• When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children’s art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.
• Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.
• When an IT person says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won’t be there when we need your password. It’s nothing for us to remember 300 screen saver passwords.
• When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because your computer won’t power on at all.
• Ask us if we got taught how to use a computer at High School… the teachers at High School are responsible for everything we ever learned about computers.
• When IT support sends you an E-Mail with high importance, delete it at once. We’re just testing.
• When an IT person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.
• Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.
• When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s electronics in it.
• When you’re getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can fix your telephone line from here.
• When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call computer support. We’re collectors.
• When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on an IT person’s chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.
• When an IT person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.
• When an IT person tells you that he’ll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: “And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?” That motivates us.
• When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.
• When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.
• Don’t learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by “my thingy blew up”.
• Don’t use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.
• If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 20kg of computer sitting on top of them.
• If the space bar on your keyboard doesn’t work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin crumbs and nail clippings in them.
• When you get a message saying “Are you sure?” click on that Yes button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren’t sure, you wouldn’t be doing it, would you?
• When you find an IT person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don’t have any money to speak of anyway.
• Feel perfectly free to say things like “I don’t know nothing about that computer crap”. We don’t mind at all hearing our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.
• When you need to change the toner cartridge in a printer, call IT support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a master’s degree in nuclear physics.
• When you can’t find someone in the government directory, call IT Support.
• When you have a lock to pick on an old file cabinet, call IT Support. We love to hack.
• When something’s the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn’t know anything about the problem.
• When you receive a 30mb (huge) movie file, send it to everyone as a mail attachment. We’ve got lots of disk space on that mail server.
• Don’t even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the queue.
• When an IT person gets on the elevator pushing $100,000 worth of computer equipment on a cart, ask in a very loud voice: “Good grief, you take the elevator to go DOWN one floor?!?” That’s another one that cracks us up no end.
• When you lose your car keys, send an email to the entire company. People out in Pofadder like to keep abreast of what’s going on.
• When you bump into an IT person at the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question. We do weekends.
• Don’t bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own. Computer names are just a cosmetic feature.
• When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office, leave the documentation at home. We’ll find all the settings and drivers somewhere.
• We don’t really believe that you’re a bunch of ungrateful twits. It hurts our feelings that you could even think such a thing. We wish to express our deepest gratitude to the hundreds of clueless losers portrayed herein, without whom none of this would have been remotely possible.
• Keep it crashing!

These are the unwritten rules from the highly over worked, but highly under paid technical support staff at an Internet service provider near you…

1. DO NOT talk over me. Listen damn it, you can’t do what I tell you to do constantly jabbering bullshit over me. I talk… you do. Why did you even ask me a question if you are going to answer it?
2. DO NOT call me and then put me on hold. You called me, genius! You want my help, stay on the line and listen. We have much better things to do than talk to you anyway.
3. DO NOT read long error messages to me unless I ask you to. Do you honestly think we get anything out of a 50 digit hexnumber???
4. DO NOT start off a call by saying anything in the neighborhood of, “Hi, how’s it going” or “Busy today?” That just serves to piss us off. Get to the problem so we can get you off the phone. The day was great until I had to start answering your totally moronic questions.
5. DO NOT get pissed when we tell you that your system is royally screwed. We didn’t screw it up. It wasn’t us. We’re simply telling it like it is.
6. DO NOT call about unrelated products. We DO NOT know the intimate details of every piece o’ crap shareware program you dredge out of the internet. Nor do we want to. Stop it!
7. We DO NOT manufacture modems, write e-mail programs or engineer browsers. If something in this arena goes wrong, call the people who made the goddamned thing. YOU DON’T USE THE INTERNET TO FAX!!! Can’t stress that one enough.
8. DO NOT compare us to AOL when something goes wrong with your connection to us. If you had the computer literacy of an 8 year old with a broken Atari 2600 you’d know better. Everyone else connects just fine. It’s just you. Keep that in mind. It’s just you.
9. DO NOT call simply for the purpose of giving us your thoughts on the content of our homepage or to request that we send you flyers so you can pass them out at bridge tournaments and bingo night. Not only is this a waste of our time, but it encourages just the type of user tech support reps fear most… the elderly.
10. DO NOT make us sit there on the phone while you tip toe through setup instructions so easy they were originally tested on lab chimps. We have better things to do than act as zoo keepers.
11. DO NOT call us and complain about a problem with your system and then say you’re not in front of your computer when we try and help you. We aren’t technological psychics.
12. DO NOT call us assuming the problem you’re experiencing is our fault. If your computer crashes, performs illegal operations, gives you the blue screen of death, or flips you off and runs away with the toaster to Mexico, you can be damn certain it isn’t us who caused it.
13. DO NOT call us and announce to us that you don’t know anything about computers. This really pisses us off. Trust me, we’re well aware of that fact. We figured it out the minute you called and announced “help, the Internet is broken!” Something here definitely needs help. People who know computers don’t call us.
14. DO NOT call us and act as if you know all that are computers and that you’re doing us a favor by gracing us with your call. This pisses us off more than 13. Chiming in with stupid suggestions and comments only increases the already tremendous temptation we face to use you as an unwitting instrument of destruction and really do some damage to your system. Not that you’d notice.
15. DO NOT (in addition to 14) say acronyms you don’t know the meaning of or even what they are for. Just admit that you’re completely lost and leave the techno bullshit to us.
16. DO NOT call in if you can’t speak English. This might seem like a small thing to you, but we find it just a tad annoying when we try and assess your problem and we can only understand every fifth word you say. And no, just because those words may be ‘computer’ or ‘broken’ doesn’t absolve you of the offense.
17. DO NOT call in hoping to get another tech rep to tell you something different than the first one did. If one of us tells you your system is screwed, it’s screwed. The second guy is going to simply look at the log and tell you the same thing, it’s screwed. That is of course unless you really piss him off and then he’s going to make sure your computer has the functionality of a house plant.
18. DO NOT be stoned or drunk when you call us. You wouldn’t think this would need to actually be said, but believe me it’s come up. For god sakes, if you can’t control yourself and must call, at least have the common courtesy to offer us some of what you’re on.

It is reported that an IBM Service rep received the following call:

“I tried to install your product and it failed miserably. I inserted disk #1 and it worked fine. It then asked me to insert disk #2 into the drive, it took some doing but it worked. The program then asked for disk #3. Now I don’t know what you people are thinking, but if you are going to use more then two diskettes in an installation, please send along a drive expander so that we can insert more than two disks into the drive at the same time.”

Announcing… An Exciting New Tool
for Data Center Management!

When was the last time you found a bazillion zero length files in /usr/tmp and said to yourself “How did this crap get on my system?”

When was the last time you had to clean fifty megabytes of run-on puns out of a user’s news directory, and said to yourself, “What a load of crap”?

When was the last time you looked at a piece of mail and said to yourself “This is the stupidist crap I’ve ever laid eyes on”?

Well, you’re right, it is crap, and now you can do something about it.

Introducing the new Crap Detector daemon “Crapd”.

Crapd works similar to syslogd in monitoring system error messages, but has the added function of removing offending files and utilities from the system using complex heuristics to determine the file’s “crap quotient”. Sensitivity is settable anywhere from “merely inane” to “gut-wrenching anal explosion” and can be set on a per-user basis.

Files that crapd has decided meets the above criteria are held in /usr/stool for a user-settable period of time, and then flushed to /dev/dump. Anything crapd decides is true stinking diarrhea will be sent directly to /dev/dump with no questions asked.

Crapd is especially useful for cleaning out mail spool directories, as this has been proven to be one of the most prolific accumulators of crap in the history of interactive computing.

There is, of course, a list of exceptions for crap you are required, against your better judgement, to have on the system. However, if Crapd decides the list is full of crap, it will be migrated to /usr/stool.

In scientific lab test, Crapd has been shown to virtually eliminate user distractions, increase system performance by 50% and reduce backup volume by an order of magnitude. Our customers report that capital equipment expenditures have been reduced significantly now that they don’t have to keep disks spun up just to keep the crap warm.

As an added bonus, Crapd will search through your process table and kill off any processes that anyone who could grab their butt with both hands wouldn’t have launched during a billion year drinking binge.

Next year, a stealth option to the crap detector daemon will be available. This option adds a new “virtual crap” feature to your file systems, which causes files that have been flushed by Crapd to appear to still be there.

In carefully controlled lab tests, we have found that users will happily continue to append George W Bush jokes to a file for years without ever realizing that the directory entry has been faked and the file no longer exists.

So, be productive, be pure, get the Crap Detector!

Warning: Be sure to put Usenet News in the exceptions list, or crapd is sure to unlink the news spool directory, shoot nntpd, and set fire to your incoming news link.

Brought to you by Waste Products, Inc.

“If it’s a Waste Product, you’ll know it!”