A tongue-in-cheek view of systems support.

1. Don't write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.

2. When an I.T. person says he's coming right over, go for coffee. It's nothing for us to remember 3,000 screen saver passwords.

3. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and Popsicle art. We don't have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours. By the way, we also move file cabinets, desks, and most other office furniture.

4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what's keeping you from getting it. We don't need to know that you can't get into your mail because your computer won't power on at all.

5. Don't put your phone extension in your e-mails to the help desk. We need to keep an eye on the address book performance.

6. When I.T. support sends you an e-mail with high importance, delete it at once. We're just testing the public groups.

7. When an I.T. person is eating lunch in his cube, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

8. When an I.T. person is having a smoke outside, ask him a computer question. The only reason why we smoke at all is to ferret out those clients who don't have e-mail or a telephone line.

9. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery. Also flag all your messages as urgent.

10. When you call an I.T. person's direct line, press 5 to skip the bilingual greeting that says he's out of town for a week, record your message and wait exactly 24 hours before you send an email straight to the director because no one ever returned your call. You're entitled to common courtesy.

11. When the photocopier doesn't work, call computer support. There's electronics in it. This also applies to VCRs, Stereos, and Televisions. We also change the bottles on the water cooler.

12. When you're getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can fix your line from here.

13. When you have a dozen CGA monitors to get rid of, call computer support. We're collectors. Also applies to old laptops.

14. When something's wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person's chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.

15. If you hate your mouse, get some other pointing device and discard the manual. We know all the keyboard accelerators.

16. When an I.T. person tells you that computer monitors don't have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

17. When you get a message about insufficient disk space, delete everything in the Windows directory. It's nothing but trouble anyway.

18. When you get a message about a hard disk controller failure, and then you reboot and it looks okay, don't call I.T. support. We'd much rather troubleshoot it when it's dead as a doornail. The same holds true if you see the "blue screen of death" periodically.

19. When you have an I.T. person on the phone walking you through changing a setting, read the paper. We don't actually mean for you to do anything; we just love to hear ourselves talk.

20. When an I.T. person tells you that he'll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: "And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?" That'll get us going.

21. If you have a 14-inch monitor that says VGA on it, set the display to true color, 1024 x 768. You'll never again have to worry about people reading confidential files over your shoulder.

22. When we offer training on the upcoming OS upgrade, don't bother. We'll be there to hold your hand after it's done.

23. When the printer won't print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

24. When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the branch. One of them is bound to work.

25. Don't learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by "my thingy's outta whack".

26. Don't use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

27. If you're taking night classes in computer science, feel free to go around and update the network drivers for your all your co-workers. We're grateful for the overtime money.

28. When an I.T. person makes popcorn, help yourself while he's checking out your access rights. And we keep chocolate in the top drawer, too.

29. When you have an I.T. person fixing your computer at a quarter past noon, eat your lunch in his face. We function better when slightly dizzy.

30. Don't ever thank us. We're getting paid for this.

31. If you're an intern, feel free to bring in all your friends from college and have your Daddy complain to our boss when we won't let them use the scanner. We had no friends when we were in college; that's why we're such a bunch of tight-assed little twerps.

32. When an I.T. person asks you whether you've installed any new software on this computer, lie. It's nobody's business what you've got on your computer.

33. When an I.T. person finds the AOL shortcuts in your Recycle Bin, tell them you've never seen those before.

34. If you have NT, feel free to change the local administrator's password to "biteme" and promptly forget it. We like installing NT.

35. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 45 lbs. of computer sitting on top of them.

36. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin crumbs and nail clippings in them. Keep large cups of coffee next to your keyboard.

37. When you receive the new Yanni CD for your birthday, shove it into any slot on the front of your computer. We like getting physical with 5.25 floppy drives.

38. When you get a message saying "Are you sure?" click on that Yes button as fast as you can. If you weren't sure, you wouldn't be doing it, would you?

39. When you find an I.T. person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don't have any money to speak of anyway.

40. Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about that computer crap". We don't mind at all hearing our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.

41. When you need to change the toner cartridge, call I.T. support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a master's degree in nuclear physics.

42. When you can't find someone in the government directory, call I.T. support. Due to budget restrictions, we double as 1904.

43. When you have a lock to pick on an old file cabinet, call I.T. support. We love to hack.

44. When something's the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn't know jack about the problem.

 45. When you receive a 30-meg movie file, send it to everyone as a mail attachment. We got lots of disk space on that mail server.

46. Don't even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the queue.

47. When your eyes fall on the family pictures on a an I.T. person's desk, exclaim in a flabbergasted tone of voice: "YOU have a child?!?"

48. When an I.T. person gets on the elevator pushing $15,000 worth of computer equipment on a cart, ask in a very loud voice: "Good grief, you take the elevator to go DOWN one floor?!?" That's another one that cracks us up no end.

