Journal

Okay, so it’s not as bad as all that…

12 Comments

I’m still in Johannesburg, and BrainShare Africa is actually going pretty well. Sure, sure, I can’t watch movie trailers over the half-meg pipe (“trickle-feed”) we’ve got, but I can update my LiveJournal, check my email, and basically keep my fingers at least halfway on the pulse of the things they’re supposed to be taking the pulse of.

Tomorrow’s 2-hour technical session still threatens to cave my head in, but I’m feeling relaxed about it right now. I expect there’ll be time enough to stress about it tomorrow, right?

I met a South African Schlocker yesterday afternoon at 3pm. We went out and grabbed a bite to eat, while I sketched a caricature of him. “Draw something every day” is a good rule for a cartoonist to live by, and that particular drawing came out quite nicely.

I haven’t drawn anything today, yet. Maybe I’ll doodle on a scratch-pad during the “Meet The Experts” session. It starts in 90 minutes, and promises to be as grueling as ever. There’s nothing like spending three hours being the personal tech-support bizzatch for 600 increasingly inebriated convention delegates, although I’m told that being attacked by pirahnas comes close.

(Okay, nobody actually TOLD me that. The cow I heard it from was in a movie, and all it really said was “moooooo.” It was a pretty stressed out “mooooo,” though.)

–Howard

12 thoughts on “Okay, so it’s not as bad as all that…”

  1. geesh.
    I’m a tech support weenie, we have to go to conferences now and then and we all dread it.
    Nothing like getting pestered by a couple hundred end-users saying things like: “well stuff I’m trying to do doesn’t work, can you fix it for me?”

    *beats head against desk*

    (btw, thanks for all the schlock you’ve given us. I know I, for one, truly appreciate your efforts in keeping it updated every single day without fail.)

    1. Oh, good! A tech-support guy!

      I’m so glad you’re here. Can you help me make my email come down faster over this slow pipe? I’ve tried everything I can think of…

          1. Re: Pipe piddling

            The End User (hereafter referred to as “Pudding Heads”) is never propperly trained… Be it on the hardware/software, nor potty…

      2. Re: Oh, good! A tech-support guy!

        oy vey, don’t make me kill you mister…

        and no, no I can’t.
        but try downloading as many attachments as you can, stressing the connection will stretch the pipe a little larger as those big chunks come through. So every large file makes it a little faster.
        Really.

        1. Re: Oh, good! A tech-support guy!

          I’ll file that right next to the tip I got about deleting files to make my laptop lighter … ;P

  2. Thank you for the mental image of a very displeased-looking cow going “moo” with a stressed tone, while the water churns around it, just before the piranha attack.

    It amuses me and, I think, properly shows the conceptual level of the situation you’re about to be in.

    1. Damn, I wish Mythocorp were still available on the web. There was one cartoon where the boss tried to train his pet piranha to attack anyone who fell through the trapdoor in his office- it featured a cow chewing its cud and going ‘mooo?’ curiously, because the boss had forgotten to ensure the piranha were starving and overcrowded first. I’d say a con full of drunken people with tech problems counts as starving and overcrowded, though.

      Meanwhile: here’s hoping things lighten up on Mr. Tayler. I’ve done tech support before, and frankly, there are jobs within the Sicilian Mafia that I’d probably take before agreeing to do help-desk work again.

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