From: Ben@lspace.org (Ben) Subject: Cry? I nearly made him. Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 20:17:10 GMT So I'm sitting in my comfy chair, playing some Delta Force and trying to imagine the guy sitting next to me (boss, fun guy, signer of the holy Timesheet of Doom) really is exploding with every shell I shoot into his almost lifeless quivering body, when the phone rings. They say "Never pick up the phone." So I pick up the phone. "Hello, IT office." I try to confuse them from the off with a fuzzy description. "Hi we've just got some new computers and we want to get the internet." Silence... "Yes?" says I, wondering a) who they are, b) where they are, c) why they've phoned me and d) why the screen's gone red and my boss is cheering. "So can you do it?" I abandon the game and resolve to take the .50 cal sniper rifle next time and take him out from the hillside. "Probably." Not giving anything away. "Well we'd like it done as soon as possible, we need to get to the email." Now, I work in an academic research building. The people here have, at the very least, two degrees. Most have a doctorate in how to make human beings and things with four asses. Yet when it comes to reading their email they become the worst sort of luser. The one who either knows it all (and doesn't) or treats the keyboard like the floor of a temple Indiana Jones has taken an interest in. It's 10am, I just got in, and the coffee's still percolating away so I take his details (those that aren't beyond his power to comprehend) and slope up in the lift. I enter the lab and spend 20 minutes fixing the colour correction on an ATI card for the attractive researcher in the corner, making sure she can see the keyboard making her leaning over my shoulder. Finally satisfied I seek out the phonecaller and notice he's using the ordering computer I put in every lab. But something's wrong. It takes me a moment to pin it down; the monitor's different. Instead of the nice 17' trinitron, there's a 15' raster gun in a dirty plastic case. Looking to my left I can see his Apple 7200 is sporting the aforementioned equipment. I resist the urge to kill him outright and settle for resolving to switch all his ports to half duplex when I get back downstairs. To control my fists of death I go and patch his ports in in the comms riser, making sure his 10/100 Apples get 10 rather than the numerous empty 100's (we are massively over spec.'d, I blame academics with more money than sense) and then come back. After convincing him that possession isn't 9/10ths of the law I get the monitors switched back round and his Apples (G3, MacOS 8.5) connected with Appletalk and TCP/IP. "What about the email? Can we get it now?" "I don't know, how did you get it before?" "We just did the telnet thing and used Pine. Do we have telnet?" I don't know, do you? Jeez-louise, they're not my machines. "Did you have it before you moved here?" I ask. "Yes...". "Then I think we can assume you still have it." He gives me a dirty look because he isn't sure if I'm being facetious and he has enough neurons to process my tone of voice. However he has one more trick up his sleeve and begins firing bogons. "The lab supervisor wants to be kept appraised of the computer usage in the lab to stop people misusing the computers after hours. You'll have to give us a breakdown of what people do with the computers in this lab every week." You could have shot Brandon Lee with my face.[1] "Erm, O.K." In less time than it takes to crash NTSP1 I decide to drop their vlan once a week and claim the results have been zero'd and we'll have to try again next week. Cisco kit has such a nice interface. Walking out of the lab with a list of names and usernames (ostensibly to be able to see who is doing what on their computers. So trusting...) I spy that the attractive research is having trouble with a download. Sitting down beside her I telnet to the floor's switch and move her from 10 to 100 (requiring the gene sequencer to take 10 instead) give her machine a reboot. The files come down from the central university server quick as a flash, she turns to me with a smile and thanks me again. I'm so sweet, she says. Across the building I can hear a dot-matrix printer printing out a gene sequence for what I know is a doctoral research paper for Nature. I wonder what kind of results line noise will render... [1] It was a blank Ben -- I'm sorry, you must be confusing me with someone who gives a damn.