Screw me, screw you
by luc • 26 January, 2003 • General • 2 Comments
It’s getting a little bit confusing for myself, this pre-dating of postings. I hope you can keep track of where you have been and where not.
Anyway, the last 3 days have been spent mostly on trying to get those pictures in the correct format, in the correct entry, displayed in an esthetic way. There are far too many manual tasks that I have to perform which are moreover very error prone. A lot of work with a lot of trial and error handling. But so far so good. The rest will follow soon.
In between Yvonne called to say that she couldn’t get the printer to work at home. This is a networked Apple Laserwriter connected to a Gateway running W2K. The Gateway is the only Wintel machine in the house. After a lot of remote diagnosis (now I know how it is to work at a helpdesk and why some technical staff which I shall not name in a company which I shall not name — you know who you are! — prefer to use sneakernet instead of ethernet to diagnose PC problems at their clients desks. Guys, you have all my sympathy!), it turned out that Yvonne had closed the local area network instead of the dial-up connection the last time she had logged into the Internet. Stupid Windows interface represents the two with the same symbol. Yvonne of course doesn’t pay attention to any textual notifications she receives from the system. She is far too much in a hurry for that. And why shouldn’t she? Isn’t it about time that someone started to write some really user-friendly interface for this thing?
With the printer connected again, I was distracted within an hour by my landlord. This is a guy with an academic degree, very close to retirement, who runs his own private school in a prestigious building that he owns in the center of Iraklio, who does all the little and not-so-little repairs in the house himself. He came to fix the locks on 2 doors that I had been complaining about. He had with him 2 replacement locks and a screw-driver and started fiddling at the doors. He couldn’t get the old locks out. In the next 10 minutes he somehow managed to get me to look at it (although I had sworn to myself that I would not fall into that trap) and 30 seconds later he was out of the apartment, leaving me with the old screw-driver in my hands.
Ah well, I needed a break away from the laptop anyhow, so I gave it a try. After half an hour I had one of the old locks removed. Now it would be easy, or so I thought. Of course not, the new lock was just a little thicker that the old one, and off by one centimer in height compared to that one. It didn’t fit. I cursed the cheap landlord. The replacement locks were some old model that he had lingering around in the basement. They were all rusty, although seemingly never actually used. I put them aside and decided to give the old lock a good examination. After fiddling with it for a couple of minutes I found the problem. It’s a bit too technical to explain in a few words, but suffice it to say that I could fix it. I put it back in and tried it. It worked. For 10 seconds exactly. The second time I tried it, it returned to its non-functional state. At least I knew how to fix it. All that it would require was to remove five screws, remove the lock itself from the door, unblock the mechanisme, put the lock back in, and put the 5 screws back in. Except that I would probably have to do that each time I used that door. I decided to talk to the landlord later…
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