Since someone requested this...
Feb. 4th, 2004 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mandolinPosted on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
customers_suck a while back, and mentioned the rhyming rant I did about my college IT department for my Satire class in '99. Got a few requests to find it posted somewhere, so I'm tossing it up here - complete with footnotes.
An Ode to IT
(Incompetent Twits)
For those who are wondering, this was written as my final Satire project in April of 1999, after an especially frustrating three semesters working for my college's IT department. They've gotten better, but after that semester I quit the work-study job out of sheer disgust. Footnotes and references can be found at the end of this. I realize the meter's WAY off, but I was on a roll and tossing in the classical references and the tangents like crazy.
The legends tell of evils past,
The vengeful wrath of Tiamat,
The tremors and the aftershock
In the wake of Ragnarok.
Of stony fate from Medusa's stare,
Her flashing eyes and serpent hair,
How beneath the churning of the sea
Lay the drought-causing Nuckelavee.
Sakhmet's rage became love of blood,
Jealous Hera assailed Zeus' brood,
The bean sidhe sang vile destiny,
Death entwined in her melody.
Sun and serpent would nightly clash,
Til Ra gleamed high o'er Apep's ash.
Yet even in those times of dread
As lives were lost and blood was shed
No fiend back then could e'er compete
With the horror we now rise to meet.
Its lair lies in no distant land;
The beast is often close at hand.
In schools, in offices you'll roam
Within the walls of your own home
No matter where you go you'll see
The demon whom they name "PC."
From whence has this machine been spawned?
Its source, on us, has not quite dawned.
We're at the mercy of the Fates--
That is, if they work for Bill Gates.
Content no more with pen and ink
You'll fall into its trap, I think--
Ten page papers by hand alone
Lead to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
So off you go to Rosenstock (1)
But soon to your dismay and shock
The filled hard drive will not behave
While MS Word declines to save,
The printer's jammed, and you can tell
Your thesis has been shot to hell.
"My G.P.A. will not survive
The scourge of Windows 95!
It says the system has to halt,
That it's General Protection's fault,
And that the buffer's gone awry,
But I don't know what that means," you cry.
With that, your fate is set in stone.
Although you know you're not alone
In panic, you start pondering
Lifetime careers at Burger King.
But as you bow your head and weep,
Cursing Microsoft and lack of sleep,
Suddenly light shines from above
A voice of wisdom speaks with love.
(That might just be your fantasy
Since it sounds like Sean Connery.)(2)
"Consign yourself not yet to doom.
Salvation lies beyond this room.
Downloads corrupted this machine,
So-called savers of the screen,
By morons who permit this hell
So they can have their AOL.
In short, this new catastrophe
Can't be repaired by one like thee.
I'd point you to the greatest good,
But in our fair kingdom of Hood
Your answers can only be had
In the hall by the name of AD."(3)
The voice of reason fades away,
Despite your pleas for it to stay.
In the absence of its bright light
You must admit, it could be right;
To rise from the depths of despair,
To fight the creature in its lair,
To drive the Melissa virus away,(4)
To banish spam and Y2K,
No choice remains but to go see
Information Technology.
Your journey squanders quite some time:
Four flights of steps are yours to climb.
The stairs are not the only way
To reach the topmost floor today--
But you know that elevator
Will break down sooner or later.(5)
Soon you complete your ascent,
Out of breath and muscles spent.
Step through the doors, what shall you find?
The statement "heat box" comes to mind.
'Tis splintered floor and whitewashed wall,
Lining a long and silent hall
Extending to each side of thee
Too distant for your eyes to see.
Of course, that problem would be gone
If you had put your glasses on.
For other reasons you must delay--
Is left or right the prudent way?
(The author wants to quickly note
She stooped not to learning by rote.
But it's not easy to contend
Which way leads to the proper end,
Especially because of the
Department's shortage of A/C.
One can't remain long in such heat
And stay forever on one's feet
So to eliminate more fuss
We must rely on calculus.
