Perils Of The People

Thick people are a pain in the arse to deal with. Especially when they do not want to change their level of thickness to "ever so slightly less thick than I was before". People who go by what their mates say are typically thick anyway because if their mate jumped off a cliff they'd probably go and do it too.

A customer bought a computer in they had recased themselves. Fortunately they had not fired it up otherwise it would have been tears before bedtime. Their mate had said it was easy to recase a computer, which it is if you know what you're doing. A strange concept people seem to have is that they can take a computer apart because the sides come off. When did you last take the car to pieces because the bonnet comes up?

Anyway this user did a good job of recasing. Aside from mounting the board in the case with two screws instead of nine, three stand-offs instead of nine, plugging front USB connectors into the FIREWIRE take-offs (not a good idea), closely followed by not bothering to plug the front panel in (lights and switches), they did a good job. Not. Fixing this required taking the entire lot out to put new stand-offs in, as they were sitting UNDER the board. Surprisingly, the equipment still worked after we'd de-botched it.

For the unitiated, please don't put stand-offs under the board as they'll only cause it to short out and it's as much good as not having any stand-offs at all. The whole point of having the stand-offs is to keep the board off the metal plate to stop it shorting, plus it grounds the boards and stops it moving around.

The other "perils of the people" scenario:

"You wiped my computer and dumped all my stuff in a folder. How do I move it?"

"Where do you want to move it to?"

"I don't know."

"Well where it is now?"

"I don't know," is the repeated answer from the customer.

"Well if you don't know where it is and you don't know where you want to move it to, why do you want to move it?"

"I don't know. See, before you wiped it, I had... *insert some story about the previous set-up of the computer that is totally irrelevant to the discussion anyway*. Plus I've got a load of emails I want but they aren't there."

"Well what email were you using?"

"I don't know." Calmly take a sheet of A4 paper from the printer and write on it in really big letters, "Bang Head Here". (They were using Outlook Express, a program that more often than not refuses to import anything from a previous installation).

There follows a painful exchange where nothing can be explained or resolved because the customer does not understand anything of what they are being told. They know not how to Google, they know not how to do anything. Break things down to their level, they accuse you of being patronising. Go up a notch and it's over their head.

Abraham Lincoln was right when he said (more or less :)) you can please some of the people all the time, all of the people some of the time but you can't please all of the people all of the time. And some people want the moon on a stick and nothing less.