Apathy Sketchpad

I got an email from my university today which started as follows:

“To all Physics Undergraduates:

“The Department of Physics & Astronomy is holding the World of Work Careers Fair 2003 tomorrow from 2 – 4.30 in the Staff Common Room.”

Unfortunatley, when my mobile forwarding service truncated the message, all I got was this:

“To all Physics Undergraduates:

“The Department of Physics & Astronomy is holding the World”

This was not the most encouraging, or even the most accurate message I was given today by my vast array of personal electronics though. Microsoft, it appears, don’t know the one reason anyone goes into hardware manager. Today it told my my DVD-Drive “is working properly,” which it quite demonstrably was not. Unpeturbed, I clocked Troubleshoot, and got asked a series of irrelevant questions, and told to call my manufacturer.

Now, I think I’ve covered more-or-less what I think of Time Computers’ technical support, but here goes anyway. Without my warranty number (which I think is in Tingley) all I can get is their website. Their website made but one suggestion, which was to insert the boot floppy provided with Windows, and boot from there with CD-ROM support. This was clearly not going to work, for two reasons. The first is rather complicated and not terribly interesting or even amusing, but the second is that I was never given a boot floppy. All Time give you is a reload CD, which allows you to access a pre-installed copy of Windows permanantly stored on your hard drive. And they even had the nerve to try and charge £50 for that. This is clearly not good enough, and if it ever comes to it, I’m going to complain about it. Or just use a copied Windows disc; I have a lisence anyway, so technically, it’s not illegal. Anyway, getting back to my quest for technical support, I knew their suggestion was doomed, so I clicked “No”, and, like last time, they suggested the same thing again, but in a different colour, as if that would make the blindest bit of difference.

Who is it who writes these messages? Why can they never find anyone with a sense of humour? I don’t think many people would mind much if their computers told them “This device appears to be working properly, but then it was Brian who wrote that driver, and personally, I think he’s on the bottle these days.”