With temperature at eighty-eight,
And 150 for one's heart rate,
An angle of degree ninety
Shall start off your trajectory.
If we take the derivative
Of the path you took to give
A friend in Meyran 403 (6)
Your notes from Sociology,
Multiply by each stair you climb,
Write it in Eastern Standard Time.
Check the alignment of the stars;
If Venus isn't blocking Mars
Perhaps some wisdom shall be had
By opening the Iliad--
Find a quote from Virgil's pages
Like they did in the Middle Ages.
As substitute we instead look
Within the page of a phone book.
It opens to page eighty-eight--
That was the temp, not the heart rate.
Fate guides your touch to this entry:
Some Dundalk chap named 'Barber E.'
But since the heat is getting tough
To bear, and since there's not enough
Data with which to calculate
Answers for which you try to wait,
Gasping for air with all your might,
What the heck, we'll guess: let's go right.)
Your direction is no more in doubt,
So once you've cussed the author out,
And wisely put your glasses on
Which you should have already donned,
You turn and search from door to door
For help that should be well in store.
All doors are locked, but then you look
And notice there's a hidden nook.
This office now belongs to the
Associate Director of IT;
Perhaps you'll find some mitigation
By speaking with Miss Information.(7)
With a tap the door swings wide
As you gape at the room inside.
The office space around you looms,
It's bigger than most Coblentz rooms.(8)
Two windows let the sun spill in,
One holds an A/C unit within.
To top it off, a padded chair
That couldn't be cheap is also there.
After plastic seats, a student feels
A tad jealous; hell, it's got wheels!
Yet its cushions support no behind,
Your searching gaze soon fails to find
Any sign of help or reprieve,
Your bad luck you just can't believe.
(In short, there's no one else to see.
Miss Info's office is empty.)
Naturally, you're quite perplexed.
Has your quest for aid been hexed?
Defeated, you turn back around.
Salvation here will not be found.
But soft! As you prepare to go
With heavy heart and tales of woe,
Around you turn only to meet
A stack of boxes with sneakered feet.
"I do hate to sound like a bitch,"
It says, "but I've been forced to switch
My hours twenty times by now,
So that some idiotic sow
Can get eight workers all at once
To come to the office of this dunce.
Ten times to her we've been referred
Since she can't change the font in Word.
But that's not the reason I'm mad,
Despite the asthma that I've had
To deal with since the age of three,
I'm no athlete as you can see,
Beside this desk I have been told
To place the speakers I now hold.
I do hope that it would behoove
Whoever you are to quickly move.
Please do so now and I can doff
This weight before my arms fall off!"
Wisely you dive out of the way;
Dismemberment's not your forte.
The speakers go down with a thunk
Landing so hard you think they've sunk
An indentation in the floor
But it remains flat as before.
The student worker, with a groan,
Stretching back and limb and bone,
With great skill and trepidation
Pulls her spine back in formation.
You're quite glad to have gotten clear,
But you must ask: is some help near?
"Miss Info," she says, "isn't in.
For supervisors, it's a sin
To be present when you arrive
Seeking aid--yet they're gone by five.
But, of course, the higher you go,
The less people you'll get to know.
For instance, I have yet to see
Our head director of IT,
The Great and Terrible Sir Gone; (9)
I swear, this floor he's never on."
She's cynical and quite a bore
But you're about to ask her more
(Perhaps suggest she try Prozac)
When foolishly, you turn your back.
But then, realizing your mistake
Around you spin, but far too late.
The worker is no longer there,
Having vanished into thin air.
Of course, she probably caught a whiff
Of "real work," and left in a jiff
Fleeing to some far-off domain
Where she can in safety complain.
Either way, you're far from done,
So you turn towards room 411.
This time the portal stands ajar,
Its temperature's hotter by far;
To any student worker's woe
There's no unit in the window, (10)
No A/C with which to relieve
The heat, and you're about to leave
And climb back downstairs to the quad,
But then you notice something odd.
No supervisor sits inside
This room that's only half as wide
As the office you entered last.
