This story is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the stupid.
So I help a lot of people. Yea, as hard to believe as it is, it’s true. I help people all the time, for free. That’s right, free. I’m not trying to get saint-hood here and I’m not blowing my own horn, even though it seems that way. I am telling you all this because you need a little background for this blog entry.
I am a highly dedicated volunteer firefighter, 18 years worth. I still receive the “Most Calls” award from my department for responding to the most calls per year… In fact, I’ve received it the last two years in a row and 4 out of the last 8 years I’ve been in the department. I’ve been named “Firefighter of the Year” 3 times in the course of the last 8 years. This coupled with working two full-time jobs (those that know me, know I stay busy), plus I help friends run an “Outfitter” company.. for free. I answer thousands of computer-help-related emails per year, for free. I sit in a chatroom, one that I created as a spin-off to a computer-help-related website I’ve built over the years, and answer computer-help-related questions in real-time, for free, every day.
Every now and then, I’ll get involved with someone that irritates me. Ok. We all do that. Most of us will overlook the irritation and work with the person or help them out. Big deal. I do that all the time.
Folks, I found someone that absolutely baffles me, we’ll call him “Numbnuts” for the purpose of this discussion. I’ve answered literally hundreds of emails from Numbnuts over the course of the last few months. Some of the emails are genuine questions that only myself or someone “in the know” can answer, they’re not general computer related issues, they’re specialty items only a select few know the answers to. Over time, these emails have progressed from the object-oriented to the obscure. I expressed my intent to help Numbnuts because he’s in China, behind the great firewall thereof. He’s a foreign national, living in a hostile environment, expressing himself in religious ways not appreciated by the communist/socialist/maoist regime in power (to which he once replied to me by saying: “…communists are good for christianity, the more they oppress, the easier it is to get converts.”) — now there’s something fucked up with that statement, but that’s a different subject that I’m not covering here.
I’ve freely given him advice on firewalls, routers, connectivity issues, PGP, proxies, hardware and MS based software issues, among other things. I’ve advised him on personal privacy and turned him onto many, many items of interests as it pertains to persecution by the Chinese government that he was (how the hell this happened I dunno) previously unaware of.
He’s even used me (chat/email) during visits to other peoples residences while he worked on their computers, then billed them for it…. ! (an exclamation point is all I have to say about that).
Numbnuts became interested in linux. Being a linux admin, I of course did the honorable thing and offered to pass on what was taught to me. I offered to assist him in learning linux and the ins/outs of linux desktops. My personal favorite linux flavor is RedHat, it’s easy for the newbie to learn, so I helped him get started and taught him about ISO’s, where to download it from, get the documentation online, etc. I taught him how to install it, how to get started and some basic functions. I helped him with his first googling of info… God did I help him with google. Numbnuts is the kind of person that wants you to hand him everything on a silver platter. I’ve had to go to the point of completely brushing him off during very busy times of the day because he doesn’t understand the FACT that I am busy and I cannot dedicate my entire day to his little problems. He continually went into IRC to speak with me, even though I told him to EMAIL me specific problems and I would get to ’em when I could. I’m not talking one or two times, I told him this no less than 10 times…. finally I had to send him an email and speak to him like he’s a little kid (he’s like 37 or so) and tell him in as simple terms as I possibly could, again, that the best way to get in touch with me is email. Something finally clicked in the moron’s brain. He stated “..I finally get it, email you.” Or something to that affect.
So, tonight, I was helping him take out some stuff in /etc/rc.d/init.d/. He fucked that up. Didn’t get things back in there that he should have. I gave him explicit step-by-step instructions, 1, 2, 3, do this, do this, it will look like this, copy here, paste here.. blah blah blah. Nope. He couldn’t do it. Reported back to me and in the interim, like some kind of dumbass, he rebooted the system, without me telling him to. Because this idiot wouldn’t take my advice and put linux on one of the other 10 machines he seems to have charge over, he setup a dual boot on his primary workstation… would he contact me from another machine while we worked on this one? No. He rebooted the box, virtually breaking it apart. Ok. Sure, I could get it to come back up, if I had access to it or he had enough experience to at least explain the situation to me or what is on the screen at a given time. He emailed me with: “….I rebooted the box, now it won’t go passed…. won’t boot.. nothing works….” blah. blah. blah. Well, we all know what happened, he borked his startup. It’s not un-fixable by no means.. but if you haven’t ever tried to recover a linux startup via email or chat while speaking to a moron.. let me tell you, you might as well grab a yank of hair out of your head, cause it’s gonna happen before the conversation is over.
Anyway, I told him, since he didn’t have anything important on the machine yet, frankly I think he’d fucked up more than he’d fixed, I told him to reboot the box with the Redhat 1 disk in and reinstall. He replies back in a form of language I’ve never seen before. I reply and ask him to speak “english only”, he replies with a smart-ass comment…. Then I reply back to him that I wouldn’t be helping him anymore…. he replies back a list of smart-ass comments… I finally send him an email explaining that I didn’t want to speak to him again, reported him to his ISP, of which, I am very familiar with the ToS ;) So all of a sudden, after months of helping this asshole, he turns asshole because…. because… only thing I can think of.. because he’s too goddamn stupid to understand anything we’ve done….
Needless to say, I am extremely pissed off right now.. and it’s two hours since last contact. It’s people like this that take advantage of people like me and decrease the number of people like me in the world. You want to know why there’s so many assholes in the world? Guess what, the above is one more link in the chain. We “do gooders” can only take so much life being sucked out of us before the steam comes to a head and we pop.