Newsgroups: alt.peeves
From: charless@sco.com (Charlie Stross)
Subject: A pane in the neck
X-Mailer: SCO Portfolio 2.0
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 15:26:22 +0000



Last week was _bad_. So bad that I don't know how to describe it.
Just, uh, let's skip over the compunerdy details by saying that
they sent me -- an inoffensive geek whose job is to write manuals,
not flight simulators -- on a course in Motif programming. If you
don't know what Motif is, don't worry, I'm not going to tell you.
Suffice to say that this course had grown men crying and trying to
crawl under their desks by day three; by day five some of us were
discussing a suicide pact as a credible means of avoiding having to
finish it. ObOpinion; windows are for houses, and should stay there.
Keep them away from my computer! But I digress ...

By Friday afternoon I felt more or less as if I'd spent the last week
being gently tapped around the cranium with rubber-coated mallets
wielded by charming, polite ice-hockey players. Luckily the next 
Monday was a public holiday, so I had three days to recover. There-
fore, being a sensible kind of guy, I decided to drive up north and
visit my folks in Leeds, giving a couple of friends a lift along
the way, and generally crash out and have fun for the weekend.

Well, I got in my car but I had real problems operating it. I 
wanted to listen to the news on the way up the M1, but the radio
buttons didn't conform to the release 1.1 style guide and 
when I tried to minimise the application it killed it instead.
Then the weather got cold so I tried to turn up the heat, but
the slider widget connected to the hot air vent was broken and
I couldn't find a resource file for it. And for some reason
I had to put all the luggage in /boot, which means that my 
car is definitely not compliant with the XPG4 specification. 

I arrived in Leeds and crashed out at my sister's place. The
Albanian dissidents had moved out -- fortuitously -- and she had 
an open bottle of wine, so I drank some of it and we passed
a long argument list back and forth until I suffered a stack 
overflow on the way to the bathroom and had to dump core.

The next morning I resolved from henceforth to have nothing 
ever again to do with Mr Babbage's infernal engines. Sadly, this was 
not to be the permitted. My sister wanted me to do the usual family
technical support line on her Mac, although she relented when
she saw the effect it's dialog boxes had on me. I went outside
to get some fresh air, and when I got back there was a message 
on her answerphone from my parents, asking me to register a 
callback with them. My brother and his wife have recently spawned,
and I was expected to go and interact with the child process.

By now, as you can well imagine, I was becoming concerned for
my own mental stability. He's never been the same since he 
did that course, don't you think? It's probably harmless -- he
keeps seeing widgets crawling out of the woodwork, but the
only messages they send him are boxes that say "Accept, Cancel 
or Help" -- still, we think we ought to take us, or him, to
see a shrink and get his main window resized.

Right.

Now if you'll excuse him, I think he's going to put his head in
a warm dark place for the next week or two. I've promised
myselves to cut down on the c*mp*t*ng before it gets out of
hand; as withdrawl therapy I've agreed with myself to port
Word for Windows to his slide rule, so I can still write
without having anything to do with c*mp*t*rs. Then in a 
week or two he's going to go on a long vacation by the sea, in
Margate. For relaxation he'll train myself to get stinking
drunk, run around the town chanting "oi! oi! oi!" and throw
stones through any windows he sees, instead of trying to maximize
them.

Then he might be ready to rejoin the human resource tree ...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charlie Stross aka charless@scol.sco.com ..... UNIX oriented text mangler
WARNING: The opinions voiced in the preceding electronic document are the
product of a warped mind. Take two before meals. 
 

Newsgroups: alt.peeves