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[I’ll prob­a­bly end up deliv­er­ing this onstage either tomor­row or next week.]

It’s 9:28 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Slaving away for machines
Which do our think­ing for us
Which is what this is all about…
Evolution…

It’s 9:32 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Soon to be board­ing
A motly crew of the dam­aged
Is crowd­ing me in the wait­ing room
What if I stay per­fectly still,
Can they see me?

It’s 9:34 PM
Commuter train of the damned
The mech­a­nized night­mare
We’re all wired in now
Did I say that out loud, or just think it?
Sloppy cadence.

It’s 9:37 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Soon to be headed out
To places bor­ing as fuck
Thou art dam­aged and still with me
Thy Rod and thy staff…

It’s 9:39 PM
Commuter train of the damned
It won’t be long now, man
Atomic bat­ter­ies to power
Turbines to speed, ready to go
Doors are closing

It’s 9:45 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Fascists ain’t run­nin’ shit.
A small god for small mir­a­cles
I knew they’d be invad­ing damn
Iran on nine-twelve.

I come into the office early this morn­ing, in the hopes of get­ting a head start on the back­log I’ve got:

1. Finish refac­tor of My First PHP Project to take advan­tage of what I’ve learned since I wrote it, be doc­u­mented, and gen­er­ally just stop sucking.
2. Add needed fea­tures, like an XML-RPC interface.
3. Switch to sub­ver­sion for MFPP.
4. Put sub­ver­sion on CentOS3 pro­duc­tion server (more “fun” than it sounds).
5. Switch pro­duc­tion to MFPP 2.0.
6. Make Big Hairy Project inter­op­er­ate with MFPP over afore­men­tioned XML-RPC interface.

Naturally, before my lap­top even fin­ishes boot­ing (i.e. before it gets to the login screen), I get a call from a cus­tomer, who wants me to walk his sec­re­tary through the client-site instal­la­tion pro­ce­dure. Apparently their sysad­min has logged this per­son into her machine as a Domain Admin, but can’t be both­ered to visit our web­site, where the instal­la­tion pro­ce­dure for the soft­ware which needs to be installed is enu­mer­ated in painstak­ing detail — includ­ing such strange sub-sections as “New Installation,” and “Upgrading from Version 2.x.”

So they call tech sup­port. But since it’s well before 8, nobody else is here to field the call. So I have to walk a sec­re­tary through the instal­la­tion procedure.

And by walk her through it, I mean, quite lit­er­ally, walk her through it. “Open a web browser” “go to xxxxx​.com” “click on soft­ware” “click on this”, down­load this, lis­ten to her read all five “Welcome to the Blah Blah Blah InstallShield Wizard” screens. Completely. Tell her to click Next fifty times. Explain what the lit­tle “under­line” but­ton in the top-left cor­ner of the screen does.

What I mean is: come on! Someone took the time to write out instal­la­tion instruc­tions for each lit­tle page. I per­son­ally took the time to write out three pages of instruc­tions cov­er­ing mul­ti­ple instal­la­tion sce­nar­ios, detail­ing what you need to down­load, and why. I even have tables with frig­gin’ pic­tures of the hard­ware we sup­port along one axis, and soft­ware pack­ages along the other, just in case users can’t be both­ered to know the make and model of the piece of junk they lug around all day.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that peo­ple read the fuck­ing things. But they get into this zom­bie robot mode, where they just spam my ears with wel­come screen ver­biage (yeah, it bugged me that much). Except they are human beings! What kind of fucked up bull­shit is this, where peo­ple will­ingly go all *dummy mode on*, and con­sent to becom­ing zom­bies requir­ing they be told when to click the “next” but­ton, or the “install” but­ton — when there’s noth­ing else you can do on the whole screen except “cancel”!

What I mean is: Jesus Christ on a stick! Hasn’t any­body ever tried to fig­ure shit out for them­selves? You know, read, com­pre­hend, act, instead of relay infor­ma­tion, receive orders, exe­cute orders. You’re sup­posed to use the machine, not become one.

Fuck.

And yeah, I know that the job was the sysadmin’s, and I could’ve spent thirty sec­onds giv­ing him the down­load URIs and hung up, rather than the first hour and a half of my day pre­tend­ing the per­son on the other end of the line is actu­ally human despite nag­ging sus­pi­cions I’m an unwit­ting par­tic­i­pant in a Turing test. In fact, I’m pretty sure the level of hand-holding needed is why the secretary’s login doesn’t have per­mis­sion to install soft­ware, even if this pro­tec­tion was neatly negated by the admin inten­tion­ally log­ging her into his account and disappearing.

Ordinarily, I don’t bitch. Except there is noth­ing in any of those screens that a ratio­nal, think­ing human being couldn’t have fig­ured out by sim­ply read­ing them. I mean, really, when “Installer X” tells you “Files are in use, close Program Y and click Retry”, I shouldn’t have to explain that you need to close Program Y and click Retry.

Unless you just want a voice to tell you what to do — in which case we can make you com­pletely humanoid by installing a screen-reader.

…or:
     That’s some nice quote­whorin’, Lou.

Watching non-programmers try­ing to run soft­ware com­pa­nies is like watch­ing some­one who doesn’t know how to surf try­ing to surf.

“It’s ok! I have great advi­sors stand­ing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again.
Joel on Software, My First BillG Review