I am exceedingly vexed by stuff that doesn’t work.   It’s not your garden variety Stuff that gets to me - instead it’s the blatant black and white No, It Doesn’t Work nonsense that sends me roaring `round the bend.   [an alert reader pointed out that this is not a long trip]

A perfect example of this is the thermostat on the wall at work.  Many people more clever than me have looked at it, `fixed’ it, and attempted to use it.  Their big problem seems to come in the using it category.  It seems that no matter how the switches are flipped, cajoled, jiggled, or screamed at, it doesn’t work.  It gets to me precisely because the unit claims it’s seventy four degrees in the room and the air conditioner is on.  This is all well and good but most of the time it’s eighty four degrees in the room and the air conditioner is NOT on.

After much contemplation, I realized that it’s not a thermostat - it’s Pop Art.  It doesn’t do a thing.  The display features numbers but they never seem to change, even if you attempt to change them.  It turns out that the thermostat is watching us for this Pop Art installation.  It notes our reactions to its total lack of functionality.  Perhaps somewhere there is a large group of people watching the progress (and the process) of people attempting to operate the thermostat, then noting their varied reactions.

What makes matters worse is that there used to be a plastic cage on the thermostat so no one could change it.  This was back when the thermostat was functional, of course.  Since I work in the Twilight Zone<tm>, they had the cover removed so that groups could come to a consensus on what the temperature should really be.  Unfortunately this had precisely the opposite effect, in that the people who were always cold would simply jack the temperature up to ninety and leave for the night.  Oh what a surprise people received when they came to work in the morning.  Of course no one would ever admit to it (but we know it was the Fat Ladies from Accounts).

My frustration is not limited to temperature control devices, no sir.  One of the biggest recurring frustrations in my life is computers.  I can make a computer do things the designers never knew could be done.  This is also most disconcerting, as I’m in computers and networks for a living.

This past weekend I attempted to do some long overdue fixing of Annoying Things on several different computers at home.  To say this did not go well would be to say that Richard Simmons is just a little bit excitable.

My main computer blew its power supply last week (I put it together, which should account for all of the problems but that’s not it - honestly).  After replacing the errant, nearly new, ultra-quiet power supply, I noticed I had no audio.  At all.  Since it runs most of the time, I had to take it down to look at it, which involved lots of dirt, moving of things, and several very large pieces of heavy construction equipment I keep on hand for just such emergencies.

At the end of the allotted thirty minutes, I still had no audio and had introduced the cat to the concept of airborne computers.

While attempting to upgrade a laptop to a new version of Ubuntu, I ran into Touchpad Hell.  Fortunately the cat had enough sense to hide out at the first sign of screaming.   Two hours later the touchpad still did not scroll.  At that point, I was grateful that the touchpad worked at all, because it had stopped working several times while I was trying to get it to scroll.

At some point I restrung a guitar and figured that now would be an excellent time to have a guitar tuner app on a laptop.  If it required a bit of extra time, no big deal.   Apparently I forgot to specify how much extra time because two hours later, I had not one single tuner working.  There were about twenty of them.  Out of twenty, I managed to get about two to come up on the screen, which felt like a major accomplishment.  Of course these two, once up on the screen, still didn’t work. My guess is that this has something to do with four hundred bazillion versions of linux plus two hundred bazillion different linux sound systems.  As I’m using Xubuntu 8.04 and 8.10, I seem to be caught between ALSA, PULSE, and the main sound system: NO Pulse.

I happen to know that on certain operating systems you can install software and it will work(!)  I have even had it happen rather a lot under linux.  There are just certain apps that flatly refuse to work.  If you think this is entertaining, you should see me trying to use recording and sound effects apps under Xubuntu.

This morning I called Dell support because my laptop was not well after only a month (see elsewhere).  I hit all the right buttons on the phone, which told me it was transferring me to Support, then promptly told me that the extension did not have enough digits in it and hung up on me.  I didn’t hit the digits - Dell did.

I called back, hitting the choices for Inspiron laptop.  I got an Indian fellow, which I’m not supposed to get in Corporate Support.  He told me I was in the wrong place (no, really?) and he would send me over to Inspiron Support.  This is precisely the kind of shit that trips my trigger.

Later on, another machine decided to allow me to type, but not put anything I typed onscreen.  I invited my long-suffering wife over to verify this.   She looked at me in her patented Long-Suffering Way<tm>, and said these words:

“Man, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be you - that’s for sure.”

It was one solid weekend of this nonsense.  The neighbors probably thought I was off my meds again.

It wouldn’t be the first time.