You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.

Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.

It figures. If there is Artificial Intelligence, then there's bound to be some artificial stupidity.

How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "We'll fix it in software." How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "We'll document it in the manual." How many tech writers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "The user can work it out."

f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng.

I really hate this damned machine I wish that they would sell it. It never does quite what I want But only what I tell it.

A computer, to print out a fact, Will divide, multiply, and subtract. But this output can be No more than debris, If the input was short of exact.

Trust the computer industry to shorten "Year 2000" to Y2K. It was this kind of thinking that caused the problem in the first place.

Excerpted from the (long and very worthwhile): "In The Beginning Was The Command Line", by Neal Stephenson, author of Snowcrash. http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat. It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it can be explained by telling a story about drills. The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe. During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder. I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror. But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it. A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master's instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences. Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware stores with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller low-end models and hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford one of them babies. Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic casings, carefully designed and focus-group-tested to convey a feeling of solidity and power, seem disgustingly flimsy and cheap to me, and I am ashamed that I was ever bamboozled into buying such knicknacks. It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to someone who had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and most expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as such. He might instead misidentify it as a child's toy, or some kind of motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner referred to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that they were mistaken--they simply had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor would go away irritated, and probably feeling rather defensive about his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools. Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously.

A businessman bought a computer and soon discovered that he was spending all his time playing computer games. He got upset and called a computer expert to come configure his computer so that he couldn't play games on it. The next day he walks into his office and finds his 9 year old daughter playing a computer game. In a rage he calls the computer expert and starts to tell him off. The expert goes: "Hold on a second, you just said to make it so you couldn't play games--you didn't say nothing about no 9 year old!"

Thins You'd Like to Say to Clients Gnomie Wayne Clark and I got into a discussion about customers that just insist on being difficult, and how to handle them. After our conversation, he emailed me the following humorous list of things you'd just love to tell customers at the appropriate time: Spend the money! If your car broke down that often you wouldn't hesitate paying whatever it took to get it fixed. You're right it is more important to spend ten times that on your curtains You buy a new car every year and change all the appliances in your house and you won't upgrade your PC every five years? I know it's not working you did the exact opposite to my advice and took the cheapest product! I know it doesn't work any better you went against my advice and took the most expensive product. I don't do raising from the dead. It has a grudge against you because you won't upgrade it Yes that's right D E A D, it's not playing dead - it is! An illegal operation? get out fast the cops will be there any minute. No the disks were really just some modern art, software companies throw in for your enjoyment, there was no reason to keep them No I can't think why you should have kept it when they put DO NOT LOSE THIS NUMBER on it. I won't give you the disc for free because I'm just plain mean. That's alright the boss pays me to sit on the phone for an hour and a half giving you free advice. I can't think why I would want to charge a call out fee when I've just driven ten miles across town through rush hour traffic when I have a dozen machines in my workshop waiting for me and you say it fixed itself. Ok a little bit to the left now, Ok now go ahead kick it again. Does that feel better? I don't mind you wasting my time, I have a special rate for that, it's the same rate you normally charge! Yeah it's just a computer you don't need to spend money on it, it should keep working indefinitely letting you do your job. My rates are high? You haven't seen the interest on my student loan! Yeah I like ripping my clients off by charging them little more than state of the art technology costs me to buy and install. Oh sure I'll tell you how to do my job for free. You're right you did know best when you did something you didn't have a clue about.

Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network In the course of a recent Microsoft Access programming project, we had three difficult technical problems where we decided to call a support hotline for advice. This article compares the two support numbers we tried: Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network. As a result of this research, we have come to the following conclusions: 1) that Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network are about equal in their ability to provide technical assistance for Microsoft products over the phone; 2) that the Psychic Friends Network has a distinct edge over Microsoft in the areas of courtesy, response time, and cost of support; but 3) that Microsoft has a generally better refund policy if they fail to solve your problem. In the paragraphs that follow, we will detail the support calls we made and the responses we received from each pport provider. We will follow this with a discussion of the features provided by each support provider so that readers can do their own rankings of the two services. Our research began when we called Microsoft regarding a bug that we had detected when executing queries which pulled data from a Sybase Server into Microsoft Access. If we used the same Access database to query two databases on the same server, we found that all of the queries aimed at the second database that we queried were sent to the first database that we had queried. This problem existed no matter which database we queried first. Dan called Microsoft's Technical Solutions Line, gave them $55, and was connected with an official Microsoft Access technical support person. As Dan began to explain the problem, the support person interrupted him, and told him that since it was clear that it was not just a problem with Access but with the two programs together, Microsoft would not try to help us. They did,however, have a consultant referral service with which he would be glad to connect us. Dan then asked if we could have our $55 refunded, since Microsoft was not going to try to answer to our question. The tech support person responded by forwarding Dan to the person in charge of giving refunds. The person officially in charge of giving refunds took Dan's credit card info again, after which Dan asked about the referral service. It was too late, however -- the refund folks could not reconnect Dan with the tech support guy he'd been talking with, nor could he put Dan in touch with the referral service hotline. End of Call One. Our second call came when Dan was creating some line graphs in Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access actually uses a program called Microsoft Graph to create its graphs, and this program has a "feature" that makes the automatic axis scale always start the scale at zero. If all of your data are between 9,800 and 10,000 and you get a scale of 0 to 10,000, your data will appear as a flat line at the top of your graph -- not a very interesting chart. Since Dan was writing Visual Basic code to create the graphs, he wanted to be able to use Visual Basic code to change the graph scaling, but he could not find anything in the help files that would tell him how to do this. After working with Microsoft Graph for a while, Dan concluded that it probably didn't have the capability that he needed, but he decided to call Microsoft just to make sure. Dan described his problem to the technical support person, whom we'll call Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob said he'd never gotten a call about Microsoft Graph before. He then left Dan on hold while he went to ask another support person how to use Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Bob came back with the suggestion that Dan use the online help. Dan, however, had already used the online help, and didn't feel that this was an appropriate answer for a $55 support call. Microsoft Bob didn't give up, though. He consulted the help files and learned to change the graph scale by hand and then began looking for a way to do this via code. After Microsoft Bob had spent about an hour on the phone with Dan learning how to use Microsoft Graph, Dan asked for a refund since he had no more time to spend on the problem. Microsoft Bob refused the refund, however. He said he wouldn't give up, and told Dan that he would call back the next week. Microsoft Bob did call back the following week to admit failure. He could not help us. However, he couldn't give us a refund either. Microsoft Bob's supervisor confirmed Microsoft Bob's position. While Microsoft Technical Support hadn't solved our problem, they felt that a refund was inappropriate since Microsoft Technical Support had spent a lot of time not solving our problem. Dan persisted, however, explaining that if Microsoft Bob actually knew the program, he would have been able to give Dan a response much sooner. The supervisor made no guarantees, but he instructed Dan to check his credit card bill at the end of the month. The supervisor explained that if Dan saw that the charge was still there at the end of the month,then he would know that he hadn't gotten a refund. End of Call Two. Our third call to Microsoft involved using the standard file save dialog from within Microsoft Access to get a file name and directory string from a user in order to save an exported file. The documentation didn't make it clear how to do this using Visual Basic code within Microsoft Access, and Dan decided to call Microsoft to ask if and how a programmer could do this. The technical support person he reached told him he was asking about a pretty heavy programming task. He cheerily informed Dan that he'd called the wrong number and advised Dan to call help for Visual Basic, not Access ($195 instead of $55). This technical support person was extraordinarily helpful in getting Dan his refund. End of Call Three. Stymied by our responses from Microsoft, we decided to try another service provider, the Psychic Friends Network. There are several noticeable differences between Microsoft and the Psychic Friends Network. Microsoft charges a flat rate per "solution," which is a single problem and can be handled in multiple phone calls. As described above, Microsoft may or may not issue a refund of their fee if they fail to provide a solution for your problem. The Psychic Friends Network charges a per minute fee. They do not offer a refund if they cannot solve your problem. However, unlike Microsoft, they will not charge you extra if they provide more than one solution per call. We decided to test the Psychic Friends Network by asking them the same questions that we had asked Microsoft Technical Support. We called them and were quickly connected with Ray, who was very courteous and helpful. Like Microsoft Bob, Ray quickly informed us that he wasn't fully up to date on the programs that we were working with, but he was willing to help us anyway. We started off with our first problem: making a connection from Microsoft Access to two different Sybase Servers. Ray worked hard on this problem for us. He sensed that there was a problem with something connecting, that something wasn't being fulfilled either in a sexual, spiritual or emotional way. Ray also identified that there was some sort of physical failure going on that was causing the problem." Do you mean that there's some sort of bug?" we asked. Ray denied that he knew about any sort of bug in the software. "Are you sure there's not a bug?" we asked. Ray insisted that he did not know of any bug in the software, although he left open the possibility that there could be some bug in the software that he did not know about. All in all, Ray did not do much to distinguish himself from Microsoft Technical Support. He wasn't able to solve our problem for us, and he wasn't able to confirm or deny that a bug in Microsoft Access was causing the problem. We then asked Ray our question about using Visual Basic to set the axes of a chart. Ray thought hard about this one. Once again he had the sense that something just wasn't connecting, that there was some sort of physical failure that was causing our problem. "Could it be that it's your computer that's the problem?" he asked. "Is this something that happens just on your computer, or have you had the same problem when you've tried to do the same thing on other computers?" We assured Ray that we had the same problem on other computers, then asked again, "This physical failure that you're talking about, do you mean that there's some sort of bug?" Once again he assured us that there wasn't a bug, but that he didn't know how to solve our problem. "I sense there's some sort of sickness here, and you're just going to have to sweat it out. If you'd like, you can call back tomorrow. We have a couple of guys here, Steve and Paul, and they 're much better with computer stuff than I am." To conclude our research, we asked Ray about our problem with the standard file dialog box." It's the same thing as the last one," he told us. "There's some sort of sickness here, and you're just going to have to sweat it out. There is a solution,though,and you're just going to have to work at it until you get it." Conclusions: In terms of technical expertise, we found that a Microsoft technician using Knowledge Base was about as helpful as a Psychic Friends reader using Tarot Cards. All in all, however, the Psychic Friends Net work proved to be a much friendlier organization than Microsoft Technical Support. While neither group was actually able to answer any of our technical questions, the Psychic Friends Network was much faster than Microsoft and much more courteous. Which organization is more affordable is open to question. If Microsoft does refund all three "solutions" fees, then they will be the far more affordable solution provider, having charged us no money for having given us no assistance. However, if Microsoft does not refund the fees for our call regarding Microsoft Graph, then they will have charged us more than 120% of what the Psychic Friends charged, but without providing the same fast and courteous service that Psychic Friends provided. Microsoft Tech Support (800) 939-5700 The Psychic Friends Network (900)-407-6611

