I recently took up additional work at my job. This work involved building PC’s and later became updating the studio to Windows 7. This process was a learning experience which was enjoyable. Much as with every learning experience, observations abound.
One thing I saw, which was more humorous than it was true, was that the less socially outgoing you were the worse your PC state was. With persons who were rather outgoing in the studio, their PC’s were clean and well maintained. The insides were less dusty, the wiring seemed more stable, and overall there was less hassle. Those individuals who I will say are…well… less than socially graceful and friendly had their PC’s resemble a crazy brothel of cabling and useless screws in places where clamps would have worked well enough.
Now the persons who’s computers I am fixing didn’t build their own PC’s. It’s more than likely that all of the observations were simply coincidence. The same goes for those persons who are observed as unfriendly and antisocial. The notion was funny in my mind however and I then added a little fun to my job.
When I zip-tied the cables on the inside, I started granting flashier colors to those who were less likely to say “Hello” in the halls. That way, when they didn’t say hello, I would know that under the hood the PC they hide behind is a pink zip-tie I will use to mock them. And if they were cool and said, “Hey” I made sure the bright orange zip-tie said to the internals of the PC, “Hey man, you’re alright”.
That’ll show those people to not say hello in the halls.
The part that rang truest though was the fact that each PC, regardless of who’s it was, had its own personality. This personality dictated how I approached the PC and whether or not I enjoyed my time on it. The ones who were the most unbearable to be around you felt you just had to deal with it and move on. I didn’t return to those PC’s unless I had to. In this regard, the PC world is similar to people. Each one might look the same, but when you get into the insides, the little differences of how they are constructed and what makes them determines if they’re a joy or a pain to be around.
I find the little things amusing to make the day go faster I suppose. If only you could find this post amusing and it would have just zipped by.
-The Adam
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And I thought I was the only one with crazy ass thoughts like that. I can see myself using colors of zip ties based on how much I liked people. Well that and the green zip ties make things run better so I would of course use those on only the computers of people I liked. Then I would feel bad about later knowing that I had cursed the other people and go back to replace them all with green zip ties.
All I know is that if you make friends with the IT people, they fix your sh*t faster then anyone elses : ) It helps to be a nice person.
Definitely true. Although some IT folk are a bit harder to become friends with. It helps when you speak their language. 🙂
I don’t know man; I know you stated that this observation was more humorous than true, but my experience with people having bad PCs has been different. I haven’t done any IT type work like you are doing where you are gutting computers and all that. But I did work in an office environment where I found some atrocious computers that people were using. Super outdated hardware and software were plaguing these people. But why didn’t they say anything or complain about the condition of their computers? The common link I found was that they simply weren’t accustomed to technology enough to truly be bothered by it. These computer users knew that their systems were slow but never raised a fuss about it. These users were mostly of older generation and that leads me to assume that they were not completely familiar with current technology to care enough that everyday they had to wait almost 10 minutes after boot-up just to start working on their computer.