It's as easy as 123

Am I really the only person who is a bit suspicious about the Yanks claiming they have killed Osama bin Laden after the world’s longest game of hide-and-seek? If they genuinely have then it is great news because the guy was a goat-raping cock. I just find it a little odd that they claimed to have shot him and then immediately disposed of his body in the sea, leaving no evidence whatsoever to back up their claim. There is also no photographic evidence to back them up. Apparently, President Obama saw the operation from a live feed but this, of course, is top secret so no one else is ever going to see it.

I also find it a bit strange that this operation took place a couple of days after the Royal Wedding, where the eyes of the world were focussed on the United Kingdom and the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The cynical part of me can’t help thinking that the Americans just didn’t like the fact that someone else was getting all the attention and they wanted to out-do us. I also think the American government felt that a story like this would boost Obama’s chances of getting re-elected in a couple of years.

Perhaps I am just cynical. Perhaps I am naive and ignorant. But could it be that the American government is even more ignorant to assume that the rest of the world will be taken in by such a weak plot? I wouldn’t possibly want to comment.

What I can comment on, however, is ignorance. This is something I have to deal with on a regular basis at work. The fact is that, despite having such a reliance on them now, most people have no idea how to use a computer. Or the internet. Or anything vaguely technical.

I get asked insanely ridiculous questions that often leave me wondering how some people manage to survive in the real world. Sometimes people are just scared of technology and sometimes people are just plain stupid. Most don’t have any common sense whatsoever or even know that the word initiative means.

Despite this, people like to sound as if they know what they are talking about. I have dealt with customers who ask me to do a job and then try and baffle me with bollocks and jargon to make the simple task they are asking me to do appear more complex than it actually is. Why for heaven’s sake? I’m trying to do them a favour. Confusing me is only going to make things harder and more expensive.

Worse still is when customers ask for my advice or ask my opinion on something and then disagree with me. Surely if they had that opinion beforehand then asking me was redundant.

This happens a lot in the area of design. Despite the pictures I’ve drawn of racing cars hanging on my walls and the fact that I’ve never had a complaint from a customer on any of the hundreds of websites I’ve designed, some people, who should know better, still like to claim I’m not a designer. Nevertheless, these certain individuals occasionally ask me to design things for them. I will come up with a nice design, whereby they will request lots of silly changes and then systematically set about turning it into something even uglier than Tracey Emin. This is so infuriating because it’s impossible for me to tell them they have the artistic ability of a blind, one-armed chimpanzee without causing offence and sounding a little unprofessional.

I have a problem with people who claim to be experts in everything when they clearly have the intellect of a biscuit. If you don’t know how to do something, don’t claim to. I have no problems admitting when I don’t know how to do things. For example, I have no idea how a secure certificate works on the internet. I know it has something to do with encryption and algorithms, all of which confuse me. All I know is that we need one for some of our websites and applications.

So last year when a bunch of new faces took over running our server farm, they helpfully forgot to renew our secure certificate and then informed us that we would have to sort it out ourselves in future. So I did a bit of searching and found that one of the companies we have registered domain names with in the past offer secure certificates at a reasonable cost.

Despite my misgivings about using them because I think their website is rubbish and even my apparently meagre design skills allow me to see that their control panel is badly designed and unintuitive, I nevertheless ordered one from them.

That in itself was easy. The only problem was it didn’t work. I emailed their technical support and they informed me that I had purchased an Auto CSR and should have used manual CSR. They refunded the money and I purchased what I was told was the correct one. This was fine apart from the fact that the manual CSR didn’t work either.

To cut a long story short, a number of emails between me and their “support” team yielded no results so I requested a refund and went and bought one elsewhere. Having heard nothing but silence for over 2 weeks, I eventually got an email back stating that they couldn’t refund our money because the money back guarantee expires after 7 days. They then marked the job as “complete” on the support page.

I could have kicked up a fuss but I have more important things to do than deal with petty thieves so I left it alone. But today I received an email stating that the certificate expires in 14 days. It says we will not need to do anything because it will automatically be renewed 14 days prior to the renewal date.

The funny thing was that the email was sent to us less than 16 days prior. Well, when I say 16 days, it was actually sent on Saturday at nearly midnight so I didn’t get to read it until the day they threatened to take the money out of our account. Money for something we never had in the first place because they couldn’t be bothered to do their job.

Now, I’m not going to be petty and name and shame this company because that would be unprofessional and might get me into more trouble than referring to my boss as a blind, one-armed chimpanzee. So I will just advise anyone who is thinking of buying anything from a company with such a hideously grotesque website that they should think twice before doing so.