Mouthbreathers!

[wildstoats]

A small excerpt from the sham that is my life:

*Ring ring*
Kid: "I want to hook up my Xbox!"
Me: "Ok, I need you to get the Wired MAC Address for me"
Kid: "Ok, is it the IP Address?"
Me: *sigh*

No you fucking dolt, if I wanted you to find your IP Address I would have told you to give me your fucking IP ADDRESS. Seriously, are universities that hard up for cash that they will take any troglodyte that manages to spell their name even close to correct on the application? Oh don't worry Timmy, 70% of the letters is close enough, and feel free to abbreviate your last name, that is graduate level work at our fine institution. Here is your standard issue bong and case of cheap beer, go have fun! And don't even get me started on this assinine system that requires any networkable device that doesn't have the good fortune to posess a web browser to be registered manually by a human being.

/rant off

[Alkasquawlik]

i dont know what a MAC address is

:shrug

[Stephen]

+1

[TheEtaUnderdog]

i dont know what a MAC address is

:shrug

You only have a MAC address if you're using an Apple product

























































sorry, had to. ;)

[Optimator]

I am sure you will be flooded with these requests due to the influx of new students, so I'd suggest you suck it up, Sally, and start doing your job as a help desk employee.

[wildstoats]

i dont know what a MAC address is

:shrug

I don't expect most people to know what one is either. But if I told you that you are looking for something called the "MAC Address" would you ask me if the "IP Address" if what I was looking for? It is like someone asking you to go grab a 17mm wrench and then you finding a 19mm and then asking them if the 19mm is what they needed. Obviously not, if I needed a 19mm wrench I would have said 19mm not 17mm. At the most base level it is just matching. Something we all learned in preschool. Even if you didn't have a clue what a MAC Address is you should be able to match the characters on the screen that spell out the phrase "MAC Address" and realized that "IP Address" does not match. I am just expecting too much? Does this kind of thing happen to any of you guys?

[Alkasquawlik]

To be honest, asking if it was the IP address would've been my first question also.
The rational being that sometimes there are different names for the same thing. I remember looking all over the place for a special cord I needed for school (I forgot what it was called), and when I went into one store, they said it was just an Ethernet cable.
Same thing, just a different name.

[wildstoats]

I am sure you will be flooded with these requests due to the influx of new students, so I'd suggest you suck it up, Sally, and start doing your job as a help desk employee.

Yeah, wasn't exactly what I thought the job was going to be when I started. They hired me in as a server administrator / intranet developer but when your company consists of 3 people you end up wearing many hats.

[Optimator]

I am just expecting too much?

I think so. To you and me, a MAC address and an IP address are two COMPLETELY different things that are not even remotely related. To this kid who called you, he probably doesn't know even what an IP address is or does.

I think you need to brush the crumbs from the entire tin of Danish butter cookies that you devoured for a morning snack off your XXXL t-shirt and get in touch with reality.

[shiboujin]

In the IT world, you get it all the time. If you can't deal with it, you're in the wrong business lol. Half my work day is explaining IT terms in analogies. It's annoying but computers are made to serve the average person, not the savvy.

FYI MAC addresses are unique identifiers. your IP address changes, your MAC addresses is "hard coded" into your network card. There is a theoretical overlap but for the most part, your network card has 1 MAC address and it never changes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

[shiboujin]

Yeah, wasn't exactly what I thought the job was going to be when I started. They hired me in as a server administrator / intranet developer but when your company consists of 3 people you end up wearing many hats.

Hahaha I'm a programmer, they said similar things. I work with clients almost daily.

[wildstoats]

I think so. To you and me, a MAC address and an IP address are two COMPLETELY different things that are not even remotely related. To this kid who called you, he probably doesn't know even what an IP address is or does.

I think that is beside the point though. I don't think that asking people to remember one acronym and one word and then find the corresponding phrase on their screen is asking too much. They don't need to know what the technical difference is between an IP Address and a MAC Address they just need to find the values that I specified. Seems pretty simple to me.

I think you need to brush the crumbs from the entire tin of Danish butter cookies that you devoured for a morning snack off your XXXL t-shirt and get in touch with reality.

Do you have a book of tech guy cliches or are you making these all up on your own?

[nando]

dude, people still call their towers a "modem" and the screen the "computer". Something like a MAC address is foreign to 99.9% of the population, even the basics of HTTP, DNS etc. have no meaning to them.

[Atreus]

what optimator said.....

just go to run>cmd>ipconfig /all

make flyers of that and post them everywhere. lol.

[wildstoats]

Don't get the wrong idea. I'm certainly not going to flip out on some kid because he doesn't instantly know how to find his MAC Address. I am more than happy to help them along, especially considering how deeply it is buried in the Xbox menus. I just think it's amusing that most people I talk to see IP Address and assume that is what I am talking about when I just told them it was the MAC address that I needed. I guess the word "Address" throws them off.

Edit:
And of course, since I posted this rant 4-5 people have called wanting to register devices that have all had their MAC Addresses ready for me. Mmmm, crow, it tastes delicious, haha