49. When the Finance folks are printing a 100-page spreadsheet on the LaserJet, send your black and white print job to the color printer. We get the black toner for free.

50. When you lose your car keys, send an email to the entire department. People out in Wagga Wagga like to keep abreast of what's going on.

51. When you bump into an I.T. person at the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question. We do weekends.

52. When you see an I.T. person having a beer with a member of the opposite sex on a Friday night, walk right up to them and ask a computer question. We don't do dating; the reason we're talking  is because we're discussing the new Intel processor.

53. Don't bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own. Computer names are just a cosmetic feature in NT 4.0; they won't be doing anything useful until the next major release.

54. When you can't access some shared directory on your boss's machine, just tell us that you've lost your X: drive. We know all that by heart.

55. If you need to buy a computer for your daughter in college, feel free to pick our brains while we're in the bathroom.

56. If your child is a student in computer science, have them come in on the weekends and do projects on your office computer. We'll be there for you when the illegal copy of Visual Basic 6.0 makes your Access 95 database flip out.

57. When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office, leave the documentation at home. We'll find the jumper settings on the Internet.

58. We're aware of that problem with computers just sitting there and not doing anything. We're confident that with the next service pack they'll be able to dance the jig.

59. The correct location to store important files is the Recycle Bin. It's just like a real office, where you keep your tax receipts in the blue can under your desk.

60. If you miss Windows 3.1, find the line that goes shell explorer.exe in your SYSTEM.INI file and replace it with shell=progman.exe. It makes troubleshooting infinitely easier when we ask you whether you have a Start button at the bottom of your screen and you truthfully answer us that you don't.

61. If you curse every morning when you start to type your password and the Virus Shield splash screen pops up in your face, disable the Virus Shield. Again, this is just like real life: if you don't like something, just don't use it, that's all.

62. If you hate PC's, get on the Internet and download one of those desktop enhancements that make your computer look just like a Mac, down to the sad faces replacing verbose error messages. We find it refreshing to troubleshoot the nuances in that sad little face instead of some cold forbidding hexadecimal integer.

63. When you detect a French accent in a an I.T. person's voice, switch to French. We don't mind that your level of fluency is low; you don't make a whole lot of sense in your own mother tongue either.

64. Please feel free to install games on your work computer that cause problems with video drivers. We like trying to work on your computer in safe mode. We also like games that are played over our corporate network with other users.

65. Store all of your files and documents on floppy disks. Networks and hard drives are generally unreliable. If you do have a network drive, save every document and spreadsheet you ever do. We're currently running a contest to see who has the most files in their folder.

66. Uncheck the remove deleted messages when you exit from your email program box. You never know when you might need that message from 3 years ago on the company picnic. Our email server has unlimited storage space.

67. Set up your email to always let you know when messages you have sent have been received and read. Post a lot of messages to the everyone group. We like to use the performance monitor to try and figure out why the network is dying.

68. Every time you hear about or receive an email virus message forward it to the everyone group. Also do this for jokes and anything else you find interesting.

69. When you're accessing inappropriate, non-related work sites on the Internet: Always answer yes to any message that asks if you want to install software. Never clear you cache, and when we notice inappropriate files in it, deny any knowledge.

70. Subscribe to and use alternate e-mail services. Our's goes down sometimes.

71. Don't back up your data files. You can easily re-create them at any time if your hard drive crashes. When you lose your files, tell your boss that we never told you to do backups or offered any training.

72. When we call you to tell you we need to take the server down immediately, try and negotiate with us to keep it up just half an hour longer. Ask us to explain what the problem is. It will be easier to handle an interruption in your work if you know that the readback cache buffers overflowed and sent a bad semaphore to the kernel. Keep phoning every 10 minutes until we get it fixed.

73. Refer to every piece of equipment and software that is received in the I.T. department as toys. Ask us often if we are playing with our toys. Although we like our work, spending 3 days setting up a new PC is sometimes not as much fun as playing with LEGO.

74. In every budget meeting, insist that the organization is spending too much on I.T. After all, the amount of budget our department receives is only for stuff that we need. It doesn't really affect any other area.

75. When you walk into our office at 7:00 p.m. and we have that strange look on our faces because the production server has just crashed, tell us that we should just go home and leave it until the morning. It doesn't make much difference if the invoices don't go out with the delivery drivers at 5:00 a.m.

76. Always order computers that are not standard for the organization. These are easier for us to configure and set up.

77. Always use the expression "the system never works" when you are having problems with your word processing, spreadsheet, or any other desktop software.

78. You never need to tell us if you don't need some reports from the stack we send you each month. Paper is still cheap, and we have high volume printers in our area.