I get! The new! Disk! Image!
The job I started at the end of May is my first at a Large Corporation, so it’s my first time dealing with an IT department and a locked-down applications folder.
When I arrived here and saw my lush silver G5 tower and the slim 19-inch Apple Cinema monitor—not to mention the window and the door and the drafting table—I was thrilled. Jobs at places that have money can be good!
When I turned the computer on and discovered that it was loaded up with cutting-edge software such as OS 10.2.8 (Jaguar—that’s two cats ago, for those of you not using Macs), Quark XPress 6.1, Illustrator 10, Photoshop 7, and Acrobat 6.0.1, however, I was, let’s say, less thrilled.
Now, I love Mac OS X, but I love it in the current version, and I love it My Way—with a constantly adjusted array of little helper applications and custom settings. Call it a legacy of my years of power-using Windows, if you disapprove. So when I found that the application folder was locked so that I couldn’t install Quicksilver, which would have made up for the most annoying deficiencies of Jaguar’s primitive Finder, nor such useful tools as TextWrangler and PrintWindow, I was, mmm, pissed.
But I’ve watched The IT Crowd; I know you can’t just call the guys in the basement and say, “Fix my computer!” Because first they’ll let the phone ring forty-five times, then they’ll ask you to turn your computer off and on again, and then they’ll have madcap adventures—while still failing to fix your computer. These things have to be finessed.
So I finessed it by compiling a list, during my first few weeks, of all the things that drove me nuts about my workstation. I then sent an e-mail asking them to fix only the most obviously pernicious, and mentioning a few of the others in a playful, nerdy tone. I immediately received a call back, but when the guy determined that I was on a Mac—nearly everyone in the building uses a PC, of course—he said he’d forward my inquiry to the Mac tech. Note the singular. Three weeks and two increasingly wheedling e-mails later, a dapper young dark-haired man finally showed up in my doorway. He fixed my system clock, which was five minutes slow, and deleted Acrobat Reader, which was always opening instead of Acrobat proper.
Then, when I gently griped—while smiling as much as I possibly could—about the general weakness of the software on my system, Mr. Tech said there was a new “image” they were rolling out with Tiger, InDesign, etc., but that it would take a while to trickle down to me. And in an attempt to cool my drooling enthusiasm, he said that when I did get the new image, Font Reserve would stop being able to activate fonts on the fly. I figured he just meant auto-activation, which I learned years ago to turn off, as that was the only way to keep Suitcase from forcing thrice-daily reboots. But no, he said Font Reserve would no longer be able to activate fonts even manually while applications were running; I’d have to maybe reboot, activate the fonts, and then start Quark. And on that cheery note, he left. I continued adding to my list, but with less hope of any relief.
A few weeks later, a blonde man stuck his head in my doorway and said he needed to install a minor upgrade that would take five minutes—something related to backups. I smiled a lot and got out of his way, drifting down the hall to distract my teammate. I later learned that this unassuming personage was the Mac guy for the entire family of companies (including the ones in other buildings), i.e., the Geek of Geeks (GoG) to pester and suck up to.
Then, two weeks ago, as I alluded to in a caption over here, I had some fucking really fucking annoying fucking font problems, which cost me at least two days’ work and half-scuttled what I thought was a pretty nice design. I started to blog about them for you, but then I couldn’t recreate one of the problems on my computer at home (hint: because my computer works), and then my solution to one of them didn’t solve the issue after all, and I grew exhausted with the whole story. But during this heady time I did send another e-mail to the helpdesk, to which I received a very long, detailed, and even passionate response (which illuminated but did not at all solve the problems I was experiencing) from GoG. I wrote back thanking him and ended my message by asking, jokily, “So, when’s that InDesign rollout happening, again?” GoG didn’t reply, which I took to mean that he hates me.
Well.
Today, the first Mr. Tech popped in to say that he was just about done upgrading the associate AD’s computer, and he asked if I wanted to be next. Did I? What do you think? So he’ll start tomorrow at five and says it will take half of Friday to finish. My teammate will be out that day, so I can use her desk during the downtime.
Yay! Yay! Yay!
I will let you know how it goes.
Lots of good luck to you. Computers are the devil unless they are the genie you just rescued from the bottle – I hope the Mac guy is kind, knowledgeable, and available until you get exactly what you want.
My scariest IT moment was at a previous newspaper. I don’t even recall what my issue was, but the sweet little guy who had solved a bunch of problems for me before came out to my workstation, looked at my computer, looked at me, looked back at the machine, and asked me, in all seriousness, “Is this a PC or a Mac?” Making this even worse, there were only about 10 Macs in the entire building, and they were all in rooms very far away, so I have no idea why he thought I’d have a Mac.
“Never mind,” I said, “I’ll fix it myself.” :-P
I would be perfectly happy to fix my computer myself, as that has been among my responsibilities at nearly every job I’ve ever had. I’ve zapped PRAM; I’ve salvaged data from hard drives whose S.M.A.R.T. status was “failing”; I’ve replaced processors. (And none of it was half as gnarly as the kind of stuff I used to have to do to keep my PCs running.) But without the admin password, I can’t do so much as update my copy of Firefox. I’m dead in the water. Helpless!
Just back up and bring your own discs in.
If it were my company I would just give everyone a budget and leave you alone…
Well, you can bet I’ll be backing up today. And making a list of apps I want to install while I’ve got Mr. Tech in my whiny clutches.
I’m sure they have very strict guidelines from legal about what can and can’t be installed on company computers. Limewire, for instance, is a no-go, I’m sure, though there are perfectly legitimate business uses for it . . . none of which I can picture right now. But TextWrangler is unimpeachable. I’m hoping that if I say, “But I need it so that I can edit text files using regular expressions” (which is, in fact, what I use it for) he’ll be putty in my hands.
Yesterday I was asked why I’ll need Quicksilver if the new disk image has Tiger, which includes Spotlight.
Searching for files is actually one of the things I don’t use Quicksilver for. To me, it’s an application launcher and a fast, direct interface to poky applications I’d rather not launch in full. After 2.5 months on this crippled computer, I’ve learned to work around most of its shortcomings, albeit slowly and with grumbling. But one function I miss several times a day is the ability to make calculations on the fly. I hate the calculator app. It’s stupid and ugly, it’s never where I need it, and it’s always in the way. With Quicksilver, I just hit my hotkey, type a period to enter text, type my expression, and tab over to calculate. It doesn’t require thinking; the calculation is just there, and then it’s gone.
Ditto for finding address book entries. I don’t want to launch the whole stupid address book; I just want to see a particular number, and then I want it to go away.
And for application launching, it keeps me from having to use the mouse. Right now, I’m forced to use the Dock. And although I’m a designer, I am emphatically not an icon-oriented person. When I look at that row of pictures, it takes me a few seconds to remember that the blue thing is Photoshop and the other blue thing is Acrobat and the other-other blue thing is Quark, and the blue thing next to that is Font Reserve, and so on. I have to use so many brain cells to decipher these supposedly helpful, friendly little pictures; it’s exhausting. But with Quicksilver, all I have to remember is P or A or Q. If you tend to think in words, as I do, it’s much more efficient.
Spotlight, meanwhile, doesn’t do much for me. It finds files, sure, but it organizes the results in ways that aren’t meaningful to me. I don’t always know if the thing I’m looking for is a “picture” or a “PDF” or a “document.” Isn’t a picture a document? And isn’t a PDF also a document, and a picture? It seems awfully arbitrary. All I want is a list of files with their properties and dates; after that I’ll do the sorting. I’m better at it. I’m sure there’s some way to change the default way it presents results, but I don’t care. I just don’t like it.
Despite my having to work in/with WinXP all day, we do have a few OS X boxes in our office (creative group). And much as I like our Service Desk folks and respect their trying to maintain a system of who updates this-that-and-the-other on everyone’s machines, they really know squat about OS X. So… I maintain them. (Even the QA group calls me over when things go haywire. Hee.)
I have to say that I’m mildly disturbed that you haven’t got the admin password, or what you’re not an admin user on your own machine.
I suspect that they don’t give users admin privileges because (1) it’s so easy to deny them, thanks to the Unix setup, and (2) they’re used to all their Windows users whoring out their boxes to whatever’s the latest virus or spyware. The techs must lose years of their lives to that kind of bullshit, so I can certainly sympathize with the urge. But the solution, obviously, is to get rid of Windows, not to inconvenience all the peaceful, happy, self-sufficient Mac users.
Hee hee. EXACTLY!
Esp. now that you can use BootCamp or Parallels to run your Windows apps. (Cough.) (: