I see dumb people. They're everywhere. They don't even know they're dumb.

[catsidhe]

4:30. I normally don't mind people coming with jobs at 4:30. The usual sort of jobs, I mean. Change the toner, install Office, change a password, that sort of thing.

Then there's this one guy who just called up.

He wants to re-partition his hard drive. He wants to change the sizes and move around actual working partitions. I told him last night, when he turned up at something around 6:00pm to collect an install disk, that this was a magnificently dangerous thing to do, and to back up everything he wants to keep, and did he really want to do this? He replied that he had been googling, and everywhere he had looked had told him all the above. “Not tonight”, I tell him then. Let me know tomorrow, and I'll come and help.

And when does he call? Four. Goddamn. Thirty. And this is, I know, an hour-and-a-half marathon of stupid-tolerance. As evidenced when he said that he had “installed gparted...” ... uh oh. The live CD has it on there already, why should he... oh. Oh no.

“You're not ... running it from the hard drive, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Not from a live CD.”
“No. Should I be?”
“You're trying to repartition a live disk, running the software from the very disk you're trying to repartition.”
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow. I'll come and see you tomorrow. don't try anything until I'm there.”



It's not just that he's a waste of oxygen, it's that he waits all damned day, then summons me down for an extended session of pain right at the end of the day.

I have a low stupidity tolerance as it is. He's just using up my reserves of pretending-to-care, which could be going on honest mistakes made by intelligent people who know what they're doing, and why they shouldn't be doing it, and why they have to anyway.

Comments

[cthulu-for-pm.livejournal.com]

He will, of course, have ignored you and tried to complete the task by himself, and expect you to bail him out of his self-made disaster.

I gather that you can't just ignore and/or garrote the imbecile in question?

Why did he even want (let alone need) to repartition his machine in the first place?

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

He wants more space in his linux partition.

He is working, IIRC on a project where he has two complete and separate source trees for GCC, so that he can make arbitrary changes to one, and compare them compiling benchmarking code.

Only I had to handhold him through things like untarring a .tgz file.
On how to compile the GCC suite.
On how to set up GCC to point to one arbitrary library/header/binary tree or another when compiling.

Then he figured that he wanted to do all this on his desktop, and needed linux to do it. So I walked him through making a machine dual-boot linux.

And now he has discovered that he needs more room. The mind boggles, and, quite frankly, I don't want to know.


Suffice it to say, he was confused as to why Windows wouldn't let him browse the contents of his Ext3 partitions. That, there, tells you all you need to know.

[cthulu-for-pm.livejournal.com]

I see.

Oh, now I remember; you work in academentia, don't you? That explains so much about this doofus.

Honestly, none of us get paid enough to take this kind of abuse...

[sjl.livejournal.com]

*twitch*

I have plenty of rants about my current job. Yet, in comparison to this, it seems somehow ... tame. Easy. Calm.

This is a worry.

[lindsay40k.livejournal.com]

To think, somebody could use a working liver...

[(Anonymous)]

Send him to Zoltan. Zoltan will sort him out... or just make him cry and wallow in anguish, at which point his own supervisor should be made to pick up the slack and clear the tears for taking on a student and not giving him the support he needs.

Can we send this student to the Information Services service desk? ;-)

I'd share your pain and suffering but I have a large bucket of anger built up this week and I am in no mood to sympathise. Today is particularly bad.