But although it's not quite as vast,
Two machines still fit in there
With a student in each chair.
Is the door sign right? You're not sure.
The sign reads "Web Site Manager."
It strikes you something must be wrong.
"Student workers don't get the long
End of the stick in work-study.
With that in mind, how can this be?
It makes no sense to me," you say.
The worker sitting farthest away
Has heard your words and your advance.
Snapping out of her screen-locked trance,
Yawning, she says, "I'd be very
Happy to satisfy your query
If I was more then half awake
And could get a decent break
From the workload ups and downs
That we always get from these clowns.
But since you look like you've been hit
By stress--the Web Manager quit.
For paychecks now we're forced to go
And now answer to Miss Info." (11)
"It's not to say that she's a pain,
The other speaks, "but for us the main
Gripe is her inability
To deal out work with agility.
She doesn't know HTML,
So she can't grasp the minor hell
Of being asked to table-ize
A fifteen-page spreadsheet before five.
I have come in day after day
With nothing to do but draw anime
Until today, when suddenly
Tons of edits were dumped on me.
I'm only here an hour more!
How can I possibly restore
The whole Biology site by three?
The confusion is killing me!"
The first girl sighs and shakes her head.
"I've griped and bitched and often said
That there's no point in hiring
Webmasters who know nothing
About the Internet at all.
Their ignorance is their downfall.
(My friend here is quite far above
The incompetents that I speak of.)
Three hours some other girl spent
With moan and groan and loud lament;
It seems that no one let her know
How web pages are supposed to go.
I found the source of her distress
Amidst her MS Word-made mess.
She tried to use an image file
That any browser finds most vile.
Beginners know not to use TIF;
Pictures that work are JPEG and GIF.
Despite her lack of knowledge, she
Gets paid per hour more than me.
I'm only permitted to affect
Files stuffed in the intranet,
Which will be seen by very few,
Probably never viewed by you.
But important jobs go to the
Folks who don't know <HR> from <P>.
Then there's one who works next door
With an automatic editor
Barely does she rely on code
Leaving her pages in a mode
That will scroll off to the side
On monitors that aren't so wide.
She gets responsibility;
They let her work with FTP!"
With that outburst, she says no more.
You sigh and wander off next door;
Her attitude you should have seen
Coming when she turned from the screen,
From the button she wore that stated
"Mental Health Is Overrated."
You approach the adjacent room
Dreading still more whining and gloom,
But to your shock and surprise
From its cool depths music does rise.
Before you can investigate,
The intervening hand of Fate
Causes you almost to collide
With the worker coming outside.
Her papers you quickly help to grab
And mention the computer lab.
"The EUC should help you,
Which is what they're supposed to do.
If I'm right, the office should fall
At the other end of the IT hall."
This answer seems to be suspect;
A direct answer here you don't expect.
"In good conscience I surely can't
Distract you with another rant.
I do believe it would be wrong;
And this satire's getting long."
Of a response you are bereft;
If you had only first turned left
You could have avoided this ordeal
And by now have gotten help that's real.
(Please try to control your fury;
The author hopes that you will hurry
On to End User Computing
So for now forget everything
To do with your trajectory--
And give her a head start to flee.)
Too tired to turn and strangle
The one who's let the plot dangle,
The Help Desk (now called EUC) (12)
You finally trudge off to see.
Now you don't know what to expect;
Of more griping you're circumspect,
Where there are workers in IT
Grumbling is a certainty.
It's still not what you hoped to find--
Something bigger was on your mind.
Five students and their books here sit;
The room's the size of your closet.
Two PCs are crammed inside too.
At first, no workers notice you;
One is speaking into the phone,
"What do you mean, it's not alone?
Are you sure there's enough memory?
Do you have a Mac or a PC?
Look, I cannot do anything
If you call it 'a squiggly thing.'
Can you give me some more details?
I won't know what this job entails
If you can't tell me what is wrong.
Is the picture too tall or long?
