As said whilst watching "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", just as the Kraken appears...

A stick of RAM I installed in a family friend's computer (upgrade from 512MB to a gig) decided after almost 3 weeks to no longer work. Turns out $OEM did something where the factory-installed stick of 512 doesn't like anything else...the timings match exactly so I'm not sure what the issue is.

She bought an extra stick when she bought the computer, but misplaced it the last time I was over there (it's likely that stick will not work either; I tested two of my spare known-good sticks in her system--which takes the same RAM type as mine--with the result of immediate refusal to boot). I explained the problem and asked if she was amenable to paying for a matched pair of sticks that I would install. She agreed and all was well, off to Newegg to find the right bits.

Or so I thought all was well....

She found the other stick last night, and proceeds to leave me a voicemail saying "Oh, Dreamstalker, you don't have to worry about the memory. I found the old stick and will try to install it myself."

She's a self-admitted computer illiterate who dislikes spending money. Yes, I know you want to save yourself the cost of a matched pair plus my install fee, but let me tell you that's much cheaper than you doing something wrong and messing up the mobo.

If I'm lucky, she won't be able to get the case open (it's a bit tricky).

Our high temp here today is 36 C with Humidex of 47. Here are just a few samples of heat-addled stupidity for your entertainment (actual Helpdesk tickets from today):

1. Storefish trying to open her till software by double-clicking with the right mouse button over and over again, then panicking and calling us, literally in tears. This was not a new luser, either.

2. Normally storefish are supposed to restart their tills in the mornings, then open up all their software and do their store opening. Today's brain trust opened the software first, then tried not once but about 50 times to restart the computer. The same error "you must close [$program] before closing Windows!" (only option - click OK) appeared each time Mushbrain tried restarting, but rather than actually READING the message and following its instructions, she just kept on trying to restart until the entire machine crashed and we couldn't even VNC to it anymore. Penalty: I made her click OK on each and every copy of the error message, until she finally got the gist of what it was trying to tell her. (Yes, I could have had her press and hold the power button for a hard reboot, but that would have been way too nice of me!)

3. Lintbrained District Manager sent an email with an attachment to all of her stores, instructing them to print out the attachment. Trouble was, the attachment was formatted for Legal size paper when the store printers can only handle standard Letter, and all DMs have previously been informed and reminded of this fact in writing numerous times. Result: nuclear-powered LART to DM (and all bosses up to God), and major work for Helpdesk, resetting crashed printers at 10 stores this morning, and showing storefish how to reformat their doc for Letter-sized paper.

4. "Manager of Store Operations" (big boss of DM's and Regional Mgrs) requested a couple of weeks ago that we set up Exchange email aliases for the store regions, so she could send messages to stores by region. The higher up they get in my company, the smaller the brains get. Even though Her Ladyship specified the exact email addresses she wanted us to set up for each region, she sent major email neepage to IT this morning, cc'd to God On High, because she couldn't send emails to the regions and it must be IT's fault! It was a pleasure to "reply to all" to her neepage, quoting her original request as well as our written confirmation that the request had been completed as specified, along with attaching the message she had been trying to send out to the stores. The attached message clearly displayed all of the store region email addresses - that SHE had mis-spelled.

Recently we implemented an email system for our stores. The idea was to facilitate communication between head office and the stores, and reduce the use of paper. Our plan was to install Word Viewer and Excel Viewer on the store systems, so they'd be able to view and print attachments, but not edit them electronically. Manglement loved the email idea, and as soon as they heard about it, they gathered like flies circling a dung heap, and began buzzing incessantly around the IT department's ears with many hare-brained ideas and demands on how this new tool could be used.

Both Ops (district managers etc.) and HR were neeping that they wanted the stores to fill out and return Excel spreadsheets electronically. The IT department was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic at this idea. After all, we're the ones who have to take Helpdesk calls like "I can't type my employee ID!!!" [they didn't click in the field to place a cursor in the box, and had to be shown how to do this more than once before they grasped the concept] and "Help me I can't open my software!" [luser double-clicking the icon repeatedly with the right mouse button instead of the left]. The thought of having to teach *these* lusers how to use Excel, and the Helpdesk calls that would ensue, is enough to drive anyone to imbibe copious amounts of alcohol and other intoxicants...

We attempted to bring this to manglement's attention, but of course they cared not one whit, since they wouldn't be the paeons dealing with the fallout. So, we tried another approach by mentioning something that they could identify with - money. "Do you folks know how much it would cost for 150 Excel licenses from Micro$haft??" One would think that at the mere mention of "Micro$haft" they'd blanch and clutch at their wallets, but to our surprise they remained undeterred. So, Senior Analyst contacted our software vendor and got the quote - $300 per store, total cost $45,000! When SA presented the quote to HR and Ops, they were still willing to shell out the money - as long as it came from the IT department's budget!

At this point, we had to get the CFO involved (our new CIO had not yet started with the company). He's higher on our manglement Pyramid of Doom (tm) than the managers of Ops and HR, so his word is law. He nixed the expenditure, using terms that even the empty, bleach-blonde heads of HR and Ops could understand. IT sighed with relief, believing we'd finally found the can of Raid that would put an end to the buzzing pests. Not so.

