Stupid Students

In what seems more and more like another life, some 15 years ago, I was an assistant in a computer lab belonging to the computer science department of my university. The lab consisted of a bunch of 286 IBM PS/2s with only a 3.5″ floppy drive — they had to boot with an operating system disk and then put in the program disk, and so forth.

One day a student was having problems booting up the computer. I went to see what was happening, because she was becoming increasingly vocal about the quality of the hardware and the incompetence of the people (me) who were supposed to maintain it. I found that she was trying to boot off a floppy with no operating system. So I tried to tell her that she needed a DOS diskette to boot the computer.

* Her: “Why?”

* Me: “Well, because without the operating system the computer just cannot work.”

* Her: “But I don’t need the operating system.”

* Me: “I assure you, you do.”

* Her: “No, you don’t understand, I’ve already passed the operating systems exam. I’m preparing the coursework for simulation theory, so I don’t need an operating system. I already passed. Really.”

* Me: “I’m not talking about the exam. I am talking about the operating system for the computer.”

* Her: “Why on earth should I want to put an operating system on the computer when I have already passed the exam? I need to study simulation theory, not operating systems! The arrogance! Now you want to tell me what I should study? You don’t think I passed the exam on my merits alone? Huh?”

She stormed out of the lab and filed a formal complaint with the department’s secretary. The worst part was that I got reprimanded, because, apparently, the senior management didn’t know any better than she did. Yes, she graduated a couple of years later.

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Stupid CoWorkers

I worked as systems administrator for a complete and utter fool at a law firm. This guy called himself a “computer specialist” and even had brochures printed that touted his computer expertise. Yet he BARELY knew what a computer was. This wouldn’t have worked but for the fact that his cohorts, the other attorneys, were even dumber than he was. The best description of that syndrome I ever ran across was the saying “in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

So we got a computer network on the Doofus’ recommendation. This was about 1992 so it wasn’t anything as modern as the networks today. He said we needed to network because we needed to have email capabilities. Just inter-office email, internet email was too new and not even considered. So we networked. Then when it came down to the end, they found out that to buy the licenses and have network versions of the software, which was needed for us to be able to have email, would cost $1,200 more. So the Doofus made the decision that we would then NOT get the network version and he ordered me to borrow the stand-alone version of the software from the office of my friend who worked in a nearby office. I complied and eventually wrote a Word Perfect Macro that accessed a DOS command and ran a Novell Network broadcast message that you could customize. It was like an inter-office instant message. Forever after the Doofus called this “our email system.”

It gets worse. One day, he went to a bar association seminar on computer piracy and came back all pumped up on this new knowledge. He marched straight to my desk to announce to me that he had learned about computer piracy and “it is a bad thing”. He said “We have to make sure we never do that.” I was momentarily stunned and then said “But we do that all the time” and I explained the things we’d been doing that he personally had ordered me to do (buying one copy of software and installing it on all 35 computers, borrowing software from other law firms, etc.) I said “If we did any more of this, I’d have to have a patch on my eye and a parrot on my shoulder.” The sad thing is, I don’t know for sure that he really understood it.

Not long after that, our network crashed briefly and I had to reset it all and I had the receptionist page everyone that they needed to reboot their computers. Guess who called me to see what that meant? You guess it, the DOOFUS!!!

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