Don’t Expect them NOT to Be Incompetent

It is always with mild amusement that I listen to people complain about the incompetence of the sales staff at CompUSA or Best Buy or Radio Shack, or of the technical support people they get on the phone late at night or on weekends.

Think about it for a minute. Even though the economy is down, there are still plenty of well-paying high-tech jobs for people with knowledge and skills. If a person actually knows enough to be competent with computers, they will be able to get a better job than a thankless, $6.50-an-hour sales floor job at CompUSA, or working the graveyard shift doing phone tech support!

Now I am not saying there’s anything wrong with these kinds of jobs. Nor am I saying people seeking these services don’t deserve to be met with intelligence and courtesy. But in a market-driven economy, some things have to give.

If you want to walk into a store and pay under $1000 for a brand-new PC that’s roughly 10,000 times more powerful than those used to guide Apollo 11 to the moon, you’re going to have to accept that the place you’re buying it from can’t afford the overhead to hire people who can tell their heads from their asses (much less their hard drives from their RAM).

And if you’re going to get 1.5 Mbps broadband Internet access in your home for a little more than the cost of dial-up, and a tiny fraction of what businesses used to pay for T1 lines (in the “olden days” — about 3 weeks ago), your ISP also won’t be able to hire people to answer your phone call at 2 AM on a Saturday who have any skills beyond basic literacy so they can step through the phone script they’ve been given.

Accept it. Do the research yourself so you know what you want before you get there, and be glad you live in a world where electronics hardware and demeaning, thankless labor come cheap.

I Am a Lazy Bastard

I am a lazy bastard. My laziness naturally leaves me inclined to stop right here, but I will fight it, because the only thing I cherish more than my laziness is the untold fame and glory showered upon me for my brilliant rants. (The fame and glory are untold because they don’t exist, of course, but please allow me my pipe dreams.)

Now where was I? Ah yes, my laziness, and my, uh, bastardness.

I have moments when I am, briefly, not lazy. And in those amazing and rare moments, I frantically bounce among my countless incomplete projects, hoping to push one of them far enough toward completion that I can coast to the finish line when I return to my inevitable state of lazy-librium.

Such is the case tonight. Wired on coffee and deluded about my own creative capabilities after skimming the latest copy of Print magazine at Borders, I returned home with grand visions (or at least murky hallucinations) of what wondrous new graphical overhauls I would undertake on this very web site.

Then I made the mistake of looking at what I already have.

Hmm… that’s not so bad, I thought. And maybe those grand murky hallucino-visions wouldn’t really work anyway. And besides, well, this one is already done. How can I argue with that? (Or could I, if only I were suffering a split-personality disorder?)

So instead, I took the usual lazy route… writing a rambling, incohesive, boring rant.

At least there’s one thing I’ll never be too lazy about, and that’s unnecessary parenthetical asides (like this one) and excessive use of italics!

Am I TOO Detail-Obsessed?

A strange thing happened to me the other day.

I was riding in the car with some coworkers, returning from lunch. We were stopped in gridlock traffic (which seems to be the case more often than not on Roswell Rd.), and as my eyes (as usual) flitted from side to side, taking in the colors, shapes, fonts, states of decay, and other assorted minutiae of the storefronts and signs in the supersaturated commercial district, I happened to notice a sign on a nearby Chinese restaurant. It said:

GIANT CHINESE B.BQ.

Now your average person, even your average detail-oriented person, may have glanced at that sign and not given it a second thought. But I was immediately consumed with perplexity over the liberties taken by the sign maker with respect to the use of periods. Why, I wondered, did the first “B” warrant a period while the second did not?

Or take another example: Tonight when I got home from work, I found a new MacMall catalog had arrived, and I perused it with passive interest while SLP was on the phone. I was mildly irritated to see yet another use of the annoying stock photos of perfect people in black mock turtlenecks with their arms folded atop some invisible barrier, which have become staples for use in stupid photo illustrations in these catalogs, where the perfect people are made to look as if they are leaning against a steroid-enhanced 5-foot-tall software package.

You’re probably thinking that my awareness of these stock photos of perfect people in stupid poses is the focus of my detail-obsessed attention in this story, but you’re wrong.

In fact, I noticed something even more stimulating to my detail obsession: On one page I saw a photo of a young woman with long blonde hair, and on the next, a distinctly different young woman with short, curly red hair. And that was when it hit me. I noticed that the hands of the two women were in exactly the same position. In fact, the arms in the picture belonged to the same person and were from one single photograph, but the heads were different. What’s more, the skin of the hands in the photo was color-corrected to match the facial complexion of the woman in each photo.

Clearly, if I notice something like this on passing glance, I have a problem.

New Adventure Easter Egg Discovered!

Most loyal fans of the Atari 2600 game Adventure are well aware of the game’s famous “Easter egg” — if you bring an invisible dot to a certain screen and place another object in the same room, you can move through a barrier into a secret room with a self-congratulatory message from programmer Warren Robinett.

But few players of the game know that this is really just the first part of the Easter egg!

If you bring the enchanted chalice with you into the secret room (a gift for Mr. Robinett, to show your appreciation for his brilliant game), then proceed to the entrance of the white castle, you will see the rest of the Easter egg.

You see, Mr. Robinett’s motivation for the Easter eggs in this game stemmed from Atari’s reluctance to give its game designers adequate credit for their hard work. (After all, it was the designers of the games who were directly responsible for Atari’s financial success, but proportionate compensation for their efforts would’ve eaten into the corporate fatcats’ stock bonuses.)

It is widely known that Mr. Robinett was only paid his paltry salary of $22,000 in 1978 for designing Adventure, a game that went on to sell one million copies, thereby earning Atari $25,000,000. But as far as the public (and Atari’s management) was concerned, games were cranked out by mindless machines, not painstakingly crafted by computer programming geniuses who managed to pack elaborate and engaging game concepts into a meager 2 kilobytes of code.

It was this lack of respect and recognition that led some former Atari programmers to start their own company, Activision — the first third-party software maker. Every Activision game boldly proclaimed the designer’s name right on the cartridge label, as well as a photo and gameplay tips from the designer in the instruction manual.

But those unfortunate game designers back at Atari were left to find other ways to get their well-deserved recognition.* Many resorted to Easter eggs containing their names or initials, inspired by the bold work of Mr. Robinett.

And now, at last, you can see the full Easter egg from Adventure. While Atari’s executives laughed all the way to the bank in light of this game’s resounding success, Warren Robinett, game designer and computer genius, left Atari to pursue… other opportunities. And his dragons did as well.

Adventure White Castle

* Yes, I know Warren Robinett designed Adventure before Activision was founded, and he had already left Atari by then. But this entire article was all just a set-up for the visual joke anyway, so back off!

Damn Cords!

I love technology. Someone could call me a technophile and I would accept it as a compliment. But despite my love for all varieties of electronic gadgetry, you may be surprised to discover that I hate cords! In fact, I DESPISE them. They are always getting in the way, they always get tangled together, and if you leave a cord to its own devices (ha ha), it will, I guarantee, find a way to tie itself in a knot.

Not just any ordinary kind of knot, mind you, but a knot of such terrible complexity as to make the Gordian knot unravel itself in fear of a competing knot of such incomprehensible madness.

Solutions are on the way. The technology Apple markets as “AirPort” (and Apple’s name for it is all I care about) promises wireless networking anywhere in the home, and the new “Bluetooth” technology promises to allow us one day soon to connect peripheral devices to a computer merely by placing them in its vicinity.

That’s all well and good, but at the moment I still sit at my desk nervously, wondering if today is the day that the mad cord monster will animate and eat my legs. Today I still have several hundred feet worth of Cat-5 Ethernet cable strung all around my house, tucked into corners as neatly as it will tolerate, aggressively making its presence known in my living room, bedroom and basement.

DO YOU HEAR ME, CORDOSAURUS?! YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!!!