Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Your What?

A guy needed a little help getting on to the Interweb. A little bumpy, but I got him to Yahoo and after a few tries he got into his email. I sat back down at the DeskSlave perch, job well done and all that. A few minutes later I was summoned back to his computer. "Where's my I drive?" he asked.
"Your what?"
"My I drive."
Sophisticated readers know that on Windows, your hard drive is the C: drive, the floppy, if you've still got one, is the A: drive, and so on. (The Mac is a bit different: when you turn on your computer, angels guide the data to the right place. No need to worry about anything.) I remembered that there was a website called idrive.com that allows you store items remotely, so I asked him if that was what he meant. He gave me the sort of look I would give somebody if they walked up and started speaking in tongues.
I started from zero. "How do you usually access the I drive?"
"It's right here! It's always right here!" he said, his patience running out, waving the cursor over the left side of the desktop where all the shortcuts for browsers and programs live.
"Do you use it on our computers?"
"No, just at home."
"But not here."
"I've never been here before."
"Do you need to go on to get to it?" I asked, trying to edge my way back to the idrive.com idea.
I got the sort of "Oh, I'm talking to an idiot look" that I like so much.
"Do you know where your I drive is physically located?"
He admitted that he had no idea. I explained that I thought it was either something that he accessed online or it was something attached to his computer at home.
"So I can't get at my documents?" He demanded.
"I don't think so."
Deep, angry sigh, complete with the "Fine kettle of fish" look that Oliver Hardy perfected in the 1930's.

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