The Guy in Bangalore

One of the things that I would like to take to Singapore is my laptop. Unfortunately it isn't working at the moment; it never came out of the reboot after the last Windows Vista automatic update.

At work, so as to be in business hours, I called the HP help number and got an Indian lady that asked if I could turn the computer off and restart it, to which I said that I didn't have it with me, but that it had died from a windows update and windows would not now start and if you went into BIOS before windows kicked in to try a restore it insisted on a disk check, which returned a dead disk message. No, she wanted me to have the laptop in front of me.

So yesterday I called from home and got an Indian man, hence my assumption that the HP helpdesk, like all others, is located in the sub-continent. I told him that windows had died during an automatic update, that windows would not start now, and that the BIOS checkdisk message was that the hard drive needed replacing. He asked me if I could turn the computer on, I said yes and did so. The he asked me to keep hitting F10 repeatedly as it started, I did so until the BIOS utility screen came up. Then he asked me to hit F9 and ENTER a couple of times, then go to the disk check utility; I did so. He then asked me to run the disk check utility, which I did. He then asked me what message it gave and I told him; "Replace Hard Disk".

Now I know that these people have come from hard backgrounds and now they have what they consider to be fantastic jobs that they do not want to jeopardise by freewheeling and so they will stick to their sheet of paper regardless. But don't you think that if I say that windows is dead and that the bios checkdisk utility says the hard drive needs replacing that this is because I have run the goddamned bios checkdisk utility and gotten the damned "replace hard disk" message?????

I grew up playing Star Trek on the mainframe at the uni where my dad was head of the school of mathematics. I remember when octal was used to program and people wished they could use base sixteen but no one could figure out how to make hexadecimal work for human reading. I programmed on cards. I had a home computer when they had less power than a wristwatch does now. I have been doing this for a long time, probably before Bangalore guy was born. I know what the damned BIOS checkdisk utility is!!! If I say that I have run it then I have run it.

I know I sound pissed off, but really afterwards I just laughed to my friend and commented how Bangalore guy had just wasted fifteen minutes of both of our lives simply because he was not empowered to listen. Or is it a cultural thing? My friend at EDS says that when he calls their help number and gets India he just hangs up and keeps trying until he get the Malaysian desk. Says that the Indians just read from a piece of paper but don't know squat about computers, whereas the Malaysians actually know what the words on the paper mean. I don't know, I don't like countries that are fundamentalist religious dictatorships.

Changing the subject for a while...

Tomorrow my fridge goes into the 'box'. That is going to impact on my routine a bit. Also the clothes washer and drier, so it will be laundromats for the next two weeks. Another minor point is that from tomorrow there will be no chairs in the house. Aggghhh, and what am I going to do about my computer? My laptop is dead and my desktop is about to go into hibernation. How will I live?

It's kind of strange, looking into this almost full container and seeing my whole life (well, almost all of my possessions) packed away for long-term storage. The feeling is kind of a two-edged sword; on one hand I keep thinking that I should be feeling some sort of concern or worry, that being the way I have been programmed by my upbringing, but on the other hand I almost feel a kind of release or freedom, a lightness of spirit. When I was nineteen I left Adelaide to live in another city (Melbourne, as it turned out) with nothing more than a shoulder bag. But I had nothing then, now I have not just a mass of physical possessions but an established career.

But in another way I have less than I did when I was nineteen. Then I was in love with my first girlfriend and still thought of our relationship as alive even though we had separated for a while. Shows you how naive kids can be, bitch actually spent that year going through a couple of other guys. She was ( - is? she still alive? - ) one of those women that cannot remain faithful to one man for longer than a year or so. Kind of the extreme version of the typical anglo bitch, most Australian women have a three year use-by date, American women have a four and a half year use-by date. I read some short bit in a womens magazine whilst waiting in a pizza shop (they only had womens magazines, why???) that with an average of 13.6 sexual partners Australian women came second after Turkish women. I think that my first girlfriend may have had some disproportional input into those statistics.

Yes, in a way I have less now than I did when I was nineteen. No relationship ties at all. No reason to stay anywhere that I don't want to stay. In hindsight of course (such a wonderful thing, hindsight, wish you could actually use it constructively somehow?) it would probably have been wiser for me to keep on going when I was nineteen. Or maybe even better, when I was in my early twenties and going back to school, I should have gotten proper accounting quals then and gotten a couple of years work experience then gone overseas never to return. Rather than having spent another ten year before getting qualified, then spending the last ten years building a career. Shows you what can happen when you grown up in a culture that doesn't offer you any encouragement to succeed, any reason to drive yourself. A culture that rewards people for being failures and punishes people for success.

I want to whinge about something else as well, but it is after ten and I am really tired, so I'm going to bed. That's an inflatable mattress, with my clothes in two suitcases. So you have to wait until another day.