Mark Alexander
You're a bad man. You're a very bad man!
Irreverent, independent, and often snarky partnered married gay boomer and doggie dad who is tired of moral pontification by hypocritical conservative assholes and hate filled religious bigots.
Based on some recent incidents, let me reiterate: If you are the owner of a photo that appears on this site and wish it removed, you don't need to get all legal and send threatening letters and takedown notices; just email me with the photo's URL or leave a comment on the offending post and I will gladly remove it.
In other words…
Retirement
(That's actual number of calendar days. It's a whole lot less if you remove weekends and holidays. And even less than that if you calculate the actual number of days I have to come into the office!)
Honestly, I blame Microsoft. Windows made it possible to use a computer with absolutely no knowledge of how it actually works. I have to admit, I am guilty of this at times.
I understand how it happens, and I'd be understanding. . .if only the person requesting help would ADMIT what they did! Or even KNOW what they did. The average computer user seems to have no learning ability, no applied knowledge skills, no deductive reasoning skills, and no willingness to figure anything out for themselves. My most recent tech adventure was with our receptionist who tried to change to a holiday theme, and managed to change her screen to black text on a black background. It is really amazing that people manage to get to work most days without crashing their cars, or getting killed crossing the street.
"The average computer user seems to have no learning ability, no applied knowledge skills, no deductive reasoning skills, and no willingness to figure anything out for themselves."
THAT, my friend, sums up everything that I hate about my job. I keep telling people they'd have a ready built audience if someone marketed pre-chewed food for these people.
Let's be a little honest here, it's not 100% the user's fault that this sort of thing is possible. Whenever we go to install or update Adobe Flash we get prompted to install another virus scanner. Oracle's java wants to install a toolbar. Random messengers want to install another toolbar. Common utilities might want to install yet another. Users often just click next next next, and so many of even us techies used to do exactly the same thing until we learned better. Sometimes the installers hide the toolbars behind a 'advanced options' which just makes it easier to miss. Ultimately we can also blame marketers and companies trying to squeeze every last dime out of their free plugin.
And some users are just a special kind of idiot.