God, I hate computers. I’ve spent four days trying to get some sense out of customer support people who seem to know less about computers than I know. As I know very little, it doesn’t bode well, does it? In reality, it was a silly little issue – probably a driver needing updating or a registry entry tweaking – but an issue neither the manufacturer’s technical support nor the ‘Tech Guys’ (hah!) offering extended support could fix. Basically, when you put a flash drive or whatever in the front USB ports it didn’t go ‘ping’, and it didn’t give you a ‘safely remove hardware’ icon to, erm, safely remove said piece of hardware. (oh, just in case there are any smart arses out there who know – or possibly think they know – about this kind of thing it could not be fixed by right clicking the drive/properties etc and changing the ‘policies’ to enable caching: There WAS NO POLICIES TAB! :o
The rear ports (oooer missus) were fine, and pinged and messaged in just the way you would want them to ping and message, but truth be told I’m not getting any younger and as the tower is situated under a desk me ol’ knees ain’t really up to the task of scrabbling around on hard floors and nylon carpets for the sake of inserting dongles blind into hubs too small for me to see even when I am wearing my reading glasses, which I probably wouldn’t be in that situation because despite having several hundred pairs scattered around the house there’s never a pair around when you need them (reading glasses are like policemen in that respect). Apart from which, I shouldn’t NEED to with a new pc fresh out of the box. There are some things I would risk my knees for on nylon carpets and hard floors, but new PC’s fresh out of the box aren’t one of them, and I’ll hazard a guess you don’t want to know about the things that are. Suffice to say there’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle...
Anyhoo, finally I thought ‘sod it’ and I took myself orf to the hinduistrial estate where the shed from which I purchased the non-pinging pc is situated and demanded a replacement, a process which took several hours of careful, diplomatic negotiation followed by several minutes of insane ranting that made William Foster’s (Michael Douglas) attempts to buy a burger in the movie ‘falling down’ look like a scene from Mary (or Meeeery, if you happen to be Dyke Van Dick) Poppins. So now I’ve got my new PC, and have spent the past three hours or so removing all the preinstalled, buggy, spyware crap they insist on preinstalling on PCs these days and the equally tedious task of putting the software I do want and use on it. And to be honest it’s not the installation time that drives me nuts, it’s all the palaver of re-registering everything because the ‘key’ you have is limited to x number of installations and what with keep buying PC’s that don’t work and reformatting hard drives that go ‘fttttttzzzzz’ you look, on virtual paper, like some sort of low rent, software Jack Sparra. A-ha.
And then I’ve got to set up Microsoft Orifice so it saves to doc not docx ‘cos nobody has ever opened a docx, despite it being the ‘standard’ since 2005 when office 2007 came out (?). And then format margins, font, paragraph etc etc to suit the OU /SMS ‘standard’, then locate and install the ‘save as pdf’ add-on for word, then set default dictionary then... Well, you get the idea.
And somewhere, at some point, I’ve got to actually find time to use this computer to produce a TMA (tutor marked assignment, for those not learning with the OU) on material I’ve not even glanced at yet. If I hadn’t forgotten how to write (at best my handwriting looked like the scratchings of a madman writing with a fingernail and shit, but that best was a good twenty years ago, and it’s gone wayyyyyyy downhill since then) I’d ditch the PC and buy a lion brand eccers book; but considering the amount of retraining it would take to get my writing back to a standard where I, let alone anyone else, could read it it’s probably easier just to wait a couple of years until they can insert a micro USB port direct into the centre of what I laughingly refer to as my brain and I can just ‘think’ my words onto a memory stick. Of course, the memory stick will fail, or get stolen, but at least that’s a more convincing argument for not delivering on homework than ‘the dog ate it’.
Oh, did I mention the car? That’s fucked too. Well, it’s not now, as it was ‘fixed’ again yesterday, but it is of a vintage now where ‘fixed’ means but a temporary respite from hurling money and insults at it. That’s its second fix in as many weeks, and as I picked her up (why do we refer to cars as ‘her’... oh yeah, they cost a fortune to run and always break down when you most need them... *whistle*) yesterday my mechanic mentioned in passing that the exhaust was ‘blowing a bit’ and would probably need a bit of attention soon. Great...
I bought a new clock today off Amazon. It’s a waterproof one, as I have to have one in the bathroom to ‘remind’ my son that showers should be cheaper than baths. He takes about 45 minutes either way, but prefers showers. If we ever get metered water he’ll wash us out of house and home. He’s already trying to eat us out of house and home, so we’ve not far to go, but I’ve found a cheap supplier of hay and that’s helping keep the wolf from the door (though one of the three little pigs living down the road keeps walking past the hayrick whistling in a most suspicious manner). He (Ben, not the 3rd little pig) broke the old clock during an over-vigorous stint of drying on Sunday, so the swift arrival of the new one was a small ray of sunshine in a week that, with the brief exception of a ‘Writing Group’ meet and several pints of Guinness last night, could most accurately be described as ‘poxy’. It’s perhaps a measure of my cynicism these days that when, on inserting batteries, I discovered the clock was ‘tickless’ I just sort of grunted in a world weary fashion and made a cup of tea. I’ve printed off the return label now, and will enjoy, hopefully, a nice walk to the post office tomorrow to despatch it back for refund, weather and god permitting.
Ah well, Windows is nagging me to shut down the computer so it can finish installing updates. Best let it, so it can download the next batch. I left it waiting until I’d finished this ‘just in case’, ‘cos the way things have been going there may well be a failure to relaunch.
Scientific progress goes 'BANG!'
