The elders of the internet know who I am?!

     I had forgotten how much busier I am when I have a job. It was a solid month between my last job and my new job, a solid, sweet month. Now I have a job again, and I really do enjoy it, but it takes up a lot of time. I am compensated for my time, and so the world keeps spinning, but it still is a lot of time. Blogging seems to have taken a back seat to living. Which is really a contradiction of terms for the whole purpose of this blog. That's immaterial. I'm blogging now, while simultaneously drinking vanilla something or other flavored granola from a small, green plastic cup.
     There is so much to write about, like my pondering on why we call wearing a costume for Halloween dressing up, while at the same time we call wearing a suit or formal wear dressing up as well. And when we wear sweat pants we call it dressing down. Think about the events you dress up for, job interview, church, funeral. Now think about the costumes you wear to dress up on Halloween, clown, psycho killer, skeleton. Now picture wearing each of those costumes in the order I mentioned them to the three events I mentioned, also in the order I mentioned them. It doesn't seem appropriate. Therefore, instead of saying "dressing up" to refer to wearing a Halloween costume, I suggest we start saying dressing sideways, or dressing crookedly, or dressing diagonally. Just a suggestion.
     I could also write about the things I'm discussing in my grad program. I'm only a few weeks away from completing this first class which I started in the Education program and have since decided to switch to the I/O psychology program. I need to finish this class and then I can switch. So for the time being we are discussing education and it is interesting. This week I read about Joseph Lancaster. He wrote an essay or treatise or pamphlet of some sort in 1803 regarding his thoughts on education reform. I liked what I read from the excerpts of it. I will, one of these days, read the entire thing and I think it will make me want to write a blog post about it. Along those same lines, I'm reading a book called "As a Man Thinketh" which I got free from Amazon.com for my Kindle. It is a fantastic read. I agree with everything James Allen has written. I think that is the author's name. Probably is. What? I'm drinking granola out of a cup! APA citations don't apply here! It's the Internet! Which brings me back to the title and a sense of zen.
     Today I nearly broke the Internet, at least for one small group out in the central time zone. I don't remember what state. You see, I work as a sort of tech support representative. Well, I got into trying to fix something that was well beyond my scope of knowledge and I broke the Internet. Or so we thought. Turns out I didn't really do something wrong, Windows did. So that was a relief, sort of. I still tried to do a corrective task that I really wasn't capable of doing. Such is the learning curve. I've only been there three weeks now.
     It did lead to a fun conversation with a coworker about how IT and tech support don't really need to know what they are talking about, they just need to sound like they do. For example, if someone calls me and says "Here's the problem" and I say "Oh my no! That's terrible, I don't have any idea what you are talking about!" the person will become concerned and worried. They are calling me because they don't know how to fix a problem, and they expect that I do. If instead of declaring that I'm just as dumbfounded as them, I say "I see, let me try a few things," not only do I maintain their expectation or hope in my abilities, but I also give myself some room to work. I say "a few things" meaning that I have several options to try, in case the first thing I try doesn't work. This buys me some time to poke around and happen to get lucky at finding a fix before they start to wonder if I really know what I'm doing. It's a thin layer of ice we walk sometimes.
     The key is to sound confident and use words beyond the common understanding of the layman. If you start losing it, and you feel like the person on the other end is picking up on your incompetence, you simply open a configuration file and start scanning the lines of text which to the untrained eye seem like a bunch of junk. You can win a lot of points by pulling off the "config file scan" appropriately. It looks impressive and puts the perspective that you know more than the caller back into the mind of the caller. It's just a big game. Computers are interesting. They usually do exactly what you tell them to do, but sometimes they don't. And that's an exciting and entertaining thing.
     If you are wondering about the title to this blog, locate the search bar of your favorite Internet browser, type in "the it crowd the Internet for Jen," the first YouTube result ought to be the one. Watch it. Laugh at it. Love it. The IT Crowd is a British comedy and it is highly humorous, although rather randy, just like most of their television programs. The clip I refer you to is clean.