Long ago, and far away, in a much younger, less sophisticated world, I knew what I was doing when it came to computers. Oh it wasn't always so.....
When I was first hired as a secretary at the Steel Facility I didn't know how to even turn a PC on. I sat there and stared at that SOB wondering just how in the world I was gonna fake my way through this one. Oh, they knew my limitations, but hired me because I knew the steel, I knew the plant. They figured if I could learn that the PC would be a piece of cake.
My first email took 3 hours to type and went out, well let's just say chocked full of errors. (lesson learned: there is such a thing as spell check). I was sent to a DOS class, and worked very hard to learn the basics.
2 weeks later we switched to Windows. Holy Cow. This made sense to me, and before you knew it I was hand picking the componets to my very own Personal PC and putting it together on my living room floor. Glory Glory. I knew no fear. I would tear anything apart, and put it together, making it better, faster, smarter. Yeah - I was THE woman!!!
That was about 14 years ago. I've managed to stay up with much of the new technology. Oh, I'm not the expert I was, and I never did know the technical terms, but "thingy" and "whatsit" seemed to work pretty well for me.
This week in Vegas they upgraded our laptops to XP. What they didn't tell us is all the shit that was gonna happen afterwards.
It completely wiped out my C drive. After my trip to the ER for the heart attack it gave me, we were able to recover many of my documents. However -
I have to reinstall my printer/scanner/fax thingy from hell
I have to reinstall the broadband modem
I have to reinstall Adobe
I want to install the Zonet router so that I can be wireless and work anywhere in the house (or pool area)
Here's the problem.
It won't let me. Not at all. Says I don't have permission. So I call IT. Get put on hold. I can either leave a message and they'll call me back promptly (yeah right - 500 sales reps, 1,000,000 issues) or hold. When you hold, it's about 45 mins. Then they want you to work with them, but they need you to be connected to the internet (that would be via dial-up) so they can have access to your system while you talk. I only have 1 phone line. My cell phone doesn't work at the house. Do you see the problem here?
It's actually pretty funny. In a twisted, ulcer causing sorta way. I've been out of commission for over 2 weeks now - between Mom's problems and then Vegas. I'm on dial up, can't print, can't load our "home page" for new documents............and did I mention it won't let me save cookies?!?! I have to re-enter my info every time I want to leave a comment, every time I want to access my blogging software......
But you know what? The pool water is a balmy 86 degrees and the sun IS shinning......hmmmmm whats a girl to do?!?!? ;-)
Posted by Tammi at January 12, 2005 12:40 PMScrew Responsibilities, go for the pool.
Posted by: Machelle at January 12, 2005 03:17 PMYep - the good and the bad of XP - the good being that malware has a much harder if not impossible time of installing when you are running things as a user. The bad being you have to be logged on as admin in order to install the little things like printers and wireless cards.
In an effort to make things "safe" companies will often restrict access on laptops or even desktops to keep people from just logging on as admin and working in that account... but there's really no excuse for them not saving your files OR reinstalling things like printer drivers.
As for cookies - while you have them on the phone, and if they or you access the admin account. Make sure that the directory that holds the cookies is set so all accounts can write to it not just the admin account. Since IE is installed under admin, this is probably what happened. ARG!
It's one of the things I HATE most about Microsoft. They try to do separation of powers... but they do it so very poorly, it drives everyone nuts until they just give up and give everyone the admin password. *sigh*
You have all my sympathy.
Posted by: Teresa at January 12, 2005 11:13 PMA quick note from an IT professional -- please do not attempt to combine the trips to the pool with the laptop. In fact, you shouldn't even mention the words "pool" and "laptop" in the same sentence. When you call and ask for help with the wireless card installation, do NOT mention that you need the computer to work "near the pool." :)
Posted by: Ogre at January 13, 2005 07:44 AMIt's times like these when I realize my brother's wisdom in having multiple computers with different operating systems.
Consider buying a used laptop running '98, just for blog-surfing.
Sure it's a luxury, but you really DO need to spoil yourself once in a while.
Posted by: Harvey at January 13, 2005 08:02 AMActually Harvey is right on this. You should be doing your personal stuff on a personal computer. But until you can do that... be exceptionally careful of what you write when on your laptop. People often forget that the company generally makes you sign things like an IT policy. This might include their ability to take your laptop anytime they want and peruse anything you have stored on it... and stuff gets stored in some pretty weird places! Microsoft loves copies, and copies of copies of copies... all stuck in odd little directories.
Posted by: Teresa at January 13, 2005 09:00 AM