They're not going to help you out--
I would suggest you scream and shout
At the group playing volleyball.(13)
Then they'll rush to answer your call.
I can't come down myself, you see;
My major's in Art History."
Another is deeply engrossed
Chatting with folks from the West Coast.
Two others in the corner sit
Sorting orders from Track-It.
The fifth worker sits scribbling
Planes and trains and anything
That comes to her imagination--
Since boredom begets creation.
Within a moment, it is she
Who looks and sees you finally,
And then from her mouth does issue
Four blessed words: "Can I help you?"
To your horror you don't recall
What brought you to IT at all!
Trying to think what this could mean,
Your gaze falls on the computer screen.
No earthly scribe could e'er relate
Your shock upon seeing the date.
"Oh my God," you faintly squeak,
"My paper's due date is NEXT WEEK!"
At that point, you hear down the hall
Some ranting about volleyball.
All the workers start snickering.
As closer comes the bickering,
You take the opportunity
To flee from all this insanity.
So thus does our odd fable end.
Although the reader might contend
There's still more to this history,
Nothing of interest is left to see.
(Of course, you'll soon panic and shriek
Since it really was due this week.
To deceive a shareware crack
A student pushed the date/time back.) (14)
So what's the moral of our tale?
When computers begin to fail
Of strange voices do not grow fond,
Even if they sound like James Bond.
If you don't like your papers late,
Always be sure you know the date.
That's not the most important rule:
When your PC acts like a fool,
Unless you're staff or faculty
It never helps to call IT.
--A. Ohlin
April 1999
(1) Rosenstock Hall - All the computer labs and the Math department was holed up in this heat box at the time. They've since moved to a new building.
(2) The Sean Connery bit was an in-joke for a friend of mine.
(3) "AD" - The nickname for Alumnae Hall, Hood College's administrative building. Most of the IT department was moved up to the fourth floor the previous year.
(4) The Melissa virus was the most recent Virus From Hell at the time this satire was written. Hey, it's dated, so what?
(5) The elevator in AD was this ancient elevator with a metal-grate door that was just shy of being a freight elevator. It's a wonder it passed inspection, and I was stuck in it for half an hour once. Not fun, let me tell you.
(6) Another in-joke. A friend of mine lived on the fourth floor of Meyran Hall, the home of the notorious Athletic Floor just below her. I heard some interesting stories indeed.
(7) "Miss Information" - AKA the assistant IT manager. I worked for this woman for a semester. Nice lady, but frustratingly clueless and managed to invalidate an entire semester of work.
(8) Coblentz Hall, my dorm at the time. The dorm rooms were average in size, and at least bigger than some of the rooms I'd seen at other colleges.
(9) "Sir Gone" - The head of the IT department, who we NEVER saw since he was all the way down on the first floor. Nice guy, though, just distant. He found this satire highly amusing when it was published in the literary magazine. (My roommate at the time thought up this pseudonym, which is fairly accurate.)
(10) You'd THINK that with so much computer equipment, they'd take steps to maybe cool down the area to at least preserve the equipment. But some rooms on that floor were sweltering.
(11) This actually happened that semester. The Web Manager, who I initially worked for and really liked, had to quit for personal reasons, and I had to answer to a woman who really didn't understand web site design for the rest of the semester. So yes, this part is my personal rant.
(12) The name of the Help Desk changed five times since I started there. At the time, the most recent name was "End User Computing." (People still referred to it as the Help Desk on campus.)
(13) There was a running joke at the time about the main IT technicians always going out and playing volleyball when we needed them to actually go out and do jobs. That wasn't really the case, but we played a prank on them because of it that I really can't remember now. Maybe![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jennies might know. Hey, War, can you refresh my memory?
(14) I can't tell you how many times this happened. We'd go down to check what was wrong in the computer labs to find someone had downloaded some shareware that was mucking up the system and have to ghost another computer to fix the problem.
Also, a note to Bank of America: POST THE TRANSACTION ALREADY so I can mail out the Ponies I sold, damn you!