God, I hate computers. I’ve spent four days trying to get some sense out of customer support people who seem to know less about computers than I know. As I know very little, it doesn’t bode well, does it? In reality, it was a silly little issue – probably a driver needing updating or a registry entry tweaking – but an issue neither the manufacturer’s technical support nor the ‘Tech Guys’ (hah!) offering extended support could fix. Basically, when you put a flash drive or whatever in the front USB ports it didn’t go ‘ping’, and it didn’t give you a ‘safely remove hardware’ icon to, erm, safely remove said piece of hardware. (oh, just in case there are any smart arses out there who know – or possibly think they know – about this kind of thing it could not be fixed by right clicking the drive/properties etc and changing the ‘policies’ to enable caching: There WAS NO POLICIES TAB! :o
The rear ports (oooer missus) were fine, and pinged and messaged in just the way you would want them to ping and message, but truth be told I’m not getting any younger and as the tower is situated under a desk me ol’ knees ain’t really up to the task of scrabbling around on hard floors and nylon carpets for the sake of inserting dongles blind into hubs too small for me to see even when I am wearing my reading glasses, which I probably wouldn’t be in that situation because despite having several hundred pairs scattered around the house there’s never a pair around when you need them (reading glasses are like policemen in that respect). Apart from which, I shouldn’t NEED to with a new pc fresh out of the box. There are some things I would risk my knees for on nylon carpets and hard floors, but new PC’s fresh out of the box aren’t one of them, and I’ll hazard a guess you don’t want to know about the things that are. Suffice to say there’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle...
Anyhoo, finally I thought ‘sod it’ and I took myself orf to the hinduistrial estate where the shed from which I purchased the non-pinging pc is situated and demanded a replacement, a process which took several hours of careful, diplomatic negotiation followed by several minutes of insane ranting that made William Foster’s (Michael Douglas) attempts to buy a burger in the movie ‘falling down’ look like a scene from Mary (or Meeeery, if you happen to be Dyke Van Dick) Poppins. So now I’ve got my new PC, and have spent the past three hours or so removing all the preinstalled, buggy, spyware crap they insist on preinstalling on PCs these days and the equally tedious task of putting the software I do want and use on it. And to be honest it’s not the installation time that drives me nuts, it’s all the palaver of re-registering everything because the ‘key’ you have is limited to x number of installations and what with keep buying PC’s that don’t work and reformatting hard drives that go ‘fttttttzzzzz’ you look, on virtual paper, like some sort of low rent, software Jack Sparra. A-ha.
And then I’ve got to set up Microsoft Orifice so it saves to doc not docx ‘cos nobody has ever opened a docx, despite it being the ‘standard’ since 2005 when office 2007 came out (?). And then format margins, font, paragraph etc etc to suit the OU /SMS ‘standard’, then locate and install the ‘save as pdf’ add-on for word, then set default dictionary then... Well, you get the idea.
And somewhere, at some point, I’ve got to actually find time to use this computer to produce a TMA (tutor marked assignment, for those not learning with the OU) on material I’ve not even glanced at yet. If I hadn’t forgotten how to write (at best my handwriting looked like the scratchings of a madman writing with a fingernail and shit, but that best was a good twenty years ago, and it’s gone wayyyyyyy downhill since then) I’d ditch the PC and buy a lion brand eccers book; but considering the amount of retraining it would take to get my writing back to a standard where I, let alone anyone else, could read it it’s probably easier just to wait a couple of years until they can insert a micro USB port direct into the centre of what I laughingly refer to as my brain and I can just ‘think’ my words onto a memory stick. Of course, the memory stick will fail, or get stolen, but at least that’s a more convincing argument for not delivering on homework than ‘the dog ate it’.
Oh, did I mention the car? That’s fucked too. Well, it’s not now, as it was ‘fixed’ again yesterday, but it is of a vintage now where ‘fixed’ means but a temporary respite from hurling money and insults at it. That’s its second fix in as many weeks, and as I picked her up (why do we refer to cars as ‘her’... oh yeah, they cost a fortune to run and always break down when you most need them... *whistle*) yesterday my mechanic mentioned in passing that the exhaust was ‘blowing a bit’ and would probably need a bit of attention soon. Great...
I bought a new clock today off Amazon. It’s a waterproof one, as I have to have one in the bathroom to ‘remind’ my son that showers should be cheaper than baths. He takes about 45 minutes either way, but prefers showers. If we ever get metered water he’ll wash us out of house and home. He’s already trying to eat us out of house and home, so we’ve not far to go, but I’ve found a cheap supplier of hay and that’s helping keep the wolf from the door (though one of the three little pigs living down the road keeps walking past the hayrick whistling in a most suspicious manner). He (Ben, not the 3rd little pig) broke the old clock during an over-vigorous stint of drying on Sunday, so the swift arrival of the new one was a small ray of sunshine in a week that, with the brief exception of a ‘Writing Group’ meet and several pints of Guinness last night, could most accurately be described as ‘poxy’. It’s perhaps a measure of my cynicism these days that when, on inserting batteries, I discovered the clock was ‘tickless’ I just sort of grunted in a world weary fashion and made a cup of tea. I’ve printed off the return label now, and will enjoy, hopefully, a nice walk to the post office tomorrow to despatch it back for refund, weather and god permitting.
Ah well, Windows is nagging me to shut down the computer so it can finish installing updates. Best let it, so it can download the next batch. I left it waiting until I’d finished this ‘just in case’, ‘cos the way things have been going there may well be a failure to relaunch.
L8rs, hopefully. Fingers crossed.
:D