Set the stage in mid-to-late 1996 through early 1997, the last time I listened to really angry music. I used to come home from hating my job where I had to interface with complete, total, one hundred percent idiots working technical support for a local ISP that was trying to market itself to first-time computer buyers and internet users. Yes, that means we're trolling for people who buy computers because everybody else has one, or because it looks impressive, or it goes with the room decor, not to actually use it. Also, think back to 1996-1997; if you were quasi-techy then, you had no problems getting on the 'net, but the number of potential variables, even that late in the game, were so many that there were myriad problems getting some people connected with their ancient, crufty hardware.

So, of course, I hated it. Being a classic INTP, I am not a people-person. I am a creator, a discoverer, I like to see the fruits of my work, not walk somebody without a clue altogether through doing something that I don't truly care if they get it accomplished or not.

Listening to: "Dogma" By KMFDM, album "XTORT" All we want is a headrush All we want is to get out of our skin for a while We have nothing to lose because we don't have anything Anything we want anyway... We used to hate people Now we just make fun of them It's more effective that way We don't live We just scratch on day to day With nothing but matchbooks and sarcasm in our pockets And all we are waiting for is for something worth waiting for Let's admit America gets the celebrities we deserve Let's stop saying "don't quote me" because if no one quotes you You probably haven't said a thing worth saying We need something to kill the pain of all that nothing inside We all just want to die a little bit We fear that pop-culture is the only culture we're ever going to have We want to stop reading magazines Stop watching TV Stop caring about Hollywood But we're addicted to the things we hate We don't run Washington and no one really does Ask not what you can do for your country Ask what your country did to you The only reason you're still alive is because someone Has decided to let you live We owe so much money we're not broke we're broken We're so poor we can't even pay attention So what do you want You want to be famous and rich and happy But you're terrified you have nothing to offer this world Thing to say and no way to say it But you can say it in three languages You are more than the sum of what you consume Desire is not an occupation You are ultimately thrilled and desperate Sky-high and fucked Let's stop praying for someone to save us and start saving ourselves Let's stop this and start over Let's go out-let's keep going This is your life-this is your fucking life We need something to kill the pain of all that nothing inside Quit whining you haven't done anything wrong because frankly You haven't done much of anything Someone's writing down your mistakes Someone's documenting your downfall

I would rant on the half-hour or so coming home. I got home and spent my time trying to keep myself from hurting myself by listening to KMFDM (like somebody asked me once: "isn't that one of the bands that those kids who killed all those people at Columbine High listened to?") and other various fucked-up bands that suited my frame of mind. I spent all my time twisted up in knots thinking about the absolute mental distress the job put me into and knowing I had to go put myself back in that environment again to get a paycheck.

It was a vicious circle, and it wasn't fun.

Finally, I left there and turned right around and found another job right away. Thank goodness.

The new job had its own flakiness involved (all jobs do), but it was okay; I was producing something, and when I did have customer contact (daily, even), the people were professional. Imagine that, people who didn't come to you with the attitude "I gave you money, now you're supposed to make it work," but "if we work together we can make this happen."

I can deal with professionals on a professional level, and it's even rewarding in a strange way. But people who put me on hold for five minutes because they need to run out and talk to their neighbor Beaufort or don't have three minutes to spend checking their computer's configuration out because their eighteen hellions are screaming in the background because they can't stop shoving sharp objects into each other's eyes tend to rub me the wrong way.

Everybody whose call I got yesterday was a complete and utter moron.

First is the guy who calls up because his software will print all the necessary forms on his spanking new laser printer, but won't print checks. (By the way, he was told by another tech he needed an Hewlett-Packard Laserjet, so get an HP 1100, they're fairly affordable, but will he listen? No, of course not, so he buys the cheapest Xerox laser printer available, and now he wants to call me for 90 minutes...) Thus, we play with every printer setting in the software and in Windows. No dice. I don't even approach checking the printer, since I don't have one handy and don't feel like downloading the manual from Xerox and wondering if I have Adobe Acrobat reader installed on my station. Finally, I throw in the towel, ask him to hold and ask a senior tech.

