Dear Mainstream Press

Your journalists are absolutely diabolical at writing about tech news.

They produce articles so fundamentally logically flawed they are laughable. This week alone you’ve embarrassed yourselves twice without even realising. Firstly, you leapt gleefully onto the fact that the suspect in the aborted French school massacre played World of Warcraft, touting it as irrefutable evidence that he was inspired to shoot people by playing computer games. Despite the fact that World of Warcraft has no guns in it. Or blood.

Then you trotted out some utter tripe about how the Google Chrome OS was going to pose “a significant challenge to the dominance of Microsoft’s Windows franchise”, as if Chrome would somehow surpass the achievements of Linux overnight, just because it’s coming from a company the journalist has heard of, and that the entire media seems happy to fawn over almost as much as they do Apple. Here’s a newsflash, you morons: Google is not the messiah. The way your journalists write about Google, one could be forgiven for thinking that everything they develop radiates the glow of summer sunsets, reduces carbon emissions, leaves daffodils growing in every footprint, and urinates Chanel No. 5.

Worse still, I’m not even talking about second-rate publications here. Both of these were in The Times, along with the usual collection of broadsheets. Stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it. Since you can’t be bothered to pay a proper tech journalist, at least have someone with a vague clue about the issues proofread your articles for ignorance. Try those poor buggers you have running the computers. If they don’t bury their face in their hands when they read the copy, it’s at least relatively safe to print — but don’t hold your breath.

Love and kisses,
The Angry Technician

Dear Acer

Question: Who in their right mind would ship a server in this day and age that has EDB disabled by default, with no way to turn it on in the BIOS?

Answer: YOU WOULD, YOU DONKEYS.

This server is less than a year old. I should not have to install a BIOS update just so I can get Hyper-V working. Especially when said BIOS update takes far longer than it should and is extremely poorly documented.

Thanks to you I didn’t leave work until 23.15 last Friday. I inherited this server when I started my new job. Rest assured we will not be buying any more from you.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear Xerox

If you’re too lazy to write some damned code to present a list of valid months for when I could have bought a printer, try not to fire the guy whose job it is to add a new line each month.

It’s now October, and according to your warranty registration page, I apparently couldn’t have possibly bought anything from you since August.

Have fun typing up the registration form I sent you by fax instead.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear SMART Technologies

It’s admirable that you’ve gone to as much effort as you have to ensure it is easy for administrators to install the software to support your SMART Board IWBs.

It would be more admirable if you’d actually given the Install Manager software a quick trial run before releasing it, because product activation during a silent install simply doesn’t work, due to a bug in your Windows Installer package.

Years ago, DHL had a slogan along the lines of “a promise is nothing until it’s delivered”. Sadly, the same is true here. It doesn’t matter how much effort you’ve put in; if your software falls at the last hurdle, it is useless.

The lesson here? Tests. They’re not just for cricketers.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear Canon

When you hide the most useful version of your driver software on your U.S. website, leaving the European site bereft of even an explanation that an alternative exists to the retrograde version you foist upon us, you are wasting both my time, and yours.

Wait, scratch that. It’s just my time you’re wasting. Cut that out, will you?

I expect this from HP, not from you.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear Digital Blue

Every piece of your software I have ever dealt with is utter rubbish.

For me, the torture began with the comically-named “Digital Blue Digital Movie Creator”, to which you had to add a redundant ‘digital’ to avoid never being able to sell the software to schools. Most recently, it was your dodgy QX-series microscopes. At every turn your products reveal themselves as cheap, gaudy, and developed by people who clearly have never read any of Microsoft’s application design guidelines, have almost no clue of how networked computer systems operate, and appear to have nothing but disdain for accepted principals of user interface design. They do, however, seem to be quite fond of designing user manuals in Microsoft Paint.

Every time a teacher hands me another one of your wretched creations with a hopeful and innocent gleam in their eye, my day is ruined. The bitter tears I would otherwise weep during the hours of anguish trying to get it to work are held back only by my hope that either you one day learn how to actually write software that isn’t a steaming river of effluence, or that you go bust. Frankly, at this point, I’d rather it was the latter.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear Arrogant Sales Staff

There are no circumstances under which you will ever be important enough for me to talk to during the first week of term.

My new rule is that any unsolicited sales calls received during the first week of term will earn your company automatic entry onto my supplier blacklist. I know that you must think this week would be a good time to get yourself noticed at a time when we might be starting new projects, but you are utterly wrong. Here’s why:

1. The first week of term is always, ALWAYS extremely busy.
2. I did all my projects over the summer. An increasing number of school technical staff work during the break. You are therefore 3 months late – and an idiot.
3. Even if I were starting projects now, there is no way I would be risking taking on a new supplier during the first week of term, due to #1.

That you do not realise these things betrays a distinct lack of understanding about your market. That does not inspire confidence. Just consider yourself lucky that you don’t have my direct line, and that you instead have to go through the switchboard, where the school’s extremely patient office staff have been screening your calls so that I don’t tell you to stick your sales call where the sun does not shine.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear BT

The management website for your MyOffice system is so ridiculously bug-ridden, it beggars belief that the school has put up with it for so long. Frankly, it’s hard to believe that any of your customers put up with it.

It took me over an hour to create just six new email accounts today. There were supposed to be seven, but on my final attempt, I managed to associate a user login with our account that simply doesn’t work. When I try to remove the user, I’m told it doesn’t exist.  I can’t create a new login with that username, because the system says the name is in use, even though it supposedly isn’t. This phantom user now haunts our account like some digital ghost in the ethernet, unable to manifest a useful presence in the form of a functioning login, but still occupying our realm in a way unsettling to anyone else present – chiefly by claiming one of the finite number of user licenses on our account, of which we are desperately short.

I’ll be calling you next week to explain all this, and much more, in detail you may find chilling. I’ve only had a couple of months experience with your half-cocked excuse for an internet services system, and I already can’t wait to be rid of it.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear Cisco

If you are going to publish crucial mistakes in your Cisco IOS configuration guides, could you please have the common decency to make them at least moderately obvious?

Telling someone to configure the ip nat outside command on the ATM interface, when it should be on the Dialer interface, is a quite subtle distinction for someone configuring a router from scratch for the first time. You know, the sort of time when one would be closely following the configuration guide?

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

P.S. Wildcard masks? Seriously? What the hell is wrong with regular subnet masking?

Dear Dell

If you will insist on shipping 4-month old drivers on a particular configuration of computer that didn’t even exist 2 months ago, try not to ship the version that will cause a BSOD less than an hour after the computer is turned on. Nothing is going to annoy your customers more than having a brand new computer crash on them. I don’t care if it’s ATI’s driver and their fault. I’m blaming you for being incompetent enough to still be shipping it.

Also, you might want to make sure the drivers on your website are not the same buggy and out of date version. You’ve had plenty of time to extract your finger from its normal resting place and test some new ones. Sort it out.

Lastly, while you’re at it – would it kill you to install Vista SP2?

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician