Had to get this off my chest

[J]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 03:31, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> old, but spot-on, and so funny because it's true:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LLTsSnGWMI
>
> Martin

HAHAHA! may be old, but I'd never seen that before... man that brings
back some memories that I thought I had successfully repressed.  If
you think Windows end user support was bad, imagine trying to do LINUX
end user support (for Windows 98/2K users who "bought this linux thing
at the computer store and can't get it to run in my windows")... oh
what a nightmare that was...

But to be honest, far worse than they end-user who admitted to not
knowing anything were the ones who THOUGHT they knew something.  I sat
on the phone listening to a very angry, very loud professor from
Cal-Tech telling me all about how he has a PHd in this and a Masters
in that and he teaches blah blah blah, and it was absolutely MY fault
that this new fangled Linux thing he had installed in his classroom
lab prevented his computers from talking to each other...

Turns out all it was was he had two DHCP servers running (He had set
one up on his "master" linux system in the lab, but still had one
running elsewhere too, so systems were getting all sorts of different
addresses)...

And there were many others... the long time Unix admin who couldn't
understand that Linux != Unix... (though he and I did end up getting
along rather well and kept up with each other for a few years after
that), or my favorite, the secretary who accidentally deleted all
those empty files in /dev to clean up the system (on a Friday
afternoon, in a small company, after their sysadmin had already left
for a 3 day weekend out of town and she HAD to have everything
restored before he got back)...

Tech support is like a rite of passage, I think...