More buzzing and humming and bumping into windows and lightbulbs ensued. HR and Ops wanted us to pirate Excel from our internal office server license, and install it on the store systems. We flatly refused of course. Stalemate. Finally to shut them up, I suggested we try Open Office Calc instead of Excel, at least this is free. We told them we'd download and test it on our lab register, and get back to them with the results. Of course, we were in no hurry whatsoever to do this testing, as we were still strongly opposed to the whole idea of stores having a full version of any spreadsheet program.

Weeks later, the flies were back. Reluctantly we admitted that Open Calc would work fine on the store systems. But in the meantime, we had devised another plan. We agreed to install Calc at the stores, but on one condition: IT would take zero, that is, NO, responsibility for training stores on this software, nor would we return any "how do I" calls to the Helpdesk. This is the exact same condition we imposed when we agreed to implement Outlook Express email at the stores in the first place. By this time our new CIO had come on board, and we had filled him in on the backstory and shown him some samples from our case history database with the storefish. He was more than happy to back us up on our "condition", to the hilt. Once again we reminded HR and Ops that they could still use Excel and Word Viewers, and have the stores print the docs out, fill them in manually, and return them by courier. In the meantime manglement wanted email up and running "now, now now!!" so we got that started, without the attachments at first. Then we sat back to watch the fun.

As we had expected, for the first few days email was running, the Helpdesk was swamped with "how-to" calls resulting from storefish refusal to RTFM on their email software. Every one of these calls (about 10 per day) were forwarded to Ops, we didn't return one of them.

You can probably guess the rest. Less than a week later, after having become completely fed up with having to return so many dumb howdoI calls about Outlook Express (which they barely know how to use themselves) Ops finally caved in like a cheap house of cards, and brought HR's card house down with them. No more neeping and buzzing about Calc or spreadsheets. It seems Excel Viewer is good enough for them after all!

So much for bright ideas from manglement...

We'll likely be arriving either thurs or friday night and leaving mid-week to come home to ($Buffalo_Sub-suburbs).

• Trip TO NYC/LI: I-90 the whole way across greater NY and then north-side bridge (GWB?) to head out to my bud's home.
• Trip FROM NYC: Scenic route across Staten Island, NJTPK, 380, Delaware Water Gap, 81, SHOPPING!, Binghampton, 86, 390, 39..... you get the idea...

Lately our little retail chain has lost a lot of store managers. The reason? The total inability of their manglement at Head Office, to organize a pissup in a brewery.

As a result, HR and Ops have teamed up to troll every "job fair" over Hell's half acre, to find people dumb or naive enough to want to work for them. Whenever a job fair is coming up, an HR drone submits a request to borrow the shared office lappy to take with them. HR and Ops tag team at these events, one HR drone, one District Manager from Ops. DM's all have lappies of their own, and one would think they'd have some remote clue how to use them. We don't expect this from HR drones, as they all have desktop PC's.

Last night at around 4, the HR drone chosen to go to today's job junket came to pick up the laptop from IT, to use the next morning. I asked this sock puppet if she'd ever used the lappy before; she hadn't. So I instructed her both verbally and in writing to "connect the laptop to your Ethernet cable, the one that looks like a big phone cord (while showing it to her at her desk) and then boot it up and log in using your network ID, this way a local ID will be created on the laptop for you and you'll be able to log in to it tomorrow when you're away." Sock Puppet bobbed her head up and down eagerly (I could have sworn I heard little bells jingling, like the ones on a jester's hat) and assured me she'd do this before leaving work that evening. Besides, she said, the DM would be with her, and would help her if she needed it. Famous last words.

Next morning Senior Analyst, who is off sick, gets an email on her Blackberry at 8:30 am from DM at the job junket: "We can't log in to the laptop!" DM didn't bother to follow IT department policy and submit the problem to the Helpdesk email or phone. SA forwarded the email to the Helpdesk inbox, after replying to DM telling her to a) send such messages to the Helpdesk in future, or call the Helpdesk number; b) log in to the lappy as administrator, password [blank] as in "no password". (Note that I'd recently suggested we set up a Guest local user account on this machine to avoid this kind of problem, but it had not yet been done.) When we received this message, I was not surprised, and I assumed Sock Puppet hadn't followed my directions.

During the usual morning rush of idiotic neepage from the storefish, a couple of calls came to my extension while I was returning store calls, but the caller didn't leave a message. Finally about an hour later, another email came in to the Helpdesk from DM: "We still can't log in to the lappy!" with no further details, nor a phone number where I could reach her. Growling in frustration at the stupidity ("what fucking part of "blank" can't she spell?!" I asked PFY) I replied to her message, repeating once again the user ID and password they were to use. Two more identical emails came in, and another call on my extension (no message again) while I was on the phone with a store. Finally I wrote back "what do you see on your screen when you try to log in?" I got no reply to this.

Finally, DM called my extension again, this time while I was actually not on the phone with a store.

Me - "What happens when you log in?"

DM - "I can't log in, there's a name 'jblow' in the user name area, I need you to give me THEIR password or we can't log in!!!"

[Head, meet Desk. Desk? Head!]

Me - "Umm... did it *possibly* occur to you, to delete the name that's there, and replace it with 'administrator' as you've been instructed numerous times this morning already??"

DM - "Uhhh... umm... never thought of that... "

Me [betting there are a helluva lot of other things this brain trust has never thought of] - "Why don't we try that now, just to see if it works, hmmm-kay?"

With DM's like this one (typical of the species) it's no wonder they're having so much trouble finding grunts who'd sign up to work for these asshats...