Sunday, October 20, 2002

Dad's Keyboard 7 Timezones Away

[...]

Dad called this afternoon, it must have been midnight over there. For what? His keyboard was not typing the letters he saw on the keys, and I had fixed that the last time I was over in July. I barely remembered what I did, but I talked him through setting his locality to NL, but his keyboard layout ot US English 101 in his properties. Since that went well, I also had to diagnose why he was getting no sound, ending up with teaching him how to make the sound icon appear in his task bar, setting the volume with the mouse, and using the special keys on his Compaq keyboard to adjust volume and mute. I told him this was a very expensive support call, he said not at all, if he wanted this support he would have to have someone come over for an hours minimum at 40 euros. I am kinda used to calls like these, my mother used to call me all the time to talk her through programming the VCR. Of course, that wasn't trans-atlantic.

Sometimes I have visions of standing in front of computer professionals and doing the Steve Balmer monkey dance, but yelling "USERS! USERS! USERS! USERS! USERS! USERS!" instead. I understand the sentiment of wanting to instill on a crowd something you think is incredibly vital: the identification of which population is the most underserved and is the key to getting the checks in the mail. In my case it is "USERS! USERS! USERS! USERS! USERS!"