January 29, 2002 - 4:29 pm
chain smokin socially inept chemical engineer man
the one where the fool has to deal with milton's anorexic twin brother.
So,
Oh. Boy.
One of our clients at work is paying our company some real bank just to let one of their employees work in our lab for the next three months until they get their own facility built. Not to be mean--okay, yeah, to be mean--if they fuckin handed over Fort Knox, that wouldn't be enough.
Let's call this guy Chain Smokin Socially Inept Chemical Engineer Man. We'll start with his appearance. He's probably in his late 50's and has the fashion sense of Dilbert. He wear thick, tinted glasses that are as big as dinner plates. His black hair is slicked back and has a pretty bushy mustache. His skin has more lines than a metropolitan road map and has the appearance of cheap leather, most likely from decades and decades of smoking. The way this guy looks (and, from what my poor co-workers say, smells) like he smokes charcoal briquettes rather than tobacco. Let's put it this way--if George McFly cornholed the Marlboro Man, and somehow, through nicotine and tar-induced genetic mutations, they conceived a child, Chain Smokin Socially Inept Chemical Engineer Man would be the result. His voice has the eerie quality of a hippo mating call. It's low and rumbling, like distant thunder (or a long-distance fart), and it rips and claws it's way through the air so that you could hear his conversational voice in, say, China.
Chain Smokin Socially Inept Chemical Engineer Man has the computer expertise of a flounder, yet he uses computers all the time as part of his job. His program of choice, for doing whatever-the-hell-he-gets-paid-to-do is Lotus 1-2-3. Now, even though his company bought him a kick ass brand spankin new laptop computer with more processing power than several industrialized countries, Chain Smokin Socially Inept Chemical Engineer Man insists on using a version of Lotus 1-2-3 that's got to be at least five years old, probably closer to ten. Basically, it's a DOS-based program that requires "expanded memory" and all that good shit that old farts like me remember having to fuck with every time we bought a game back in the late 80's just to get the damn thing to run. Plug-and-Play was nothing more than a Bill Gates wet dream back then. Back then, you had to know more about your computer than you know about your family just to get a simple game like Pong to work right.
Anyway, I got called in to help him with some computer issues this morning. All he wanted to do was get on the internet and check his company e-mail. He handed me the paper that had the web address written neatly across the top. He told me, in his chain smoking garbage-disposalish voice that it worked FINE on his laptop, but our computer wasn't operating correctly.
I typed in the address as written (something like http://255.255.255.0expansion), and sure enough, it didn't work. So he starts going off about how there MUST be something wrong with our computers. Blah blah blah. He's a garbage disposal with no off switch. I swear to God I'm going to record some of what goes on here so you all can offer some real sympathy because dealing with this guy is like getting a vasectomy with a blowtorch. Seriously. I fudged with the computer a little bit, then tried this: http://255.255.255.0/expansion
Sure enough, it worked fine. Dumb bastard didn't write down the damn slash. (And I know 255.255.255.0 isn't a real site...it's my own little movie 555 telephone number joke thingy joke-like attempt at being humorously dumb, or something like that anyway...)
So then the garbage disposal starts going off again. Now, I know, being a staggeringly painfully shy guy, that I'm not one to talk, but this guy has oral interpersonal communications skills of a dying wildebeest. Think the district attorney from My Cousin Vinny (great flick). That's this guy. Seen Office Space? Chain Smokin Socially Inept Chemical Engineer Man could be Milton's anorexic twin brother.
"Now, now, now, now, now, now, what's this? You put, what, a slash there? I, I, I, I, I've never had to put that there before. You see? See? Every computer is different and it drives me crazy. How would I know to put that slash there? I've never had to put the slash at home. So let's see. Let's see. Let's see. How do I...How do I..." He starts moving the mouse and clicking on things. "How do I...How do I...where is the Favorites button?"
"Someone put the Yahoo bar across the top. Just click on that little scroll bar and..."
"Now, now, now, now, now, see? Every computer is different. Every computer. Now, now, now, uh, uh, this scroll bar? Help me out here. Here? Okay, okay, okay, okay. I see. Every computer is different and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and how do I add this to the Favorites?"
