IBM - Idiotic Bloody Machines

Good day everyone!

It is me, your long lost blogging friend. Still checking my blog every now and then? Well your patience and perseverance have paid off! Today, I return with a new post! And what compelled me to write a new post?... My new company laptop.

A couple of weeks ago, I was told that I would be getting a new laptop for work. Well it was about bloody time I say! My current laptop is a piece of shit. I've actually adopted a routine that revolves around this oldy moldy laptop. When I reach the office in the morning, I will press the power button to boot it up.

Then I go take a walk around the airport just to make sure that my operations are running smoothly.

Then I go get some breakfast.

Then I read the newspaper.

Then I go to the toilet to offload the remains of my digested breakfast.

Then I sweep the floor.

Then I clean the windows.

Then I ponder and work on my astrophysics mathematical equation that will unravel the mysteries of the universe.

Then I twiddle my thumbs for a bit.

AND THEN! Tada! The laptop will chime to say it is ready for me to log in with my username and password. Of course, by then I only have 10 mins left before I knock off from work so I will rush through my emails and finish up with whatever I can do.

So it comes as no surprise that I was pretty pleased that I would finally get a new machine so that I can chuck my current laptop into the pits of technology hell. Goodbye you stinking piece of poo.


Fast forward to 6 weeks later, a guy from UPS knocks at my office door and delivers a box with "Lenovo Thinkpad" splashed all over it. Good lord, a lenovo thinkpad? Thats exactly what the old computer was. Essentially, it was the same old IBM Thinkpad with a new name. I looked at the specs at the side of the box.

- Intel core i3 processor: Core i3?? Isn't intel rocking the core i7 chips now? What is this i3 shit?
- 2 GB memory: 2 GB?? Hey, my computer had 2 GB of RAM too.....8 years ago.
-Windows 7 professional: Goodness, they might as well install a virus that would cause the computer to self destruct once you turn it on.

An engineer was soon sent to my office to setup the new laptop. He installed all the software I required for my work and migrated my email data. Once it was done, he handed the black laptop to me and said it was ready for use. Immediately, I ran into trouble.

My email wouldn't work! All the important info and work that I needed to do were in there and it just refused to work! Instead, I was bludgeoned with error messages that I could not understand! Was it telling me that my email was setup wrongly? Was it telling me that there were corrupted files? Was it telling me that it could not detect the correct network settings? In the end, I concluded that all the gibberish that was flashing before my eyes loosely translated to "only morons will have lotus notes installed on windows 7 in a thinkpad". In fact, those 3 things on their own can be considered catastrophic. Why would you mix 3 poisons together to make an even bigger disaster??

I wanted to print out the error messages to show the technical help desk but of course, I did not have "administrative privileges" to install the printer so I had to get technical help for that too. Clicking on the "control panel" to make adjustments to the settings in the computer only made the hourglass icon spin for an eternity before anything happened. Even a snail crawling backwards from Spain to Germany would get there faster.

To cut a long story short, I spent the next 2 days over the phone with my company's IT department's helpdesk trying to get everything sorted out. Not really the technological advancement I was hoping for. In the end, I'm still stuck with rubbish that does not make my life or work easier at all. Phooey.

I sincerely hope that you guys are not facing the same crap as I am. Of course, if you're using a mac, you'll be reading this post and chuckling to yourself before moving on to do other stuff on your computer effectively and without any problems. For the rest who are using windows, your computer probably hung or flashed some error message before you even got to the end of this post.