I Call It Coolness, And You Call It Visibility
(The title of this post is a lyric from the Le Tigre song Viz from the album This Island. The picture is from Scott McCloud's Zot!. Neither the title of this post, nor the image, have anything to do with the text below.)

Yesterday, my desktop PC at work was switched out for a newer model with an updated operating system. If you've never had to sit and watch as an IT guy switches out your old system for a new one, you don't know how lucky you are. For me, at least, it was torture.

I smiled, nodded and did my best to describe the nature of the work I needed the new PC to perform. But, as proficient as I feel I've become with the applications and databases I work with, I still felt intellectually inferior talking to our company's computer guy. My biggest problem may have been that I gave him the impression I knew more than I did about what he'd installed.

My afternoon was quickly ruined, as I systematically began to remotely access other PCs around me, shutting down programs others had been running. I fucked up not only my whole day, but my coworker's work as well. Altogether, it made for a real, shitty day.

Eventually, I got another IT guy to sit down with me, and show me how to access the aforementioned PCs using the new software, without logging anybody else off. Today went much more smoothly.