Otomen

Recently, I was cleaning a computer of unnecessary files, and I found something interesting. Not interesting in the "Oh god, what the hell is that?" way, but in the "Hmmm. I kind of want to see more of that" way. There is a very interesting Japanese drama called "Otomen," about a guy who is pretty badass all around- he does kendo (Japanese swordfighting) and always sticks up for the weaker students. But he has a secret: he likes pretty things, and he likes to sew and thinks stuffed toys are cute. He hides this to portray only his stereotypical badass side... but then he falls in love with a girl who's more badass than he is, and he is able to reveal his true self to her.

I love it, it's a great series. I really thinks it helps show the reality of life- that people aren't always exactly like the persona they project. In real life, I try not to seem so depressed, and I always act like my mother's suicide didn't really affect me all that much. But I can let my real personality show on the Internet.

Argh, this has nothing to do with the television drama, so I'm going to shut up now. If you're interested, you can watch it on dramacrazy.net, the series title is Otomen.

How To Traumatize Your (Straight Male) Coworkers

1.Find computer with several gigabytes of yaoi on it.
2.Tell coworker, “hey, I've never seen a virus like this one before- have you?”
3.????
4.PROFIT!

Oh my god, I don't think I've ever laughed that much in my life. I guess I should start from the beginning. Today a college girl came in and asked me to de-virus her computer, but she was very insistent that I be the one to do it. She didn't want G to touch it at all. I thought maybe she had embarrassing images of herself that she had taken for a boyfriend or something, so I agreed and told her to pick it up in an hour and a half. She left, and I got to work.

While I was scanning for viruses, I found her, uh, “special time collection.”For those of you who don't know what yaoi is, it's basically pornographic drawings/animations of gay males. Now I've seen a lot of it in my life (you see a lot of crazy stuff in my line of work), and I've become inured to this type of stuff. Seriously, you just stop caring after a while, and it becomes more of, “Oh, another sick fuck with horse porn on his PC... well, better switch out the network card.” But today, I was in a particularly lulzy mood and can stomach yaoi pretty easily (some of it is quite well drawn), so I decided to torture G.

Z: Hey, G, this is a really weird virus. I've never seen anything like it.
G: Are you sure it's a virus?
Z: Pretty sure. Can you take a look?
*G comes over to see what I was talking about and gets an eyeful*
G: ZETSUBOU, YOU BITCH!
Z: *laughs hysterically*
G: You bitch! You're horrible! How do you sleep at night, knowing you're more corrupted than a bad batch file? (Yes, he seriously said this. He likes to make bad computer references)
Z: *laughs even harder*

At this point, R came back from his lunch break and saw what was going on. It was probably a bit bizarre to be honest- at this point I was practically falling out of the chair from laughing so hard, and G's face had started to look a bit like a tomato from embarrassment. So he decides to check it out too, resulting in more lulz.

R: Zetsubou, what the hell is going on? Are you alright?
Z: Ahahahahahahaha... computer...virus.... WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
R: Computer virus? Since when do you think computer viruses are funny?
Z: hehehe, take a look and see! It's really great!
G: For god's sake R, don't do it!
R: *ignores G and looks at the screen* You're terrible, Zetsubou.

He just shook his head and walked away, resulting in me laughing even harder. Eventually we got the viruses off.
...I'm a terrible person. And I love it!

to G and R- love you guys, and sorry. Oh well, you'll get over it, and I'll send you guys some extra-strength brain bleach (read: vodka) on Saturday.

Techno Remixes!

A lot of people will say things, and then some intrepid Internet user will set it to a techno beat. Yesterday at work, we all had great fun finding these and listening to them. The customers enjoyed them, too, since most of them had heard the quotes that had been technofied.

(300)- This Is Sparta! Techno Mix


(Senator Ted Stevens)- Series of Tubes Net Neutrality Dance Mix


(Spongebob Squarepants)- THIS. IS. PATRICK!


(Glenn Beck)- Get Off My Phone Radio Freak-out (TWILIGHT VAMPIRE REMIX)


(Death Note)- Potato Chip Remix


(Azumanga Daioh)- Sata Andagi remix (FYI- sata andagi are basically donuts)


(Jingle all the Way)- PUT THAT COOKIE DOWN!


(Star Trek)- Shatner of the Mount



(Pirates of the Caribbean)- I've Got A Jar of Dirt Remix


(Lord of the Rings)- They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard


There are a lot more of these, but these are some of my favorites.

And now I think I'm going to go eat a potato chip.

Our New Helper

R's daughter's elementary school is on break this week, and since Mrs. R works for the postal service, she can't look after her, so R's brought her to work the past few days. She's hilarious, and really very helpful. She likes to see inside of the computers, so we all let her have a look when we're installing new hardware. G even let her install updates on someone's PC, which she found absolutely awesome.

Surprisingly she's very well behaved. She will watch us work for a while, and if she gets bored she'll go watch her Danny Phantom DVDs in the break-room. G was apprehensive about the whole situation at first, because kids can be rather unruly, but this one is very well-behaved, even if she did eat all my salsa. Even that was rather impressive- I eat only the spiciest salsa there is, and none of my coworkers can handle it, but R's daughter ate it like it was made of chocolate. Now I have to go buy more, since someone else will eat it now!

IKEA Song

I love IKEA. I really do. It's probably one of the most entertaining places ever, and they have delicious meatballs. OM NOM NOM.

Anyway, I found this hilarious parody of the song "Fireflies" by Owl City (which I like as well) and thought I'd post it here for a laugh.

Interesting files

One of the fun things about working tech support is getting to see all of the weird things people have downloaded on to their computers. Why am I bringing this up now? I don't even work on Sundays! Well, a friend of mine called me and told me that he'd bought a computer at a Goodwill store, and whoever had it before forgot to wipe the hard-drive. Thankfully, there was nothing really bad on there- just about a million saved articles about Katie Price (a British celebrity) and some essays that looked like they were written for a high school government class.

While that particular hard drive was full of pretty innocuous items, others I've come across were not so harmless. Once, someone came to me in a panic because their laptop was full of viruses and they had to turn in a term paper the next day. I took a look at it, and apparently this person had been downloading everything they came across on the Internet. Their computer was full of online video game free trials, weird little desktop gadgets (I personally despise those things, so I've never understood people who download them), Youtube videos they'd downloaded with a converter, and all sorts of other little innocuous-looking things. The problem is, the sites you can get all of that stuff off of are full of viruses. No wonder this person had a problem...

One of the more bizarre things I've ever seen was the former library circulation desk computer that needed a tune-up. The person brought it in, and in a fit of boredom I decided to go see what they had on the hard drive. Big mistake. Someone had installed a hentai game, which makes me wonder exactly what kind of library this PC was from... I'm not sure I really want to know about that one.

Although I probably have to say that my favorite case was the time I had to explain to a customer that Compaq was not a version of Windows. Normally, I wouldn't mind, or even notice. The thing that made me take notice was that when I explained to this lady that Compaq was a make of computer, and not an operating system, she got extremely angry with me and started threatening to call the manager on me for not doing my job. I finally told her to do so, my manager came over, heard the story, and promptly started laughing like a loon on loony tablets. The woman was so offended that she stormed out threatening to never come back. Three weeks later? She was back with another computer problem.

I'm not sharing these stories to sound like a bad person. Most of the people I end up working with are very nice people, but occasionally I get the random nutter. It happens to the best of us, I think. We've all dealt with that person at the grocery store, electronics store, religious institution, government bureaucracy, shopping district, etc that just... fails.