"Click the button that says 'Add To Favorites.'"
"Okay, okay, okay, okay. Now, now, now, I clicked it and it's not coming--oh, here it is. Well, maybe it's just because I'm still logged in. We'll see. Now, now, now, now, I've got another problem. It'll just take a minute, I know you're busy."
"Okay."
"Now, now, now I've got Lotus on my laptop, but, but, but, but, but, when I run it--it's a DOS program--sometimes it tells me it needs something called Expanded Memory or something..."
Must. Find. Way. Out. "Well, you've got Windows XP on your laptop and they've said that several DOS programs won't work with XP--"
"But, but, but, but it WORKS, just with some files. Only really big files ask for the expanded memory."
Must. Find. Sharp. Object. Thrust. Into. Throat. Escape. "Well, XP handles memory much differently than DOS, and I really don't know anything about it and I'm--"
"Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Let me show you something else. Every computer is different. Drives me crazy. I can't get this damn thing to work right. Here. Let me show you something. See? Whenever I run Lotus it comes up in a really tiny little window and I can't resize it..."
He opens a DOS window and types in "botus."
"See, see, see, see, see? It's called botus because I have several copies of it on here. I have 'botus,' 'lotus,' 'motus,' and...here we go. See? See? See? It works fine on my computer at home, but here it comes up in this tiny window."
I tried several different screen resolutions but his laptop just kept shrinking the display rather than actually changing the resolution, thus the annoying little window stayed little. He kept talking and eventually came back to why he uses a DOS-based version of Lotus...
"Now, now, now, now, now, now, Windows just doesn't run as fast as Lotus. I've tried Excel and it's just too slow. Sometimes I do calculations that take three days to go through and I need Lotus to go as fast as possible." He runs a sample Lotus calculation. "See? See? See? Here at the end, the macro shows how long it took, and here, here, here. See? Point three seconds..." Funny, it was clearly more like 15 seconds. "Now, now, now, Excel 97 let you use Lotus macros, see, but Excel 2000 and whatever, they don't let you do that anymore. Because it's Lotus and not Windows."
I tried ever so hard to induce cardiac arrest, but failed. I spent the next thirty minutes listening to him go on and on about how wonderful Lotus is and how awful Windows is, when clearly the poor guy doesn't realize that Excel and Windows are not the same thing. You could get a newer version of Lotus, compatable with Windows, and it would be able to take advantage of the great processing power in the computer MUCH better, and instead of waiting three days for a calculation, you might get it in a few hours.
Poor guy. Sadly, I'm beginning to think most engineers are like that--chemical, mechanical, railroad or whatever. I know a software engineer who is just as maniacally set in his caveman ways. He absolutely refused to work on a Windows-based machine. He wanted an Alpha and whatever operating system it uses (UNIX? I don't know). His employer bought him an amazing (for back then) computer...top of the line, jaw-droppingly wonderful. And he didn't even take it out of the box after finding out it was a PC rather than an Alpha. Crazy. Good guy, though, but quirky as hell.
Anyway, Chain Smokin Socially Inept Chemical Engineer Man would NOT shut up...
"Sometimes, like I said, these calculations run for several hours. Like last year, I put in the Bush/Gore votes in Florida and did hundreds of permeations of the 832 votes separating them, seeing how they come out random, and so on. Took days. I wrote than macro. Like I said, Excel used to import Lotus macros and..."
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!! Luckily, I'm not the one assigned to work with him. THANK GOD. I would go crazy. No joke. He would push me over the line. I'd end up curled up on the floor, drooling puddles and pissing my straight-jacket, giggling like the fool I am.
Chain Smokin Socially Inept Chemical Engineer Man.
Sheesh.
And sadly, maybe, I have a lot of sympathy for him. Like that crazy electrician who damn near killed himself a few years back. Just knowing that he probably (or maybe not) knows what a loser he is, yet tries to think he's cool. I don't know. All I know is, this guy is bad. He's going to push all of us over the deep end.
But at least I might have some funny stories for you all... :)