"Yeah, the Xerox Docuprint P8 won't print checks," he says. I stare back in blank disbelief. Why isn't this in the knowledge base? (Let's just say that "knowledge base" is a misnomer at this place. Anyway, if it were in there it would hardly matter; the search function actually does a full-text search on the whole network server, not on the knowledge base. If I do a search for "xerox docuprint" I'll get listings of the print driver files resident on the server and Windows NT release notes that have that string in them, for instance. Not helpful in the least, huh?)

It goes like this all night. I take some small solace in the fact that it's not only myself that feels this way; most of the other techs who have been here for a while agree that the software we're supporting sucks and environment, while loose, isn't the most support-oriented.

"Presario 4704" is a phrase that will probably haunt my existence forever, I think. Anything in my life connected to a Presario 4704 has been a Bad Thing�. It's the Windows machine I used at the job that we turned the owner of the company in to the IRS (and only slightly more tolerable than the buggy Power Mac 6100 (I think, I generally left the Mac off) I was saddled with). Hypochondria had one of these machines. We had one at my last regular job that routinely acted up. A couple people I know have called me time-and-time-again wanting me to help them actually get something working in them, or back it up because they had to quickrestore it for the nth time. This is not to mention the Presario 4740 at my last job that decided it wouldn't see network cards anymore upon applying a Compaq-suggested Sofpaq and required a motherboard swap (just to replace the BIOS!) and I have concluded that the 4700 line from Compaq sucked (as opposed to the 4800 line, which I adored, even if the hard disks weren't ATA/33 disks, and were slow as molasses as memory swap doing things like manipulating large images).

As the night wears on I going on and on with somebody with some Compaq-supplied Y2K fix for his Presario 4704 feeling like I'm a galley slave chained to my oar, when one of the customer support people comes over telling me that somebody I'd helped the day before was having problems again.

Oh, believe me, I remember this guy.

He has a really screwed-up machine that doesn't want to run this software successfully. Now he's having various errors that are actually caused by his Windows setup being marginal, but not directly from this software (it's a 16-bit DOS app... did I mention that yes, people are still stupid enough to buy DOS applications seven years into the win32 standards, and when win64 is right around the corner?). So we're trying to get it to work with his modem.

I try to get him to shut down to DOS to run the application, but he can't since he called his vendor about problems running the software. They walked him through hacking his registry so that there is no "shut down to DOS" option.

Imagine me trying to tell this joker over and over that he can boot up into DOS by hitting upon bootup when he sees "Starting Windows 95...", and see me wanting to pummel him senseless when he has done it twice for me but then acts like he doesn't know what I'm talking about.

This guy is an idiot. It's fifteen minutes past ten, I could be more than halfway home by now.

So I walk him through making a bootup disk. Simple enough. It works. Life is good. I was satisfied with my solution. This guy really needs to get his Windows setup fixed, and from the spit and bubble gum that's holding it together that I saw, I don't want to go there, lest the whole thing come to pieces.

So, last night I'm trying to take this other call and one of the customer support people says that this guy wants to talk to me. Uh, I'm busy, you know? Talking to somebody else? Trying to do my job?

So I get chewed out. He's a "special customer." Like I know that, right? I am still taking a call, got his software working the day before, and he's screwed something else up and I did my time in the barrel with this guy already, let somebody else take care of him.

So I blow it off. Later somebody else comes up to me. "Did you talk to a 4672?" I shrug, but she keeps looking at me.

"Can you hang on a minute?" I say calmly into the phone, put the customer on hold (one of the first nice people I'd had all day), and spin around to face the girl asking me this.

"First: I don't learn people by numbers. I learned a bunch of other useless things by numbers that I'm carrying around in my head, like the charge of an electron is -1.602 times ten to the negative-nineteenth Coulomb, you should load assembly routines to call on a Commodore 64 at or above 49152 decimal so that you miss the system monitor and BASIC and an astronomical unit is about ninety-three million miles. I don't remember people by numbers, I use the number as an index to get their name and then forget the number. We're not in The Village, you know.

"Two: maybe I did. If I did, then look at the database. I tend to write quite a bit about every call I do, in direct proportion to what it takes, unlike many others here. It's probably listed by my name, though, not my number, so you probably couldn't find it.

"Three: I am assisting someone else now. Please go away."

