Us and They
Ginny is an odd bird. Whenever a customer comes to me with a request for a $5000 computer and then laughs it off as a oddity meant for a side hobby, I find myself raising my eyebrows until I remember, “Ah yes… rich people.” It is said that the rich are the same as you and I and in my interactions with them, I’ve discovered this to be true to an extent. That said, there is equal and perhaps greater truth in the aphorism, “The rich do not live as you and I do.” And in my estimation, this living in such a different way than Everyman leads to eccentricities not exhibited by the public at large and accentuating differences that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. After all, you don’t call a homeless person who talks loudly to himself in the presence of others eccentric, you call him crazy.
Ginny is an even odder case than most in that she is the wife of an affluent lawyer who has the uncommon good morals not to jettison her for a younger model.¹ This restraint is doubly impressive in that Ginny’s eccentricities and quirks have turned her into a very dis tractable and very annoying woman. But, oddly enough, even though Ginny seems to annoy her husband almost as much as she annoys me, he tolerates her eccentricities. Rather, he tolerates her eccentricities by encouraging her to have more hobbies. And thus she came to me for a computer that would make her a better photographer.
Ginny is like a number of my more affluent clients in that, among those for whom money is a given, the best solution to a problem is to meet it with money. Thus, if you are not as good a photographer as you’d like to be, you buy a computer that will run all of the latest photo-editing and developing software with a large monitor and the best video card, processor and memory that money can buy. So long as you stay within your allowance, of course. This doesn’t even begin to address the digital camera or all of the attendant costs of a film camera and dark room… but that’s Ginny’s concern and her husband’s problem, not mine.
Now, building a good computer is much easier than building a bad one, and so equipping Ginny with everything that she needed was not much of an issue. But, of course, Ginny is high maintenance and to be otherwise would be against her nature, and so the issues came later. But, at least for the first couple of months after purchasing her computer, life was bliss and Ginny rarely graced me with her presence except to buy new things with which to advance her hobby.
Several months later, Ginny brought her computer in with a distraught look on her face, “Windows won’t open PhotoShop today! It wouldn’t open it yesterday either and I think it’s mad at me.” Ummm… what did you do to Windows? Are you sleeping with Linux on the side or something?
Before I let my tongue get away with all of the witty remarks that were flitting about in my head, I busied myself with diagnosing her computer. I have never seen an installation of Windows run so far amok and yet without a single virus. A half an hour of inquiry and finally a picture began to emerge as to what exactly Ginny had done to her computer.
As with many of those who came of age during the development of the World Wide Web, I remember the subtle change in the sourcing of research papers as it came to light that information could be found on the internet as well as on the computer resources in the library and from actual print publications. And then, almost minutes later it seemed, the more overt change in checking of sources as it came to light that any dumbass with a modem and a keyboard (or maybe just two tin cans and a spool of yarn) could publish a webpage. Worse still, with the advent of shitheaps like GeoCities, any idiot could cobble together a page even if he lacked the patience or wherewithal to learn HTML, which had heretofore been the incredibly low bar of admittance to online publishing. I must confess that I was guilty on more than one occasion in Jr. High to have published a page that liberally plagiarized another source to inflate those wonderful source counts imposed by teachers.²
Like many of the students caught by this bygone age in paper writing or their modern brethren who consult Wikipedia without thought to its potentially-unwashed origins, Ginny has a problem identifying trustworthy and reliable sources of computer advice. And thus, when she came into my store complaining of her computer’s inability to perform a number of routine tasks, what she failed to note was that she’d been schlepping through her registry and her configuration files, altering things willy-nilly at the advice of the proverbial armchair mechanics of computer repair. After all, I don’t tell her how to shoot pictures or how to edit them or how to do things in photography at all. The least the morons on the photo-editing sites could do is extend me the same courtesy.
And the worst part is that the vast majority of these sites give great advice, advise due caution and are generally circumspect in how they work. And yet, Ginny manages to completely avoid such wise sites and manages to find the dark alleys of the internet from which to glean her advice or worse still, when she does take good advice, she manages to implement it all backwards such that it might have been better simply to turn off her antivirus and firewall and let in the malicious hordes who at least keep a computer in a semblance of working so that it is usable in whatever nefarious scheme is on the move. Your average virus would have to spend two or three hours fixing Ginny’s computer before it could be put to any use at all.
I wish I could say that Ginny’s status had changed or that my attempts at educating her had made her a better consumer and a better person. But the fact of the matter is that customers like Ginny need something more than a simple education… they need to understand that money is not a salve nor a cure-all… and I really can’t say I’ve taught her that. After all, she messes her computer up and gums it all to hell, she comes in, she pays me several hundred dollars to fix it and fix it fast, and she leaves with her computer back to good by the close of business. In short, I perpetuate the problem… but at least it pays well to be a part of the problem.
¹I once heard it said by a crass doctor who I do work for that you do with wives as you do with money that you want to use: once you get into 40s and 50s, you change them in for 20s.
²While I don’t confess to publishing utter fabrications to source papers, I did know those who did and I might have engaged my entrepreneurial spirit to make a buck or two by assisting in such endeavors.
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