The Chronicles of George

Frequently Asked Questions About George

"This can't be for real!" and "Is he a native English speaker?" are the two most popular questions I get sent via e-mail. With those as a starting point, I will address some of the most popular questions I get, so that I don't have to keep typing the same thing over and over and over again.

You're joking! These can't be real! No one is that bad!

If you think that, you've never worked in a call center before. Yes, there are bobs out there who are just as bad as the caller in the worst tech support story you've ever heard. I happened to work with one of them for more than a year.

Does this guy still work at your place of business? Do YOU still work there?!

I was employed at this particular company from January 2000 to September 2001. George was employed there from approximately March 2000 to May 2001.

So, come on, man! Spill it! Was he fired, or what? Were YOU fired?

George was caught in a massive layoff in May 2001 that purged 50% of the staff. I survived, but left in late August of the same year.

It's obvious George doesn't natively speak English. Shame on you for making fun of someone just because he can't speak the language!

I assure you, George is a native English speaker. He is 100% American. He was born and has for his entire life lived in Houston, TX.

OK, then, if he's a native English speaker, then he must be developmentally challenged or handicapped or something!

Not to my knowledge. He appeared a normally functioning individual, albeit one with a habit of attending raves every weekend. Draw your own conclusions.

George has dyslexia, and you're a cruel bastard for making fun of him. I'm going to kick your ass!

I've corresponded with a number of dyslexic people over the years about George and the consensus is that even if George IS dyslexic, there's no excuse for the stuff he writes.

Remedy ARS has a spellchecker. If you weren't such a cruel asshole who obviously likes making fun of dyslexic people, you would have enabled it!

Here's the poop on Remedy and spellchecking, straight from the mouth of a dev:

"As a Remedy Developer, I can tell you that Remedy does NOT have a spellchecker! Any Remedy installation that has a spellchecker is using the spellchecker feature from another application. A developer has to create a button and OLE commands to the application with a spellchecker. Using Word is the only easy way to implement a spellchecker, and that's because it is the example in their Programmer's Guide for OLE Automation."

You're part of the problem, Mr. Smarty-Pants Webmaster! You should have tried to help him out instead of making fun of him, you moron!

George was a non-technical person in a technical job. We tried to help him, but he wasn't interested. It's as simple as that.

But how could someone like that have kept that kind of job for so long?

Nepotism.

Has anyone from that company ever found out about this site?

Several years ago I got a flood of emails from ex-coworkers who'd found me out. All were amused and, fortunately, nothing big ever came of it. The company itself is still around, though it's a very, very different place from how it was in 2001.

I'm smarter than George. Will you tell me where you used to work? Can I apply there?

I don't doubt that you are, but no and no.

Damn, I have a George where I work, too! If I send you his/er tickets, will you make a page for them?

As fun as this would be, I do not have the time to sort through hundreds of reader-submitted tickets. If you have war stories and tickets you'd like to share, post them in the forums for everyone to see.

It's obvious what George is talking about in $TICKET. You could have fixed this problem by blah blah blah...

Chances are, I did fix the problem by doing that.

I don't particularly care for the amount of sarcasm and general nastiness displayed on this site!

Then you can fuck right off.

Why won't any of the images load?!

To save a bit of bandwidth, this site uses a small bit of javascript to lazy-load each page's images as your browser's viewport gets to them. If you're disallowing javascript, you won't see images. If you want to see the images, you must whitelist the script.

You misspelled something! You have the grammatical skills of a retarded child! Your links are broken! You're a hypocritical ass!

If you happen upon a misspelling or a grammatical error on any of my web pages, please e-mail me and report it to me so that I can fix it.