I'm beginning to think that it is company policy that the grunts for PC Technical Services where I work at Initrode must be pricks. Twice in the past year I've had people come to my office to do something to my machine and both times I had the technician explain to me how what I needed done was a waste of time.

By the time the tech is at my office, the die has been cast, and sadly the powers that be have not consulted the tech about the best way to solve the problem. Believe it or not, the corporate help desk is more interested in satisfying users' requests than assuaging the little ego of some grunt that couldn't cut it at a decent company and so is working at Initrode.

About 4 months ago, someone in the Computer Support Services department must have had a few 100,000 dollars that needed to be spent quickly. So, a memo was sent out: "All PCs in the company will be upgraded from CRTs to LCD flat screen monitors." Of course, the company bought the cheapest, shittiest LCDs they could find and when I got mine the image was so fuzzy that I literally had trouble focusing my eyes when working in VB code windows. After 2 days of fighting it I call the Helpdesk.
"May I please have my CRT back?"
"Why do you want it back?"
"Well, in order to get rid of the eye-destroying fuzziness on these POS LCDs I have to jack up the resolution to 1280x1152. Of course, then everything is so small that I get headaches from trying to read it."
"Oh, well we don't have your monitor anymore. We'll have to bring you one of the ones left over from the lab."

Of course, they bring me an old 19in monitor, the color of which is already starting to fade to purple. The Novell logon prompt is also burned into the center of the screen. And the tech, who should just unhook the LCD and plug in the CRT for me and then leave promptly, decides he needs to find out why I don't want the LCD and try to see if he can "fix it"...as if I were too retarded to figure out the hardware doesn't work for me. He does eventually leave me with the barely usable monitor. Fortunately, there were 2 machines in the lab down the hall with 17in monitors. So, I swapped the 19in for one of the 17in monitors in the lab that was similar to my old one. Problem solved, no thanks to PCTECH.

Anyway, today, I requested to have more RAM put into my machine so I could run some reports I have to generate about once a week in less than 30 minutes or at least not have my machine turn into a single-tasking dumb terminal while the reports run.

I asked for more RAM because I knew there was no fucking way that my company would lay out the $1500 or so to get me an up to date Dell with something other than a Celeron in it. So, the request for RAM was already a concession on my part to practicality over the pursuit of the best solution to the problem. Well, Lou showed up today to install the larger capacity RAM modules and the second thing out of his mouth is some vague statement to the effect that "studies have shown adding RAM doesn't work to increase speed" and how "people don't want to troubleshoot the problem, but just throw RAM at it". This, coming from someone who is baffled as to how to logon to Windows XP because I changed the Netware client's welcome bitmap from the standard Initrode one to one of my own.

What the fuck?