The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Welcome to the machine

Ah, the Corporate Overlords' Managed Laptop … how would I ever waste time without you?

Last week I received an email saying the Corporate Overlords' Managed Laptop is “out of compliance” (read: I waited longer than twenty minutes to update the laptop). I followed the instructions in the email but they failed to appease the Corporate Overlords as it was still “out of compliance.” A meeting was scheduled to let the “Desktop Compliance Analyst” log into the laptop and make it “into compliance.” That failed due to the Corporate Overlords' VPN being flaky, so the meeting was rescheduled for today.

This time, the DCA had me download a 2G patch file. As I was waiting for it to download, the XXXXX­XXXXX­XXX Protection program updated itself and was asking me to restart the computer to finish its installation. I asked the DCA about this, and was told to just let the computer run and finish the downloading.

Twenty minutes later (and I wish I was making this up) The XXXXX­XXXXX­XXX Protection program interrupted the popup asking me to restart the cmpouter to inform me that it had updated itself again and to restart the computer to let it finish.

Seriously.

While this was going on, I asked the DCA about the Heisenberg Notification Center. The DCA said it was easy to reconfigure and went ahead to do it, since I don't have access to do said configuration.

“Oh,” said the DCA, “you're running a version of Windows 10 that's older than twenty minutes. No wonder I couldn't find the option I was looking for.”

“You guys set it up,” I said.

“No, I belong to the Desktop Compliance Unit. I'm not responsible for configuring machines.”

“No, ‘you guys’ being The Corporate Overlords.”

That got a slight chuckle out of the DCA.

I then asked the DCA about another issue. “I keep getting this popup—‘Program FunUtility has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working. Please close the program’ and it has a button on it labeled ‘Close the program.’ I do that, but it keeps coming back up.”

“Can you send me a screen shot?”

“Can you not take over my laptop and see it for yourself?”

“Oh, it's probably nothing. Just keep dismissing the dialog box until it stops appearing.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

How does anyone use Windows?

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