Antarctica Starts Here.

But it's from a test fitting for the visor! That's just how LeVar dressed!

bnuuy :3

og pic:

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"Discharge cannot be after time of death": it was at a hospital and a nurse was trying to make the discharge paperwork a problem for Next Shift. But the system would not allow it.

Had a lot of those: they would tell me the error message and all I had to do is say it aloud to them.

The other was opening hardware support tickets - usually printer jams. These should have been easy for me: open ticket, record the hardware serial number, send it to the desktop team.

>looks inside

Someone being a prey animal is not an excuse to be mean, threatening, or generally rude towards them. This is coming from someone who is both a predator and a prey animal. I find it kind of concerning that this is semi-normalized. All prey animals should feel safe interacting with other animals on the internet.

Maybe its because i only experience prey drive towards theriform animals. Maybe its because ive become (mostly) desensitized to humans. You can't just not take responsibility for your actions because its "instinct". If your prey aggression is that bad, you need to go to therapy or find another way to get that under control. Being mean to strangers that you wouldn't have otherwise because they're something you would potentially eat is just... not okay?

Its one thing to put a warning that you will talk about prey drive or mention eating specific animals fequently. Thats fine. But ive seen multiple creatures say that prey animals need to stay off their blog because they will be agressive towards them. Thats just harassment and its not okay.

All sorts of animals that would eat me in a heartbeat follow me. Crows, owls, coyotes, hawks, martens. Some of my followers who interact with my stuff the most are my natural predators, and i have never once had a negative experience because of it.

And on the rare occasion i have the opportunity to talk to moths, frogs, and small lizards, i have never once wanted to make them feel unsafe, despite them being part of my natural diet.

No one, predator or prey, should feel unsafe interacting with fellow nonhumans on the internet. You are responsible for your aggression. It just feels so off to me that one would be so open about being unable to control their urges in a way that directly causes them to hurt others and makes it clear theyre not making an effort to fix it.

Every single time, what actually happens is, all those costly things were indirectly earning the government a lot of money, and cutting them out reduces revenue across the board, resulting in the government bringing in a LOT less money than they saved.

Once my folks convinced my teachers that a) we had a computer, and b) I could actually type (thanks, mom - <3 <3 ) they started accepting my printed out papers because my handwriting was (and remains) terrible.

In the 90's I'd gotten my hands on a second hand Atari XEGS (hotwired with a memory expansion) and 65XE, a couple of 810 disk drives, an Atari 850 interface (four serial ports across the front and a Centronics parallel port on the distal side which worked nicely with my PC printer) and an SX-212 modem. I'd started doing my homework on that because it was easier to get printer ribbon cartridges for the PC printer than my Commodore printer at the time.

There were local BBSes around at the time. 1984.ev was when BBSes really started taking off.