Fun_People Archive
16 Feb
Support?

Date: Thu, 16 Feb 95 13:33:19 PST
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: Support?

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
From: Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@novatel.ca>

    For the last two weeks I've been having to run Windows/NT at work
mainly because everyone else that I'm working with is running it.  In
doing so, I've been dealing with the PC Support personnel at my company
and since these support people have such a completely different method-
ology for "diagnosing" problems, I thought I'd outline them...

Symptom: Some applications won't come up properly. (MS Word comes to
         mind as the main culprit here).

Solution: "That Xwindows gunk causes lots of problems. You shouldn't 
          run it."

	     I close the PC Xserver even though it is my only link to 
          sanity. The problem doesn't go away.

          "No, you actually have to reboot because the Xwindows gunk
          doesn't release resources".

          I do a warm boot.  The problem doesn't go away.

          "Try power cycling the thing."  Now, I understand what
          it really means to diagnose something but I have to do 
          what these guys say because it's the only way I can get
          them to admit there's a problem greater than the box
          under my desk.  Anyhow, the problem still doesn't go
          away.

          "Ok, reinstall the application."

          "I can't. It's on the novell server". I said thinking this
          would prompt him to actually *do* something productive.

          "Ok, then reinstall Windows/NT."


....And on it goes... Now I understand what I was doing wrong all those
years that I was doing Unix admin work.  I was actually trying to *help*
the user.  This PC Support methodology works sooooo much better because 
the time lag between "first question" and "having to do something" is
gigantic allowing for more games of DOOM and occasionally the user might
get frustrated enough so as to actually commit suicide alleviating the
problem altogether.

I might add that the X-server is the application causing me the least
problems... I'm not sure what that says however...
Fun_People Archive 16 FebSupport?

Fun_People Archive
16 Feb
Support?
