Thursday, December 13, 2007

The Amazing World of Techies

I purchased some new software today. I needed to upgrade my Quickbooks at work to a newer and more advanced version. The old version did not have the capability I needed to do some "stuff" my boss wanted. Well, I could have told her to go jump in the lake since my boss is my daughter but I decided to try to accomodate her wishes and install the upgrades myself. OMG ! That was a disaster!

I followed the simple instructions to the letter only to jam my computer into complete uselessness!! It would not move! Even control alt delete just sat there and stared back at me!!! There is a computer wizard in our office who used to be the business manager for a major company and as a last resort I solicited her support! Good thing she didn't have any appointments this afternoon because it took her three hours on the phone to India to get the thing installed! The first two techies who tried to help - she had to ask for different ones because she was repeating every word approximately 17 times to get them to understand Alabamian - and you can imagine what it was like to understand whatever language they were speaking.

Finally, my co-worker requested another techie and after asking for the same information over again as she had given to the previous two, she was ready to start over with the "head honcho"!

He confirmed that the software was installed properly but it would not transfer my information from the other version I had on my computer so the bookkeeping records for the last three years were somewhere in cyberspace and could not be found!

I want to make it clear that I love techies - my son-in-law is the best one in the world but he was at work and I couldn't talk to him and besides he had told me that Quickbooks is not his forte so we spent literally all afternoon in utter frustration!!! Knowing that middle of the month checks have to be written tomorrow I was pretty much freaking out when the fellow in India said if we would give him permission to go into our system, he could transfer all the data to the new program. At that point, I would have given him permission to get into my personal bank account, my health records, my school records, my credit card numbers , and would have given him my date of birth and social security number just to get some relief from the mess I was in.

Three hours and ungodly frustrating trials later, I got it all working properly. Now I just have to figure out to work the new system!

I know one thing - techies don't get paid enough!!!! In fact, a couple of them in India probably turned in their resignations after today.

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