• Mood: pissy
• Music: Tupac Shakur - When I Get Free II

Anger and Frustration: How I Nearly Strangled A Small Chinese Man Tonight

Large portions of the entire campus network are completely unusable right now, because - sadly - the school uses Microsoft Office.  And Microsoft Office wants to run the installer from the CD - or, in large networked environments, from a common server - for every single user on every single computer the first time that user logs onto that computer.  And, it being August, there are 10,000+ new users on campus.  Each of whom logs into a different lab computer in a different lab several times a week.

God I wish we just fucking used OpenOffice.

To make it worse, MS Office also wants to save everything that you do, by default, in your My Documents folder.  Which is in constant synchronization with - you guessed it - a network server.  Meaning that, if the campus LAN is DOS'ed to unusability by MS Office first-time-user install spam, when you try to save things in Office, that won't work either - you can't even save somewhere local that ISN'T synchronized to a network server, because the "Save As" dialog box wants to render the contents of that network server as a file listing when it opens up... and your whole workstation will lock up while it tries, and fails, to render it.

So, let's recap: the campus network is utterly unusable right now, and as a result, it is impossible to save anything to anywhere using MS Office.  Got it?  Okay.

If you think that sounds frustrating, try dealing with that while a five foot four ball of pudge with a mousey little voice, who speaks his ESL as though he's orally constipated, hops around from one foot to another like a demented cockatiel and yells increasingly loudly "SABE TO E-BAIL!  IF DOES NOT WORK, GET DIPPUREN E-BAIL ACCOUT!"

I am now piratpurchasing a copy of Maple so that, in the future, I can just show up to the lab, get the assignment, surf the fucking intertron until class is over, then go home and do the assignment.

Grrrrrrrr.