mercifully dropped I might well have been driven mad.

I'm not sure what this really means but I will say this: if the whole world is a twisted simulation of a long-dead reality I really hope it is more like Dark City and less like the Matrix.

-Trent

Addendum: Someone just called in with a warranty on a cassette walkman. Purchased in 2008. I'm amazed.