An early post of mine tells of my start in the professional arena of IT. I worked at a shop in my home town, and my game stepped up tremendously once I got going. I learned rather quickly, and I dedicated myself to learning as much as I could about, well, everything.
This was late 2003, and there were a number of amazing things happening in the computer world. Windows 98 Second Edition was still out there - USB support was introduced at the end of the 20th Century, which prompted Microsoft to release Windows 98SE. Other versions of Windows were out there en masse, such as Windows Millennium Edition (ME), Windows NT and Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
There were multiple versions of Microsoft Office floating about as well - 97, 2000, XP (aka "2002"), and 2003.
Linux was something of which I had not even heard as of yet.
Dial-up and DSL were still things, and cable modems were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are now. Wireless routers were relatively new as well - Local Area Networks (LANs) were starting to enter into small businesses and residences. This was a very exciting time for me, as I was leveling up rather rapidly. It was like I had enough advanced weapons and armor so that I could punch above my weight class without much risk, and upon slaying the monsters I jumped several levels at once.
I had several experiences while I was there that were just amazing...
IT Tale of the Day #1
A customer became a repeater, stopping in once ever couple of months with a same problem with her Windows 98 box. She was a customer before I was an employee, so I had to get the back story. Her machine would act weird, so she would unhook the tower and bring it in. We would work on it, she would come and pick it up, and then 6-8 weeks later she would be back - wash, rinse, repeat. Finally, I decided that, since I was on the road, that I would stop by to pick up her tower. I wanted to see what was going on in its current state. I pulled up to the house, and she welcomed me - she really was a sweet lady, honestly - and she sat me down at her desk. There, all over her tower were magnets. Tons of magnets. She collected them from her travels and whatnot, and she thought that they would look great sticking onto the metal case of her tower. And there were a TON of magnets. She was gaussing her hard drive; for those who, like me, are kinda old, it is like putting a cassette tape on a speaker. Once I explained that it was harmful to the machine, I helped her move her collection to the fridge, and I recommended stickers. I checked in a couple weeks later, and her machine was purring like a kitten. The only down side was that I didn't really see much of her after that, which was a bummer.
IT Tale of the Day #2
A hair salon called us up and asked for a system cleaning. I don't mean the standard Operating System (OS) cleaning - getting rid of unused programs, defragment the hard drive, scan the hard drive for errors and correct them. No, they meant an actual physical cleaning of the system - popping the cover and vacuuming out the tower. Vacuuming out the hair was relatively easy, one would think - oh, no, my dear reader. Nothing is ever that simple. The tower was rather tiny, so getting the vacuum wand to the crevices was impossible.
Since I had already powered the machine down, I started attempting the pull out the modem and other cards that were plugged into the motherboard. I say "attempting" because there was a film that coated the inside of the computer, a layer of hairspray that secured all of the components to the motherboard. That was when my spidey-sense began to tingle.
I warned them about the film of Aquanet, Salon Selectives, and various other hairsprays and how I was uncertain as to how it would affect the machine, and if they wanted me to proceed. They gave me the green light, and I pressed onward and managed to get all of the components out of the machine and vacuum out the rest of the hair. I reassembled the machine and I made darn certain that I tested it. I powered it on, powered it off; I powered it on and then had the OS (which was 98SE) do a restart. I ran the software that they needed, tested their web browser, the whole 9 yards. I spent as much time testing their system as I did cleaning it. I packed, they paid me, I left, and I was done for the day. Come the next morning, we get a call from them - their computer is not working. It was working when I left, and after an hour of testing, but somehow, the damage done by a layer of hairspray gumming up the inside of the machine was all my fault.
IT Tale of the Day #3
A customer with some money behind her called us for a virus repair. Our general rule was that we could spend hours hunting down the virus and maybe even never truly clean the system, or we could perform a system reload: backup the files, wipe the drive, reinstall the OS and update it, reinstall the programs, and then restore the files. So we did that. In the process, she asked that we could locked down her system as tightly as possible. So we did that, as well. I bring back the machine on a Friday evening - the week is at an end, and there is a plate of pasta and a glass of wine waiting for me when I get home. I get to their house, which is definitely beachfront property - cha-ching. I set up the system and show her the security protocols that we instated. At first, she didn't seem to mind. We walked through the whole procedure for connecting to the Internet over AT&T dial-up several times, she wrote down the procedure, and then it was her turn. And she couldn't follow the directions which she herself had written down. Eventually, she starts to get angry with me, and her husband backs her up - I mean, good on him for backing up his wife, that's a stand up move, despite the fact that she was angry with me for the wrong reasons. See, there were levels of security that we instituted that would prevent someone from forcibly working her system over, but those levels also restricted the how easily she could initiate the dial-up access. Heck, it would've put a damper on high-speed access as well. She told me that she didn't like the restrictions and asked me to remove them - well, there goes my Friday night. I explained to her that we set them up at her request, that it would take time to undo them, and I'd have to charge. I also reminded her that taking off the restrictions would leave her vulnerable.
She's arguing and yelling at me, telling me that she wants liberty and security in equal measure. Well, that's impossible on a technological and a philosophical level, and I really have no idea what to tell her. She agrees to pay me, but not for the hour of my Friday night that she just wasted, which cost me fresh pasta and halfway decent wine. I managed to hold my tongue, even as she decided not to pay for the hour that she just wasted. The boss and I had Nextels - they had a "Push-To-Talk" feature, which basically made them walkie-talkies. So I buzz him and I tell him what's up, and that she wouldn't pay for the last hour. He screams at me until I bang a u-turn and head back, knock on their door, and I have him on speaker phone (no longer Push-To-Talk/walkie-talkie) so that they can scream at each other. Yeah, that was a fun Friday evening, let me tell you...
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