Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

Reminiscing the days before Mercurial and Git,

1) I delete foo.cpp.
2) I tell Subversion to delete foo.cpp from repository.
Subversion: Error - can't delete file because it doesn't exist locally.
3) I create some dummy foo.cpp.
4) Again, I tell subversion to delete it.
Subversion: Error - can't delete file because it exists locally.

Every time I get angry with Git (strangely never happens with Mercurial), I remind myself what Subversion was like.

Just reminiscing about the time I needed to recover my ldap password and the procedure consisted of an asthmatic tech support dude showing it to me in a giant spreadsheet.

Just reminiscing when back in the "old days" video games had cheats built in...

Proton men and the flying Dutchman IN AOE3...

Now have to find hackers to create trainer apps that change values in memory and bypass cheat detection...

Reminiscing my first tech sticker, this one's from my first hack-a-thon. :') gonna go to the same one in 2 weeks, kinda nervous because I didn't really learn much compared to last year. (but I shamelessly collect the stickers)

Oh why must reminiscing be such a horrible thing. Going back to when I was a white hat, didn't do a major amount but oh how the times have changed, makes me feel old and I'm only bloody 20, computers have come a long way in the past 5 years...

That feeling when you were sick as shh and almost good now after eating good pepperoni sausages and wine, suddenly getting energy and reminiscing about : (1. Biggest priority)
1. Am I really going to play with code side project it's Saturday
2. Nah I'm still going to play Dota or wow or idk
3. Laying in bed devranting and telling to myself am I that tired and lazy to do the above ones? Nah it's just socializing
4. Laying in the bed turning the phone display down ?
Yeah tough choices probably get some wine and do some music idk man

Reminiscing about my old name generator...

-Shart’Cannon, Village of Linlar’marlu-

... still my favourite

So I was reminiscing about my hs and uni yrs and thought of the teachers in my hs Sr yr and my uni freshman and semester abroad. I went to business school in uni but freshman year was all classes in the general subjects like calc n physics that everyone had to take no matter what school you were in.

So feels like all that time in bschool was a waste... No memorable moments at least.... Only take away perhaps is maybe I'm a slightly better investor but for that I probably got more from reading interesting classics than from the classes....

Well this is in fact just me reminiscing, instead of telling anecdote.

My first PC was a pentium two, the cpu casing being those horizontal ones, and a big bulky monitor resting on top of it; all white. A white mouse, two white speakers (you know the ones). I was perhaps just about 6 years old, and I used it the first bunch of times to play Mortal Kombat, and Sega's Moto Racer 3, and watch animated disney movies but mostly mickey mouse on VCD. I guess my habits of gaming and binge watching started way too early.