The Rage Page

I'm not quite sure why things irritate me so much, just that they do, and if I don't get the resultant rage out of my system I'll blow up and take half of London with me. This page is my means of getting the rage out of my system.

So, don't take any of this stuff personally - it's not aimed at you (even if I name you in the text!) And, please, don't assume that because I'm raging about a certain subject, it means I've never once committed whatever terrible sin it is I'm raging about... far from it. In fact, more often than not, I will manage to commit said sin, having raged about someone else doing whatever-it-is just a few minutes earlier. But when I do whatever-it-is, there's always a good and legitimate reason for my actions. Hypocrite that I am :)

"I'm not a boffin"

In the course of my work, particularly in previous jobs, I used to find myself delivering IT Support to some very creative people (predominately Video Editors). I quite enjoyed this, being creative myself and I was often able to speak with people about the stuff which interested me, while legitimately doing my job.

Once in a while however, I would have to help out someone who was not quite so keen to learn.

I should point out that I have no problem with people who simply can't get their head around a concept - I have to work very hard to understand most maths, such as algebra or calculus and usually conclude "I'm never going to use this information, I'll put my valuable brain power to something more interesting and important to me". However it irritates me greatly when someone is too lazy to learn the most basic things about something which they use every day (like a computer system that they have just bought to use to get their job done). I may be wrong, but I have noticed in the past that artistic types are particularly prone to this type of laziness.

Occasionally, I would get a call from someone who was experiencing a problem with their computer-based editing system, which stemmed from the fact that they had absolutely no idea how it worked. Usually, this arose from the fact that they'd wanted to take the next step to a bigger and better editing system, and their dealer had sold them a PC-based system, taking no notice of the fact that the customer had never used a computer. I didn't really mind being called and asked how to do something really basic and first having to explain that in the bottom left of their screen the customer should see a button labelled "Start", because we've all got to take the first step at some point.

In fact, it was quite rewarding to spend half an hour patiently and gently explaining a little about how the system worked - checking at every opportunity that the customer understood what I was talking about - and know that I had helped someone who was sitting in front of several thousand pounds worth of kit, which they had no idea how to use, to take the first step into learning about what fantastic stuff this equipment was capable of.

And then once in a while, one of these customers, before I even got started on explaining the system and how to use it, would be too lazy to listen and would trot out the phrase "I'm not a boffin"

And that little phrase meant a multitude of things. It was a shortcut. All in one expression it said "I don't think that you, a techie, are capable of explaining things in a way that I, an artist, will understand" and "You on the other hand are a boffin" (a word which carries with it an implication of tank tops, buck teeth and greasy hair) and most irritatingly of all, it said "I'm too set in my ways to accept that a computer is simply another tool, no different from my previous editing suite, which I was perfectly capable of using". This sort of laziness is, in my opinion, practically a slander against the capabilities of the miraculous organ that is the Human Brain.

To add insult to injury, one of the customers who had previously spoken to me every few days for at least three months trying to get his system working, eventually bought the kit into our office. My boss had "met and greeted" the customer when he arrived, and had then sent for me to set up the kit and find out what was wrong with it. I introduced myself, so the customer knew I was the same girl he'd spoken to over and over when trying to sort out his problems with me on the phone. And I then spent 10 minutes or so setting up the kit and firing it up to see what the problem was. At that point, the customer asked if I was going to get someone "technical" in a minute!

I resisted the temptation to throw him out of the plate-glass window he was standing in front of and pointed out, in the sweetest and most patient voice I could muster, that I was the UK technical expert with this particular product but if he wanted I could ask if one of the programmers from Germany would be willing to fly over to speak to him some time?

He apologised

Past Rants

If you didn't catch it, my first rant was called Causality Man and the No Wonder Kid