The Pandemic Soul

So, I had to go ahead and close the comments on my last post, “10 Things the Techno-Retarded Want the IT Guy to Know” (a response to Think Smarter’s “10 things your IT guy wants you to know“, which was linked-to from Dumb Little Man) because it (apparently) was not apparent that this was satire.

My intention was to respond, hopefully in a humorous manner, to the author’s annoyances of non-IT people. Let there be no mistake: there are elements of truth to the piece. However, it is not written in my voice.

I do happen to work in sales, and as such I have a keen (and unfortunate) understanding of a lot of the idiots who work in that field. As such, I suppose the blow-hard mentality comes a little too easily to my keys. My apologies to those who felt insulted — it was not my intention. I figured that most would be able to see that numerous references to Warcraft and the inability to talk to girls were closer to the likes of a low-brow summer comedy’s college-QB-turned-stock-jock than to reality.

I want to reiterate what I said in my last comment on that post, because I know a lot of people probably don’t read other posts on my blog before responding, and thus don’t know much about where I’m coming from. I am, in fact, gay. So, while I have quite a few girlfriends, I have mojo with none of them. Undoubtedly a clip-on wearing IT dork (if such a thing even exists anymore) would have better luck (and more motivation) getting a woman in the sack than I. I also don’t have the faintest idea of how one would begin changing a tire. (Isn’t that what roadside assistance is for, anyway?) And most ironically, I do, in fact, play Warcraft, and I am even heavily involved in Star Trek Play-By-E-Mail role playing.

As for the elements of truth in the post, which were probably what made it so convincing: I did feel that the “other Jordan” (the one who wrote the original post) was playing on the common, but not necessarily ubiquitous, mistakes that many of us non-IT people make. I think it goes without saying that while many people are totally inept at working with computers, a good number of us work with them just fine and rarely have to worry about how we’re going to recover those files we deleted yesterday and then lied about having done anything with. In that sense, I feel that there are some truths to the emotions I mentioned in my post — no one wants to be talked down to about something they don’t know anything about, and good manners are always appropriate. I whole-heartedly disagree with Jordan’s idea that just because we are “all adults” that it’s ok to “seem blunt and rude.” As userhacker said, you have to learn to sugar-coat some things, even if you think expedience is necessary. But the voice in which I responded would never, in my opinion, have been acceptable in the real world. I hoped that would go without saying, and for those of you among us who have assured the readers of these two posts that you have, in fact, heard these types of things out of the mouths of co-workers, I hope that you’ll accept that just because you deal with the morons every day, doesn’t mean that all of us fall into that category.

Finally, yes, I did misspell “throne.” I wrote “thrown” when I meant “throne.” I was rushing to get the responses finished before heading to bed, and I was careless. I don’t think that one error justifies the crucifying at Cliff’s hands, but that’s just me ;)

Hopefully this clears up any ambiguity about my intentions. I think that the fact that so many people were so passionate about how IT is treated shows either an industry-wide uber-defensiveness, or a complete lack of respect for the poor guys fanning the servers and conspicuously not spying on our workstations!

See Also:

• A response to the techno-retarded