Goodnight and good luck

It is with a heavy heart that I must now bid you, my fair readers (both of you) farewell. This is something I have been contemplating for a while now, and Dr. Nerd's Technical Trauma Center will be closing (at least temporarily...) There are two reasons for such an untimely end to my tribute to the techno-stupidity of others:

I've become obsolete. As I had mentioned in a prior post, we recently hired a new IT guy who is a god among geeks. Everything around the office is starting to work the way they describe it in the manuals, and he's restricting our access in ways that only the most blazing idiots could screw up badly enough that they'd require help. Unlike those who held this position before him though, this guy is actually qualified and my dear colleagues are coming to me less and less with their questions and problems. I'm starting to realize that the archives will only get me so far and eventually, I'm going to need some new material.

More important than this though, is something I'm terribly ashamed to admit. Doctor Nerd, savior of the clueless masses (who enjoys laughing at them behind their backs), has been beaten. It pains me to type this, but I have fallen to the forces of evil and stupidity. This happened a few days ago and I've been broken up about it ever since...so much so that even my new favorite co-worker setting me up with her (very attractive) nice little Jewish girl friend hasn't been enough to vanquish the thought of this failure from my mind.

One of my colleagues (a repeat offender) called me to see if I could come help her with something. She was getting very angry and close to throwing "this damn computer" out her window (odd, since this particular co-worker doesn't have a window). I went over, figuring it would be something amusingly, innocently dumb that I could share with you. However, what I found was something way over my head. She was working on an enormous spreadsheet, copying data from one workbook to another. When clicking on a cell in the destination workbook, however, it was opening up a blank email addressed to various people whose names were in the first workbook. I figured she was somehow hyperlinking cells in her destination sheet to email addresses in the origin sheet, but was concerned by the randomness of the addresses and the fact that the "mailto" function was being put into what seemed like miscellaneous cells - there was no pattern to speak of. I had her send me the workbook so I could do a quick zeroing out of the formatting, which is supposed to remove the hyperlinks. It worked, but 4 minutes after I gave it back to her, she called again in a panic. Apparently copying one additional set of fields over put ALL of the random links back. I took a look at the original book but couldn't see anything there. Even google was of no use to me in figuring this out. I never thought I'd see the day when I was truly, completely, hopelessly stumped, but it has happened and I feel that continuing under the Dr. Nerd moniker would be akin to fraud. At best, I should be demoted to "Med Student Nerd" or something equally degrading.

So with this, I bid you all farewell.

Shalom Beeotches!!!!!

New hires + the old guard = hillarity ensuing

We recently enhanced our staff with the addition (or promotion) of a former intern. She just graduated, seems very bright, motivated and enthusiastic. After accepting our offer, she promptly changed her instant messenger screen name to something appropriate and sent an email around to the staff letting us know that her old name was no longer active. She got a reply from one of the old timers, who took a liking to her during the internship, congratulating her and asking what a screen name was...

Inspiration from beyond the hallowed halls

Thankfully, I got this one from a colleague whose significant other is an IT person. This did NOT come from here (although it wouldn't have surprised me if it did)...

A co-worker got a pen stuck inside our printer. He started to try and remove the pen, but I told him we don't have time for that now, just put a note on the printer telling folks not to use it and then report it to the Help Desk. So he grabbed a piece of paper and scrawled on it.

I left before he finished the note. . . .

About 20 minutes later, one of my techs comes in laughing and says he was just in the lobby, saw a piece of paper on a printer and went to investigate.

Below is what he found. Sometimes things don't always come out the way you want them to........

Nerdiness is next to godliness

My company recently changed our IT department, getting rid of the outsource and hiring a new superstar...the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned. He started a week ago and I've become obsolete, at least as far as tech support is concerned. On the bright side, it's the first time in years I really feel like it's going to be a challenge to keep up my less than acceptable technical activities at the office (no more bittorrent, no more downloading, probably no more hacked, cracked or patched proggies on my machine, until I can beat this bastidge).

With my alter-ego and tech support role apparently no longer active, I'll have to turn to other sources for inspiration. Thankfully, I had one today...before going any further, I must warn you that what you're about to read is nauseating.

I was out for the day with a client...actually, 3 of the senior people at one of my client companies. It's a somewhat revamped team, as I've had one primary point of contact for the last 5 years or so, but he recently left the company. The guy that replaced my longstanding contact is a nice guy, and seems pretty good at what he does. He had an absolutely beautiful thinkpad laptop too, which immediately made me think he was cooler than he seemed...at first.

When we were on our fifth meeting of the day and I was fighting to stay awake, I was taking notes as replacement guy's boss was talking to our audience. Just as I was about to doze off, new guy's computer started making some of the most heinous noises I'd heard in some time...never before have I heard a battery warning alarm blare so loudly. He shut off his computer but didn't bother to put it away. About 10 minutes later, I happened to look back over and saw him still sitting, looking intently at the screen on this pretty laptop. At that point, I saw something that disturbed me beyond belief. There he was, a senior executive at one of my longest standing clients, with a finger shoved deep in his nose. If that wasn't bad enough, I then saw him pull finger from nostril, and start typing again (typing what, I have no idea - I thought the laptop was still powered down). Glancing over a few other times during the meeting, I saw several more gross abuses of technology, including one instance where he appeared to be knuckle deep, and another where he looked like he was doubling up, the first time since kindergarten that I've seen someone with both index fingers simultaneously invading the nasal cavity. As grossed out as I was, the only thing I could think was that poor laptop.

wow, I really AM a geek.