I am not dead, just busy. :)
customers_suck a while back, and mentioned the rhyming rant I did about my college IT department for my Satire class in '99. Got a few requests to find it posted somewhere, so I'm tossing it up here - complete with footnotes.An Ode to IT
(Incompetent Twits)
For those who are wondering, this was written as my final Satire project in April of 1999, after an especially frustrating three semesters working for my college's IT department. They've gotten better, but after that semester I quit the work-study job out of sheer disgust. Footnotes and references can be found at the end of this. I realize the meter's WAY off, but I was on a roll and tossing in the classical references and the tangents like crazy.
The legends tell of evils past,
The vengeful wrath of Tiamat,
The tremors and the aftershock
In the wake of Ragnarok.
Of stony fate from Medusa's stare,
Her flashing eyes and serpent hair,
How beneath the churning of the sea
Lay the drought-causing Nuckelavee.
Sakhmet's rage became love of blood,
Jealous Hera assailed Zeus' brood,
The bean sidhe sang vile destiny,
Death entwined in her melody.
Sun and serpent would nightly clash,
Til Ra gleamed high o'er Apep's ash.
Yet even in those times of dread
As lives were lost and blood was shed
No fiend back then could e'er compete
With the horror we now rise to meet.
Its lair lies in no distant land;
The beast is often close at hand.
In schools, in offices you'll roam
Within the walls of your own home
No matter where you go you'll see
The demon whom they name "PC."
From whence has this machine been spawned?
Its source, on us, has not quite dawned.
We're at the mercy of the Fates--
That is, if they work for Bill Gates.
Content no more with pen and ink
You'll fall into its trap, I think--
Ten page papers by hand alone
Lead to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
So off you go to Rosenstock (1)
But soon to your dismay and shock
The filled hard drive will not behave
While MS Word declines to save,
The printer's jammed, and you can tell
Your thesis has been shot to hell.
"My G.P.A. will not survive
The scourge of Windows 95!
It says the system has to halt,
That it's General Protection's fault,
And that the buffer's gone awry,
But I don't know what that means," you cry.
With that, your fate is set in stone.
Although you know you're not alone
In panic, you start pondering
Lifetime careers at Burger King.
But as you bow your head and weep,
Cursing Microsoft and lack of sleep,
Suddenly light shines from above
A voice of wisdom speaks with love.
(That might just be your fantasy
Since it sounds like Sean Connery.)(2)
"Consign yourself not yet to doom.
Salvation lies beyond this room.
Downloads corrupted this machine,
So-called savers of the screen,
By morons who permit this hell
So they can have their AOL.
In short, this new catastrophe
Can't be repaired by one like thee.
I'd point you to the greatest good,
But in our fair kingdom of Hood
Your answers can only be had
In the hall by the name of AD."(3)
The voice of reason fades away,
Despite your pleas for it to stay.
In the absence of its bright light
You must admit, it could be right;
To rise from the depths of despair,
To fight the creature in its lair,
To drive the Melissa virus away,(4)
To banish spam and Y2K,
No choice remains but to go see
Information Technology.
Your journey squanders quite some time:
Four flights of steps are yours to climb.
The stairs are not the only way
To reach the topmost floor today--
But you know that elevator
Will break down sooner or later.(5)
Soon you complete your ascent,
Out of breath and muscles spent.
Step through the doors, what shall you find?
The statement "heat box" comes to mind.
'Tis splintered floor and whitewashed wall,
Lining a long and silent hall
Extending to each side of thee
Too distant for your eyes to see.
Of course, that problem would be gone
If you had put your glasses on.
For other reasons you must delay--
Is left or right the prudent way?
(The author wants to quickly note
She stooped not to learning by rote.
But it's not easy to contend
Which way leads to the proper end,
Especially because of the
Department's shortage of A/C.
One can't remain long in such heat
And stay forever on one's feet
So to eliminate more fuss
We must rely on calculus.
