About a year ago, my father called me, saying that he'd had some computer trouble. The two of us talked about what had been going on, and though Dad couldn't give me specifics, I told him that it sounded a lot like a virus. As I lived quite a distance away, this would normally be cause for alarm... but just as it happened, I was due to fly in just three weeks later anyway. So, we both agreed that the simplest solution was to just let me come in and have a look. We hadn't seen each other for several months and we were both looking forward to the trip.

In the meantime, my father's girlfriend got a little frustrated and decided to "take a crack at it". My dad didn't know much about computers, but knew enough to know when he was in over his head. The girlfriend was a little less savvy and a little more brazen. you can all see where this is going... she sits down and starts poking around at anything that looks like it might fix the problem. She freely admits she had no clue what she was doing. The whole while, Dad was behind her saying "Leave it the fuck alone..." and "He'll be here in two weeks, don't worry about it..." All the while, she's saying "Control Panel, what's this dooo??" And Dad is throwing in another "LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE!" for good measure.

I know nothing of any of this. I'm just packing and otherwise getting ready for the trip. Four days prior to my flight, I get a call from Dad. "Ummm... yeah, she decided to try and fix it... and now I'm seeing all sorts of stuff I can't recognize..." I try my remote login, no luck. So I have him describe it to me. Dad was a creature of habit, I'd set up his desktop a certain way, and what he was describing to me was nothing like it. It sounds like...

Oh my God. The Compaq Administrator default desktop.

There were only two ways this could have appeared on his screen. One would be if he somehow managed to access the Administrator account. That was highly unlikely. That leaves one more option... that she somehow managed to FFR the thing using the recovery partition. I had him look for anything that would indicate his data was still on the hard drive. Nada.

"Well, Dad, I hate to tell you this, but it looks like she somehow wiped and reinstalled Windows. So anything you had on there is gone."

"Yeah, that's what I kinda figured. So, can you fix it?"

"It's not really broken, it's just no longer set up the way you like it. But yeah, when I'm in, I can set it all back. Honestly, she did exactly what I would have been doing... the only difference is, I'd have known what I was doing."

I hear the girlfriend in the background 'What did he say?' "He said you shouldn't have been fucking with it!" More laughter from both. 'Was it a virus?' she asks. Dad relays "...Is it possible I have a virus?"

"NOT ANYMORE!" I snort, and the three of us nearly piss ourselves laughing. "Yeah, Dad, one thing she did do is get rid of the bad with the good... so you might not have your old stuff on there, but you don't have any viruses either!" I'm just astonished as to how she could have actually gotten that far by accident. There are several prompts and scary-looking screens warning inexperienced users if they're really sure they want to do this... granted, I can totally imagine her bumbling around thinking "Recovery! Hey, I like the sound of that!"... but doing a complete restore had to be like throwing magnetic letters on the fridge and somehow coming up with a Shakesperian sonnet.

"He said 'Not anymore!'" I can hear in the background, along with "I'm sorry, I should't have been messing around, I had no idea what I was doing."

In the end, no serious harm was done, and I had a new rule for all pending repairs: "Don't fuck with it."

you do twice the work as some co-workers?

I do helpdesk so I'm on the phone all day. I had a chat with the boss today and got to see my stats. Turns out I take almost twice as many calls as the department average.

Twice as many.

So this means that I literally do more work than pretty much every other analyst there. Only one person took more than I did...and he doesn't have project work like I have in addition to taking calls. I feel absolutely no guilt that I got a bigger raise and bigger bonus than anyone else there.

The only reason I'm still there is because the job market sucks around here and I'm not willing to leave my well paying job for a contract to hire position even if it does pay more.

This morning I get a call that one of the partners at the firm broke his 18 month old iPhone; the screen is cracked. He asks about getting the 3gs upgraded to an iPhone 4s and I let him know his due date is in June but I'll ask.

Admin lets me know that he can get a replacement 3s from stock and has to wait until June for a new phone. I communicate this to the user....and then he decides that he'll live with the cracked screen for 3-4 more months.

I don't understand these people...

One of my tickets this morning was for a voice-mail issue...the user couldn't get into the system. The admim fixes things and resets their voice-mail PIN. So I call the user back

And leave a voice-mail telling them that their PIN has been reset and what it is.

One of the other analysts points out what I just did...and I have that moment where you realize just how dumb what you just did was. I did follow up with an e-mail to the user since that was working.