...whereupon I spun back and picked up the phone to keep helping this lady and she walked away looking more than a little miffed. Join the club.

I think (but am not sure) that the person I said this to is my supervisor's girlfriend. (Did I mention there's a lot of nepotism in this place? I discover this a little bit at a time; no wonder the two techs that me and the guy I was hired with relieve in the evenings don't want their contract extended with this place.) But I don't really care.

(Oh, and this nice lady on the phone needed serious hand-holding. I ended up staying a half-hour late to help her because her computer was having a fight with Netzero (she's one of those, "oh, by the way, I have one more question" people). Not to mention I worked six hours without a break, and nobody can even fix my network login because I have no grace logins left and it won't let me change my password.)

I'm sure tomorrow I'll hear about everything that I did wrong again, or maybe just get reamed out, or if I'm really lucky, just let go (although I'll feel awful because I "failed again"). Any way it goes, I don't care. I thought about it - I'm not getting paid enough to tie myself in knots. I can get another job.

This morning I pulled into the parking lot of the three-story office building they had slung up in Pearland right smack in the middle of nowhere last year. I had noted before the building was even finished that the sign out front listing all the businesses that would be housed there contained a temporary agency.

I decided to see what they had to offer, and went there before my psychiatrist appointment this afternoon.

I walked in and felt like I was transported. This place wasn't in Pearland, this was in some ritzy-wannabe place, surely. (Then I remembered that Pearland was a ritzy-wannabe place now; doesn't "master planned community" sound like "city implementing Der Fuhrer's final solution"? Anyway, Pearland isn't a master-planned community. Pearland is a haphazard bedroom community like all the rest that surround Houston and now they want to chase off all the people who have lived here for literally generations, probably originally as rice farmers (we are seven feet below sea level, after all (another useless number)), so that they can build big homes for the white-flight yuppies.) I heard somebody coming down the stairs, but it wasn't their shoes on the steps.

It was the whole superstructure of the stairs vibrating. I thought that was weird until I stepped into the men's room to check my hair and set my portfolio down on the counter, and there was a tinny sound in response. It was all flashy, but had that cheap, just-slung-up feel to it.

This place will be in little chunks in my front yard after the next hurricane.

Still, though, I took the steps to the second floor and went through the attractive-yet-flimsy door of the temp agency. There was a couldn't-be-bothered woman behind the desk reading something that I later discovered was a magazine.

"Can I help you?" she said without looking up. I guess either her neck was broken into that position or that article in the magazine is just too enthralling to tear herself away from to do her job.

"Yes. Do I need to make an appointment to see someone about getting a position?"

She shook her head in mock disappointment, hoping that this would mean I'd go away. "Yeah, I'm afraid so."

"Good," I said with a mock smile in answer, sitting my portfolio on the ledge of the reception desk. "What do you have tomorrow?"

So she looked at my r�sum�, decided that maybe they could actually employ me, and set an appointment for ten-thirty tomorrow morning to meet with both the information technology and the clerical placement reps.

I'm crossing my fingers. And I'm not taking any tech support or customer support jobs. [grin]

Of course, my Remeron was working, so I thought we were going to increase the dosage. But nope, we're going to change to something else.

You see, Remeron has one really annoying side effect, in that I tend to sleep ten or twelve hours a day while I'm taking it. The sedative effect isn't something that I really appreciate because it inhibits me getting as much accomplished as I'd like, but at least my dreams finally calmed down while I was on Remeron.

When I told my psychiatrist (yes, the one who wears a Mickey Mouse watch) about this side effect, he decided to change my medication to Celexa, and he wanted me to go off the Remeron. Spiffy.

So here I go with another medication. He told me that if this didn't do the trick then maybe he could add some Wellbutrin to this (which is what he said last time), so I guess we'll see how this goes.

Am I going to be one of those "Guinea pigs" where they try out every available medication for some reason? I hope not. If worst comes to worst, I'd rather just go back to Remeron and sleep, but I don't know if increased dosage meant more sleep or what, which would be bad. All I know now is that the half life of Remeron in my system is coming due, whereas I'm just ramping up on Celexa.

What's worse, now I have to scan a Celexa. Sigh.

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