With temperature at eighty-eight,
And 150 for one's heart rate,
An angle of degree ninety
Shall start off your trajectory.
If we take the derivative
Of the path you took to give
A friend in Meyran 403 (6)
Your notes from Sociology,
Multiply by each stair you climb,
Write it in Eastern Standard Time.
Check the alignment of the stars;
If Venus isn't blocking Mars
Perhaps some wisdom shall be had
By opening the Iliad--
Find a quote from Virgil's pages
Like they did in the Middle Ages.
As substitute we instead look
Within the page of a phone book.
It opens to page eighty-eight--
That was the temp, not the heart rate.
Fate guides your touch to this entry:
Some Dundalk chap named 'Barber E.'
But since the heat is getting tough
To bear, and since there's not enough
Data with which to calculate
Answers for which you try to wait,
Gasping for air with all your might,
What the heck, we'll guess: let's go right.)
Your direction is no more in doubt,
So once you've cussed the author out,
And wisely put your glasses on
Which you should have already donned,
You turn and search from door to door
For help that should be well in store.
All doors are locked, but then you look
And notice there's a hidden nook.
This office now belongs to the
Associate Director of IT;
Perhaps you'll find some mitigation
By speaking with Miss Information.(7)
With a tap the door swings wide
As you gape at the room inside.
The office space around you looms,
It's bigger than most Coblentz rooms.(8)
Two windows let the sun spill in,
One holds an A/C unit within.
To top it off, a padded chair
That couldn't be cheap is also there.
After plastic seats, a student feels
A tad jealous; hell, it's got wheels!
Yet its cushions support no behind,
Your searching gaze soon fails to find
Any sign of help or reprieve,
Your bad luck you just can't believe.
(In short, there's no one else to see.
Miss Info's office is empty.)
Naturally, you're quite perplexed.
Has your quest for aid been hexed?
Defeated, you turn back around.
Salvation here will not be found.
But soft! As you prepare to go
With heavy heart and tales of woe,
Around you turn only to meet
A stack of boxes with sneakered feet.
"I do hate to sound like a bitch,"
It says, "but I've been forced to switch
My hours twenty times by now,
So that some idiotic sow
Can get eight workers all at once
To come to the office of this dunce.
Ten times to her we've been referred
Since she can't change the font in Word.
But that's not the reason I'm mad,
Despite the asthma that I've had
To deal with since the age of three,
I'm no athlete as you can see,
Beside this desk I have been told
To place the speakers I now hold.
I do hope that it would behoove
Whoever you are to quickly move.
Please do so now and I can doff
This weight before my arms fall off!"
Wisely you dive out of the way;
Dismemberment's not your forte.
The speakers go down with a thunk
Landing so hard you think they've sunk
An indentation in the floor
But it remains flat as before.
The student worker, with a groan,
Stretching back and limb and bone,
With great skill and trepidation
Pulls her spine back in formation.
You're quite glad to have gotten clear,
But you must ask: is some help near?
"Miss Info," she says, "isn't in.
For supervisors, it's a sin
To be present when you arrive
Seeking aid--yet they're gone by five.
But, of course, the higher you go,
The less people you'll get to know.
For instance, I have yet to see
Our head director of IT,
The Great and Terrible Sir Gone; (9)
I swear, this floor he's never on."
She's cynical and quite a bore
But you're about to ask her more
(Perhaps suggest she try Prozac)
When foolishly, you turn your back.
But then, realizing your mistake
Around you spin, but far too late.
The worker is no longer there,
Having vanished into thin air.
Of course, she probably caught a whiff
Of "real work," and left in a jiff
Fleeing to some far-off domain
Where she can in safety complain.
Either way, you're far from done,
So you turn towards room 411.
This time the portal stands ajar,
Its temperature's hotter by far;
To any student worker's woe
There's no unit in the window, (10)
No A/C with which to relieve
The heat, and you're about to leave
And climb back downstairs to the quad,
But then you notice something odd.
No supervisor sits inside
This room that's only half as wide
As the office you entered last.
