If they bothered to pay a decent wage for these 'thousands of vacancies' they'd get more applicants.

When the economy took it's nose dive the first thigns a lot of companies did was to gut their IT Departments as these departments 'Didn't make any money and ran at a loss". Case in point, the Company I worked for, a company heavily engaged in telecommunications, downsized it's IT Dept from 5 techs providing 24/7 support, a web designer and a web developer to 1 IT guy (not me fortunately) to provide 24/7 support and a web designer.(Yep, they got rid of the developer and kept the designer). But at least they managed to hire three new salespeople to sell a product they couldn't hope to support.

The only IT jobs that were available paid stupidly bad wages

"OK, the job is you support the end users, handling ANY IT related issue they can think of, we want you to take telephone calls AND handle ten remote desktops simultaneously. Your shift pattern is 8 1/2 hours a day 5 days out of seven including weekends between 8am and midnight, there are no public holidays (Yes, you do have to work Xmas day and New Years) you get a half hour for lunch and for all that we will pay you the princely sum of £14,500 per annum"

I do not recommend ANYONE to consider a career in IT at this time.

Space: The Final Front Ear

Talking to a draughtsman on the phone, trying to figure out why AutoCAD coudldn't pick up a licence from our licence server.

Me: Ok, if you click 'Start', then 'Run'

Him: OK.

Me: In the box type 'cmd', that's 'C' for Charlie, 'M'. for Mike and 'D' for Delta, then press the Enter key

Him : Ok, I have a black window open up now.

Me: Ok, in that window can you type Ping, that's 'P' for Peter, 'I' for India, 'N' for November, 'G' for Golf and then a space.

Him: What kind of space?

The guy who was doing on-the-job traiing with me swore my face changed colour.

I have also had calls where I have spent upwards of 15 minutes trying to help someone find the Enter key.

Wrong street

Looks like your picture is of West Nile Street in Glasgow.

Apples store and main entrance is one block over on Buchanan Street

Make it even more human like

have the bot tea-bag downed opponents and sxreech obscenities in a girlie voice over the chat

iPhones are like string

Every yo-yo wants one

RIP

let me say this.

I hate Apple products.

I hate the legions of drooling fanbois who camp for days to get their latest iCrap product.

I hate Apples business practices of trying to stifle the opposition with patent lawsuits.

Having said all that.

RIP Steve, although I didn't care for your company or it's products, a lot of other people did and you brought that to them. 56 is a young age to go at and my condolences to your friends and famiy.

Pairs, cos she's sad too.

From St. Jobs

Don't charge it that way.

No big deal.

Sent From My Asbestos coated iPhone

From an ex-Dell tech

I worked the Optiplex support desk when the 270's were still being sold. When you got a call in and the machine was either GX/SX270 or 280 you knew it would be bad caps, the most common symptom was a green power light, no video and no diagnostic lights on the back.

Dell knew it was a BIG problem but you weren;t allowed to say it. You had to get the cusotmer to open the machine and visually identify the swollen caps before you were allowed to book a replacement. Some big companies and organizations (eg the NHS) got a project booked to replace every single motherboard.

it was so bad that a big order for Microsoft got cancelled due to this and they ended up using the machines earmrked for Microsoft to fit out the Glasgow call centre instead.

To give Dell their due they did extend the standard 3 year warranty out by an extra two years if you could confirm the presence of faulty caps on the board but it certainly kept us phone monkeys busy.

@ By Gordon is not a Moron

The title you're looking for is "The Curse of Fenric" one of the better Sylvester McCoy stories.

GVood thing "Silly Nemesis" isn;t in there.

Mine's the one with the sonic screwdriver in thepocket.

Silly question

"No word yet on the make of the laptop - but hey, you've got an IT angle, what more do you want?"

Boobies!

Mines the one with the copy of 'Razzle' in the pocket.

Dell support

As someone who works for Dell Tech Support it is amusing to read these comments from bitter know-it-alls. While I can;t speak for my Indian colleagues, here in the Business support section we are currently orunning on a customer satisfaction level of nearly 90%.

@Dan - "I would like to see what percent your staff are telling people to re-build thier PCs to get a fix."

It is a fact that a great deal of PC problems are caused by (l)users installing something they shouldn't or spyware infested systems. In my experience more than 50% hardware faults turn out to be misconfigured or incompatible software, corrupt profiles and disk read errors caused by someone improperly shutting a system down. But trying to tell a self described tech-god this can be an exercise in futility.

The only time I have used DGSI techs is when I had an ID10T moment and bought the wrong motherboard. It was swapped over in minutes and I was on my way wih no fuss.

A simple solution

Maybe they can find some way of re-gruntling employees. Some sort of mechanis at the front door that sprays a gruntling solution on them as they pass through?

Or maybe I should just get me coat.

That'sh a load of, thingy, erm. RUBBISH <hic>

I mashelf am Scottish and I do not drink excessitively. I enjoy the odd tipple every now and then, but oI am cutting down by only having a half bottle at breakfast.

Yer ma best mate yraway

me an you apl! me an you against the WURRRRLD!!!