A language instructor was explaining to her class that in French, nouns, unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine. "House," in French, is feminine-"la maison." "Pencil," in French, is masculine-"le crayon." One puzzled student asked, "What gender is computer?" The teacher did not know, and the word wasn't in her French dictionary. So for fun she split the class into two groups, appropriately enough, by gender, and asked them to decide whether "computer" should be a masculine or feminine noun. Both groups were required to give four reasons for their recommendation. The men's group decided that computers should definitely be of the feminine gender ("la computer") because: 1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic. 2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else. 3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for possible later retrieval. 4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it. The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine ("le computer") because: 1. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on. 2. They have a lot of data but they are still clueless. 3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem. 4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you'd waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model. The women won.

I.T. DEPARTMENT COMPUTER PROBLEM SELF-REPORT FORM 1. Describe your problem: ______________________________ 2. Now, describe your problem accurately: _________________ 3. Speculate wildly about the cause of the problem: __________ 4. Problem Severity: A. Minor__ B. Minor__ C. Minor__ D. Trivial__ 5. Nature of the problem: A. Locked Up__ B. Frozen__ C. Hung__ D. Shot__ 6. Is your computer plugged in? Yes__ No__ 7. Is it turned on? Yes__ No__ 8. Have you tried to fix it yourself? Yes__ No__ 9. Have you made it worse? Yes__ 10. Have you read the manual? Yes__ No__ 11. Are you sure you've read the manual? Yes__ No__ 12. Are you absolutely certain you've read the manual? No__ 13. Do you think you understood it? Yes__ No__ 14. If `Yes,' then why can't you fix the problem yourself?____________ 15. What were you doing with your computer at the time the problem occurred? ________________________________ 16. If `nothing,' explain why you were logged in: ___________________ 17. Are you sure you aren't imagining the problem? Yes__ No__

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.