But although it's not quite as vast,
Two machines still fit in there
With a student in each chair.
Is the door sign right? You're not sure.
The sign reads "Web Site Manager."
It strikes you something must be wrong.
"Student workers don't get the long
End of the stick in work-study.
With that in mind, how can this be?
It makes no sense to me," you say.
The worker sitting farthest away
Has heard your words and your advance.
Snapping out of her screen-locked trance,
Yawning, she says, "I'd be very
Happy to satisfy your query
If I was more then half awake
And could get a decent break
From the workload ups and downs
That we always get from these clowns.
But since you look like you've been hit
By stress--the Web Manager quit.
For paychecks now we're forced to go
And now answer to Miss Info." (11)
"It's not to say that she's a pain,
The other speaks, "but for us the main
Gripe is her inability
To deal out work with agility.
She doesn't know HTML,
So she can't grasp the minor hell
Of being asked to table-ize
A fifteen-page spreadsheet before five.
I have come in day after day
With nothing to do but draw anime
Until today, when suddenly
Tons of edits were dumped on me.
I'm only here an hour more!
How can I possibly restore
The whole Biology site by three?
The confusion is killing me!"
The first girl sighs and shakes her head.
"I've griped and bitched and often said
That there's no point in hiring
Webmasters who know nothing
About the Internet at all.
Their ignorance is their downfall.
(My friend here is quite far above
The incompetents that I speak of.)
Three hours some other girl spent
With moan and groan and loud lament;
It seems that no one let her know
How web pages are supposed to go.
I found the source of her distress
Amidst her MS Word-made mess.
She tried to use an image file
That any browser finds most vile.
Beginners know not to use TIF;
Pictures that work are JPEG and GIF.
Despite her lack of knowledge, she
Gets paid per hour more than me.
I'm only permitted to affect
Files stuffed in the intranet,
Which will be seen by very few,
Probably never viewed by you.
But important jobs go to the
Folks who don't know <HR> from <P>.
Then there's one who works next door
With an automatic editor
Barely does she rely on code
Leaving her pages in a mode
That will scroll off to the side
On monitors that aren't so wide.
She gets responsibility;
They let her work with FTP!"
With that outburst, she says no more.
You sigh and wander off next door;
Her attitude you should have seen
Coming when she turned from the screen,
From the button she wore that stated
"Mental Health Is Overrated."
You approach the adjacent room
Dreading still more whining and gloom,
But to your shock and surprise
From its cool depths music does rise.
Before you can investigate,
The intervening hand of Fate
Causes you almost to collide
With the worker coming outside.
Her papers you quickly help to grab
And mention the computer lab.
"The EUC should help you,
Which is what they're supposed to do.
If I'm right, the office should fall
At the other end of the IT hall."
This answer seems to be suspect;
A direct answer here you don't expect.
"In good conscience I surely can't
Distract you with another rant.
I do believe it would be wrong;
And this satire's getting long."
Of a response you are bereft;
If you had only first turned left
You could have avoided this ordeal
And by now have gotten help that's real.
(Please try to control your fury;
The author hopes that you will hurry
On to End User Computing
So for now forget everything
To do with your trajectory--
And give her a head start to flee.)
Too tired to turn and strangle
The one who's let the plot dangle,
The Help Desk (now called EUC) (12)
You finally trudge off to see.
Now you don't know what to expect;
Of more griping you're circumspect,
Where there are workers in IT
Grumbling is a certainty.
It's still not what you hoped to find--
Something bigger was on your mind.
Five students and their books here sit;
The room's the size of your closet.
Two PCs are crammed inside too.
At first, no workers notice you;
One is speaking into the phone,
"What do you mean, it's not alone?
Are you sure there's enough memory?
Do you have a Mac or a PC?
Look, I cannot do anything
If you call it 'a squiggly thing.'
Can you give me some more details?
I won't know what this job entails
If you can't tell me what is wrong.
Is the picture too tall or long?
