It is not, I am able to rationally recognize, something I should feel bad about.
It has been, oh, at least seven or eight years since I really was called upon to do PC tech support as a professional , and probably another four to five years prior to that when it was my actual job. And, yes, that was in fact back at the dawn of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and we built PCs out of rocks and wrote “64K” in cuneiform, and Windows was but a glimmer in Bill Gates’ eye.
So it is not rational that I, a highly compensated IT executive who oversees application development activities on an enterprise level, would feel frustrated or irked or somehow like a failure should I, in my pointy-hairedness, be unable to deal with some basic PC tech support issues, to wit video card failures and the like. Any more than, say, an insurance industry consultant who was at one time a general practitioner should feel professionally inadequate because he is not capable of performing heart surgery.
It is not rational. But …
I am perfectly capable, by the bye, of installing software, of doing basic diagnostics, of installing a new machine from more-or-less scratch and by the nuimbers … so long as nothing goes wrong. Should there be a significant problem, though, and I reach the limits of my never-formally-trained and now-rapidly-aging knowledge, I am reduced to banging my head against the wall (and dealing with various now-ridiculous Imposter Syndrome flashbacks as well). Which is … aggravating.
Did I mention that Margie’s video card seems to have gone south, rendering her sans CoH access? At least, so far as I can tell, in my dotage.
Rrg.
I know you’ve probably got a cadre of techs at work to call on, but if there’s some way I can be of assistance Dave, feel free to drop me an email.
I feel your pain.
My first paying IT job was assembling NT 3.5 networks, which meant assembling machines from parts and installing the software off of the 48 (I think, been a while) floppy disks it took and then wiring them all up to make sure all the cabling was good and everything was setup right before unhooking it all and hauling it across town to a client site and re-assembling it all.
After that I worked for a dial-up / web-hosting company that was just starting up and assembled server and modem racks and tested them. As well as the occasional often humorous bit of phone tech support for new dial-up costumers.
Now, years later of doing web-based programming, I can’t even get my mouse driver on my computer now to not crash on me once an evening and require me to un-plug it and then re-plug the damned thing in.
Heh.
I don’t quite yet know just enough to be dangerous, and usually when I have to call on the techs at the office to look at something on my machine, it’s something pretty seriously wrong. And I can install cards and RAM and the like with no problem.
Still, I keep feeling more and more like the Talosians, unable to repair the mechanisms that my ancestors (or, at least, I in another life) was able to fix. *sigh*
Specifics of the problem. As of yesterday morning, Margie noticed she couldn’t toggle the KVM switch over to her new machine at home (her old machine is still hooked up, since I am a slug). When I started playing around with it, it *seemed* like the new machine was booting up and all that, but nothing was going to the monitor, and I wasn’t sure the keyboard and mouse were responding.
Tried plugging the KVM video from the video card on the machine to the onboard video. Nada. Tried using the cable direct from the monitor to either port. Nada. Tried cycling the power (with the cord), tried hooking up the mouse and keyboard direct, tried using a real keyboard rather than the wireless … nada.
The machine did give an odd beep on power-up — it was unclear whether it was different from the normal startup beep, or one of those dire diagnostic-on-the-BIOS style beeps.
Finally, after getting home last night, I pulled the video card out, then hooked it back up to the onboard video. And, hey presto, it worked. Which points to the the video card having gone bad.
I did not try reseating the video (the AGP card clips in there, so it can’t really come loose), but I probably should.
So Margie’s PC works, but only with the craptastic onboard video. Which, needless to say, we confirmed does not work at all with CoH. Rrg.
So, ultimately, there’s *really* no point in my feeling bad about it, because it’s a hardware failure and, thus, not my fault. Except that it took me too long to diagnose it, and the card was one I bought, and the machine was cleverlhy bought specifically to be able to handle that AGP card. So, you see, it really is all my fault … 🙂
Those damnable video card gremlins! Curse them! Cuuuurrrrse them!
Whew! A diagnosis of Gremlins from a tech specialist! I feel much better now!
(Just to show how out of date my skills are, I was leaning toward blaming Evil Spirits …)
I used to have the theory ( and to a degree it seemed to hold true at the time ) that if I didn’t end up cutting or nicking myself or something similar somehow while putting togethor a machine or a server rack from parts that it wasn’t going to work right. Sort of a blood sacrifice to appease the computer gods.
Wow, I suffer from the same affliction. Heck, I even did level 2 support on my last job, but didn’t have to really look at hardware issues — there was a tech for that.
I remember when I could gen a server, crimp RJ11 and RJ45, and punch down panels.
Now? I’m lucky I can remember how to turn on my wireless on my laptop.
Heh. Exactly.