Booleint

Day One: A luser calls up and speak with one of our newer support folks. She is very interested in a new technology known as 'Booleint'. She is quite adamant about the fact that we support this new program, and wants to know how it is supposed to plug into WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. [0] Our consultant has NO idea what the woman is talking about, but being a good bob, she attempts to take the woman's name and number so that we can call her back with an answer later. The woman explodes, insisting that she has spoken with our supervisor, saying that she does not have to give us her info, that she is in some way SPECIAL, and we can burn in hell. She hangs up. The newbie puts the question on our open problems board, as per procedure.

Day Four: Consultants have been looking at this problem for the last few days. All of us have agreed that the woman was insane, and more than a tad clueless. We had pretty much dismissed the problem, assuming that the woman was actually speaking of 'Boolean'. She calls back that very same day, wanting to speak to someone about...you guessed it, 'Booleint'. The consultant explained to the hapless luser that she might have been mistaken and that she may have been speaking of boolean. Once again, the luser went ballistic, and hung up in a huff.

Day Seven: (The final chapter). The phone rings. I pick up, and, lo and behold, it's the now infamous Booleint luser. She informs me, quite reasonably, of her problem. I, recognizing my predecessor's mistakes, simply went to the heart of the problem: where did she hear about this 'Booleint'? Well, the story unfolded, a whole sordid tale. She had been at a cocktail party and speaking to some CS individual.[1] The luser had heard the term Booleint and latched onto it as a cool new buzzword. She then proceeded to insist to her friends that she was running the new Booleint software, and they were all quite jealous of her new-found knowledge. Anyway, she wanted to know how to use this software in her WP51 dinosaur....I cordially explained to her that Boolean was simply a CS term for a True False variable, and was worthless in WP. She persisted in her quest, telling me, "Damn it, I KNOW you can do this, you just don't want to tell me." At this point, I had lost all patience with this woman. Since I didn't have her address, I, of course, couldn't hunt her down and kill her with a pair of needlenose pliers and a wirestripper. So I did the next best thing. I explained to her how to write her very own Boolean software. I had her type a couple of lines of trash, including var Bool = True; and I had her save it as bool.sys in her WP directory. She then was directed to reboot. The woman was ecstatic. She thanked me profusely and hung up. [2]

See? They SHOULDN'T be allowed to speak without at least one responsible adult there to watch them. CS terms with a PG rating....*shudder*

------

[0] You have to understand...the luser went out, shelled out 3,000 dollars for a brand new, state of the art piece of machinery. She turned the damned thing on (a miracle in and of itself) and BING! Win 95 comes up. She freaks. Never seen a GUI before. Panics. Remembers her DOS class from the Mid-Pleistocene epoch. EDITS HER MSDOS.SYS FILE! I'm amazed the woman can breathe on her own....she refuses to use ANYTHING but MS-DOS version old.

[1] My guess? An IT manager who's never programmed a line in his life, who's sole qualification is that he can actually FIND the Start button...(ok...all the way to the left...now down...good luser..here's a biscuit.)

[2] This of course was not the end of her. I should have taken a lesson here...if you are nice and fix their worthless selves, they assume that you enjoy talking to their pathetic selves and will fix every little piece of the Frankenstein monstrosities they bring to you. Schmucks.....

Submitted on June 5, 1997 to alt.tech-support.recovery by [email protected]

Try a Free Evaluation Copy of our Product: LinkScan