dannyman.toldme.com

Hoohah!

The other tech support guy is out this week, so its all me, all day.

And of course, because its Monday, we have to be slammed by dumb people.

Okay, for the record, if you are a web neophyte, do not use Front Page. It will burn you. It claims to be very friendly, because it is a Windows product that reinvents the wheel when it comes time to place content on Unix-based servers. Reinventing the wheel causes trouble, especially if Microsoft reinvents the wheel for you. Not only will you not know what you are doing, but the server extensions will break, and the Unix server support personnel who try to help you will not understand why the extensions are broken, or how to fix them, they won’t even know how to tell you to use the standard FTP part of FrontPage, because Microsoft went and invented its own sort of interface.

I am surely exagerrating, but you throw Front Page in there and you widen the gulf of understanding between a Unix support expert and a Windows-based neophyte. I can talk you through FTP, which is what I ended up doing, but I can not make FrontPage work — when it inevitably breaks — through the telephone.

And then there’s the guy who likes to ask every last questiopn there could possibly be … over the phone … complicated questions you wouldn’t normally come up with … he can not use e-mail? Use e-mail! I tell them to use e-mail! I just spent another 29 minutes on the phone with him. He’s a nice guy, even if he’s sucked up two hours of my time. At least he’s paying for a more expensive account, and he’s an old customer who is migrating to the new platform, so he’s worth it.

Thirteen calls so far today. My lucky number? Not counting tickets and routine tasks and the like. It aint a bad job.