They're not going to help you out--
I would suggest you scream and shout
At the group playing volleyball.(13)
Then they'll rush to answer your call.
I can't come down myself, you see;
My major's in Art History."
Another is deeply engrossed
Chatting with folks from the West Coast.
Two others in the corner sit
Sorting orders from Track-It.
The fifth worker sits scribbling
Planes and trains and anything
That comes to her imagination--
Since boredom begets creation.
Within a moment, it is she
Who looks and sees you finally,
And then from her mouth does issue
Four blessed words: "Can I help you?"
To your horror you don't recall
What brought you to IT at all!
Trying to think what this could mean,
Your gaze falls on the computer screen.
No earthly scribe could e'er relate
Your shock upon seeing the date.
"Oh my God," you faintly squeak,
"My paper's due date is NEXT WEEK!"
At that point, you hear down the hall
Some ranting about volleyball.
All the workers start snickering.
As closer comes the bickering,
You take the opportunity
To flee from all this insanity.
So thus does our odd fable end.
Although the reader might contend
There's still more to this history,
Nothing of interest is left to see.
(Of course, you'll soon panic and shriek
Since it really was due this week.
To deceive a shareware crack
A student pushed the date/time back.) (14)
So what's the moral of our tale?
When computers begin to fail
Of strange voices do not grow fond,
Even if they sound like James Bond.
If you don't like your papers late,
Always be sure you know the date.
That's not the most important rule:
When your PC acts like a fool,
Unless you're staff or faculty
It never helps to call IT.
--A. Ohlin
April 1999
(1) Rosenstock Hall - All the computer labs and the Math department was holed up in this heat box at the time. They've since moved to a new building.
(2) The Sean Connery bit was an in-joke for a friend of mine.
(3) "AD" - The nickname for Alumnae Hall, Hood College's administrative building. Most of the IT department was moved up to the fourth floor the previous year.
(4) The Melissa virus was the most recent Virus From Hell at the time this satire was written. Hey, it's dated, so what?
(5) The elevator in AD was this ancient elevator with a metal-grate door that was just shy of being a freight elevator. It's a wonder it passed inspection, and I was stuck in it for half an hour once. Not fun, let me tell you.
(6) Another in-joke. A friend of mine lived on the fourth floor of Meyran Hall, the home of the notorious Athletic Floor just below her. I heard some interesting stories indeed.
(7) "Miss Information" - AKA the assistant IT manager. I worked for this woman for a semester. Nice lady, but frustratingly clueless and managed to invalidate an entire semester of work.
(8) Coblentz Hall, my dorm at the time. The dorm rooms were average in size, and at least bigger than some of the rooms I'd seen at other colleges.
(9) "Sir Gone" - The head of the IT department, who we NEVER saw since he was all the way down on the first floor. Nice guy, though, just distant. He found this satire highly amusing when it was published in the literary magazine. (My roommate at the time thought up this pseudonym, which is fairly accurate.)
(10) You'd THINK that with so much computer equipment, they'd take steps to maybe cool down the area to at least preserve the equipment. But some rooms on that floor were sweltering.
(11) This actually happened that semester. The Web Manager, who I initially worked for and really liked, had to quit for personal reasons, and I had to answer to a woman who really didn't understand web site design for the rest of the semester. So yes, this part is my personal rant.
(12) The name of the Help Desk changed five times since I started there. At the time, the most recent name was "End User Computing." (People still referred to it as the Help Desk on campus.)
(13) There was a running joke at the time about the main IT technicians always going out and playing volleyball when we needed them to actually go out and do jobs. That wasn't really the case, but we played a prank on them because of it that I really can't remember now. Maybe
jennies might know. Hey, War, can you refresh my memory?(14) I can't tell you how many times this happened. We'd go down to check what was wrong in the computer labs to find someone had downloaded some shareware that was mucking up the system and have to ghost another computer to fix the problem.
Also, a note to Bank of America: POST THE TRANSACTION ALREADY so I can mail out the Ponies I sold, damn you!
I am not dead, just busy. :)
