Thursday, September 06, 2007

how many em bees in a gee bee?

While I wish my mom would just get remarried to a nice IT guy, in the meantime all of her tech support issues fall onto the shoulders of Ry or myself. Ry, particularly, is where she usually goes for help - much to his discomfort and annoyance. I only tend to get called if Ry is unreachable. So, with Ry out of the country right now on tour with NOFX, I become the second string family IT guy.

Tonight I had the pleasure of trying to diagnose and trouble-shoot setting up a home wireless network over the phone. This is how things always go. Everything is always over the phone and it's always like trying to talk an infant through ... well ... setting up a home wireless network.

Me: Okay, well ... there are a number of things that you're asking me that I don't know because I don't know your computer's system specs.
Mom: I have a PowerMac G4. It has 512 em bees and 128 em bees.
Me: (long pause while I figure out that she means how many megs of RAM the computer has) Okay.
Mom: And I'm using OS X version 10.2.9. The software the man sold me is saying that I need OS X 10.4. Do I need to buy a new computer?
Me: No, mom. You can upgrade your system software without having to buy a new computer.
Mom: You can?

Etc. I'm convinced that when wicked IT people die and go to hell, they have to spend eternity helping my mom turn her iMac into a stand-alone web server.

1 comment:

EmoRiot said...

I think you're right about hell. Because to turn her computer into a stand-alone webserver would only require clicking one checkbox in the System Preferences to activate "web-sharing" but it would take an eternity to pull that off.