The guy I installed the server for runs a small insurance broker company with 5 users. He has Windows 98 (red flag #1) clients and he just bought a Windows 2003 server box. 98 and 2003 is not a supported configuration according to Microsoft, but I spent a lot of time cobbling it together.

This was it, I told myself. I was going to install this fucking thing so clean and perfectly that they would never call me again. My optimism was foolish.

The worst thing about their network is not the computers, although the computers are horrible. It's the users. They're all intelligent people but they have no idea about technology. When they found out they all would have user names and passwords, they wanted the user names to be user1, user2, etc instead of something based on their name so they wouldn't have to add and delete users if the staff changes. That's a bad idea for a lot of reasons which I won't go in to, but I totally understand asking the question. Then they wanted me to restict access to folders with confidential data. That's a great idea. However, when the password discussion came up, they wanted all the passwords to be the same.

No dice, bucko.

This all relates back to how people view technology. They could not do their jobs without technology, yet they want it to be totally hands off. They don't want to have to remember anything, type anything, or know where to even begin to look for anything.

They just want it to work magically. You can't do that. You can't just drive your car and ignore the needle on the fuel guage moving towards the E.

It helps to have IT people to guide the company towards good practices, but in the abscence of IT people you can't just pretend that the computer is a magical mystery box full of wonder and sunshine dust that is going to solve all your fucking problems.

There I was, sitting in front of an old Windows 98 computer, waiting for it start up for the 5th time to install the 30-some odd CRITICAL Windows Updates that were never installed. I started to look around the desk. The user of the computer had a page from one of those page-a-day calendars tacked up to the wall. It was an excerpt from a piece by Dave Barry. The article was about how his computer keeps rebooting and then telling him it has to check the disks and how it seemed to silently blame him, but it wasn't his fault.

It's always the worst computer users who have this shit. They say things like "My Computer Hates Me!" and they forward along all their little computer jokes to their friends via e-mail. You computer does fucking hate you. If your operating system is fucked up, it's probably your fault. Did the computer install Gator and Internet Accelerator on itself? No, you fuck, you fucking did.

Software is like emotional baggage for computers. You keep fucking piling it on and pretty soon all your computer wants to do is sit around and not work and think about how fat it's getting and wonder where everything went wrong and how it got stuck with you as a fucking end user.