Allrighty then. Here I go at my first attempt at writing a blog. I don't know that anyone will ever read it, but let's see how it goes. I'm mostly doing this as a place to rant about my job. I'm employed as a technician for Aroma Computers in Orem, UT. I love working there. I have great co-workers and my employer is awesome. My only complaint is those danged customers.

Yesterday I was working on a customer's computer and he needed to have his WindowsXP Professional reinstalled. I called him to let him know three weeks ago when he first brought it in (it turns out that he was on vacation in France for three weeks, and we finally got ahold of him yesterday) and ended up leaving a message with one of his kids. It's now been three weeks and we finally hear from him. I told him what was going on and he said he'd find his Windows product key. So, about two hours later one of his sons calls back with a product key that starts with "FCKGW...". O.K., anyone who knows much about Windows piracy would know that any key that starts with those five letters has been blacklisted by Microsoft. It is a key that will only work with a hacked Windows installation CD. Usually Windows XP Corporate (there are legitimate versions of corporate out there, but for this key you have to hack it). I just wanted to laugh. I didn't notice at the time when he read me the key, so I just wrote it down and went to work doing a repair install of WinXP. Well, it didn't work of course since we don't have a hacked version of Windows XP Corp, and we weren't going to find one for him. So the guy is just all steamed and unhappy about not having his computer working, and he said he'd try and "find" another key. Yeah, right.

Here's another good one just for laughs. I received a phone call just after clocking in on a Saturday about three weeks ago. The customer said that he had been having a lot of pop-ups coming up even when he wasn't on-line. So I told him to use Spybot - Search and Destroy and Lavasoft Ad-Aware to get rid of the spyware on his computer. But it gets better. He said that one of the pop-ups had said that his Windows Messenger was leaking information out onto the Internet. So, based on what he saw on the unsolicited ad (and knowing just enough about Windows to be really dangerous, he ran regedit (which allows you to edit your Windows registry - don't do this unless you are absolutely sure you know what you're doing) searched through his registry for every occurence of the word "Messenger" and subsequently deleted them all and now his computer won't boot into Windows. I had to put him on hold so that I could laugh. I told him that the only thing he could do was reinstall Windows, since he had just done the equivalent of running a cheese grater over fine silk. I then went and told this rather funny story to my supervisor, who informed me that she had just talked to our genius friend about half an hour before I got there, had the same conversation with him, and gave him the same advice. I'm just wondering if maybe he was expecting another technician to give him some magical tool that would fix everything he'd done. Almost makes me want to take his computer away to protect it from any further abuse. Hmmmmmm.....