Black Bags and Bleary Eyes
You will, I presume, forgive me if I start to ramble and become incoherent. See, I’ve been up since just before 4:00 am this morning. There were some very reasonable and logical reasons behind this unusual approach to “slumber” but whatever they were they no longer seem very important and I honestly can’t remember what they were anyway.
I’ve been working as an official support person for about four days now. I scarcely recall the days now where I thought, “Man this whole training process is tedious… things will be much better once I start getting down to work.” At this juncture I’m too busy longing for the sweet serenity of those halcyon days to contemplate the bitter irony that lies at the center of those sentiments.
It’s not that my job sucks; hardly. The environment is good, the customers I’m tasked with supporting are overall competent and people are understanding and supportive of my necessarily rough transition. Plus I get paid well and the work is interesting. The problem is that those competent customers are more advanced than I (something they’d find delicious were they to ever know, I’m sure) and when I say “interesting” what I mean is that at some distant point in the future I can imagine this work to continue to be as challenging and rewarding as it may be now, only in my current state of ignorance it feels much more like mind-melting avalanches of foreign data and concepts that my already tiny brain holds in the manner that a thimble holds the ocean. Which is to say—not.
I remember trying to learn about Linux (and Unix in general I suppose). It was frustrating because just when I thought I was getting it I’d get stuck or I’d come across a concept I couldn’t fit into my brain as though it were a piece from a different puzzle entirely and could not be forced in no matter which way it was turned. I have the distinct deja-vu style sensation these days only the extra wrinkle is that in addition to trying to put together some kind of sense of understanding on my own behalf, I’m trying to help others at the same time. Eventually I was able to grasp enough Unix/Linux concepts to where if I had to I might be able to do this job for that but we’re talking about something I’ve been fiddling with for around six years as opposed to something I’ve been exposed to for six whole weeks.
I Can See Through the Windows
Another minor perk of the job is my new work computer. The Dell Inspiron notebook is an impressive business machine: 2 GB RAM, 2.13 GHz processor, a hefty graphics card capable of 1920×1200 resolution (on the built-in screen!) and 80 GB hard drive. Okay, okay, so it’s a Dell which means I’m all Windows-bound. Well, so is the product I’m supporting (for the most part) so I have to deal.
It’s funny though because I’ve used Windows for a very long time but it has been these past few weeks where my usage of any alternative system for anything useful has been relegated to a few sparse hours here and there after hours or on weekends. Now this is Windows XP Professional which, by most accounts, is the best version of Windows you can get. I’ve had to be quite familiar with the special little tweaks of Windows in a hurry. Know what? Heresy though it may be, I really am finding it not that bad. The key of course is that I did not pay the $120 or whatever ridiculous fee they charge for a system that is “meh, not too terrible” but as far as an OS I could live in, I admit that by and large it gets the job done.
Neil Stephenson had an essay called “In the Beginning There Was the Command Line…” in which he used an analogy of cars for operating systems. I’d say an apt description of XP Pro is that it’s like a Ford Taurus: It’s not “cool,” it isn’t really fast, no one thinks it’s special but it gets you from here to there. Eventually if you have it around long enough it’s bound to show some rust, but by then you’re probably thinking about a new one anyway. Which is why I’m more attracted to OS X and *nix, because at least there the polish and attention to detail is more pronounced. Or, in the case of *nix, it looks maybe as bad or worse but will last you until the next Ice Age, provided you don’t run it into a tree or something.
Anyway, abandoning the stretched metaphor, here are a few of my gripes in “un-switching” from being primarily a Mac user to being forced into primarily Windows use.
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