Gregory's ServerYour oven - a device with one moving part, and which functionally can be either "on" or "off" - stops working because a tiny capacitor exploded on the circuit board buried deep in the control panel and it costs hundreds of dollars to get a visit from an authorised screwdriver turner to replace it. The oven still doesn't work until you collectively figure out you have to set the time on the digital clock first, and you're reminded of this needless complication every time there's a power outage.
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 That 168-hours-and-a-bit slowly cycles later and later into each passing week, and you fucking dread when it reaches late Friday afternoon, because it means Monday morning will be written off by logging in, rebooting, and patting multiple Microsoft applications on the head, and you're useless to your busy colleagues until you do. This program with no icon or name is preventing you from restarting. You click Cancel. It restarts anyway. Also, how likely are you to recommend Teams to a friend? Your cheap home PC doesn't have the physical space for another hard drive inside, so you buy an external one and your wireless keybbbbbbbbboard starts acting up when you're backing up. Seriously, USB 3 devices put out a bunch of 2.4GHz interference and it fucks up wireless gear. Put your dongles on cheap USB extension cables and blutack them to the underside of your desk, I promise you'll stop hating Bluetooth quite so much if you do this. Bluetooth is still shit, but this one's USB's fault. You buy a second-hand but still quite new wireless gamepad. It dies unexpectedly at the approximate age of 16 months. There's a listing for a replacement battery on Amazon and a disassembly guide on iFixit, so you take a punt on a new battery and swap it in. The gamepad's still dead, so you email its manufacturer for A) a repair, or B) spare parts, or C) to offer them even more money to fix it, but they don't provide any of those for a device still sold new today. Get fucked, Steelseries. And here's the thing: None of this stuff makes me angry. Annoyed, sure, but I've been around computers since I was a toddler, and I have to solve shit problems like these for myself every day. What makes me angry is: What about all the folks who aren't computer people? How the absolute fuck do they survive in a world where you can no longer function as an employee, a family member, any sort of citizen without encountering this stuff? Those people are fucking heroes, and I'm angry for them. This shit is why, when banks announced they were going to stop processing physical checks and a whole wave of elderly folks protested, I understood. It's one of the last fleeting vestiges of anything in their lives that still makes sense, and arguing about the cost of supporting obsolete systems is an absolute red herring. It's not about the money. It's not about the tech. It's about kindness, and being fucking human to each other. Do you work in IT? Do you support a system? Do you work on a helpdesk? Do you take calls, answer emails? Congratulations. That's no longer your job title. From the moment you read this, you're a user advocate. Process issue holding something up? Bug in the app? Is a particular system always down? Advocate for your users. Go to bat for them with the teams responsible for their struggles. Folks will say "oh thank christ, it's you" when they hear your voice on the phone if you advocate for them. tl;dr: In a world where companies will fleece you, scammers will steal your grandmother's savings, your chat program algorithmically charts your gender, and your car's manufacturer sells analytics about the way you drive without a second thought: The only thing that matters is kindness, and we could all do with a lot more of it. Also, I'm going to go have a drink or two now. Holy hell, that little rant has been building up for a while now. |
Your login session at work lasts exactly 168 hours (24*7) and at 168 hours and one minute, you get two MFA prompts simultaneously. You can't click on Outlook yet because the MFA system "didn't hear from you". After logging on, you join your daily Teams standup anonymously, because you don't have time to dig through dialog boxes that ding at you when you click on them to find the one with the working login button. A password prompt appears for a moment, you start typing, then it disappears again.