SoftArtisans’ technical support guru by day, poetry slam extraordinaire by night, Kate Mogel combines these two areas of her life into one engaging poem. I first heard Kate unleash her talent at the company retreat open mic night and after some prodding convinced her to share her talents with you. Listen to the audio above and follow along with the lyrics below as Kate takes you through the ups and downs of being a self-proclaimed “nerdy girl.”

D&D&T&A

by Kate Mogel

I’ll take the automated infrastructure.

I’ll take the prerecorded voices.

I would love to follow a convoluted maze of customer service concepts, taking a few steps forward by pressing 7.

Taking a few steps back by going forward.

I would not like to talk to an operator.

Because I have a girl voice.

I would not like to talk to a person.

Because I have a girl voice.

Tech support treats me like an idiot.

Because I have a girl voice.

“Okay, hun, there should be a wire that looks like a big phone cord…”

Ethernet cable? Reboot the modem? Release and renew the IP? Seriously?

Listen Ken, if I were in that room… I’d kick you in the blank spot where your testicles should be.

Now I’m going to go fix the computer.

You can jump in your little pink dream car and drive to your Malibu mansion.

There is no Open Source Barbie.

But you can have a vagina and…

Know the Mario Brothers theme song

And

Play with breadboard circuits

And

Quote Punisher comics in everyday life

And

Break your glasses backyard wrestling

And…

Be… uhm… I guess what I’m trying to say is: I’m as much of a loser as any of… you.

I don’t know what neckline works best with my shape, But…

I know what code line worked best with my fstab.

I know what command line actions are used for, I know what command station Riker sat at, I know what T station’s close to the comic store.

I don’t even use pick up lines in clubs, I just walk over and say…

Sudo mount /dev/me -now

And in my fantasies my dream lover responds simply by saying “Password:”

One high day, I was staring at a pack of Winston’s and I modified the pack.

I made them tech friendly.

I call them “Win 2ks”

They’re full of a bunch of crap you don’t need, and they burn Reeeeeal Sloooooow Why won’t anyone treat me like a dork?

Dweeb?

Loser?

Just say I’m a nerd so I can feel cool!

Or at least get a job working tech support and be nice to the girl voice.

Because there’s a really good chance it’ll be the last one you ever hear.

Addendum

• There is a standard customer service process for tech support – namely they tell you to restart the modem and disconnect the Ethernet cable while doing so. Then they have you relay signal readings while talking  down to you about how you couldn’t possibly grasp the term “uplink.” The reality of the situation is that anyone who knows enough to call tech support, knows enough to restart the modem and at least try to renew an IP…especially since windows does that for you when you hit “repair.” I worked in internet support at one point, and 9/10^th’s of the time, the issue is a bad cable. Just sayin’.
• I have made half adders with breadboards, broken my glasses backyard wrestling, learned the Mario Brothers song on piano, and worked lines from Punisher into everyday conversations. I’m a verified geek in many ways.
• The code line I put in my fstab was for a beta version of Red Hat I was putting on a virus farm. I came upon four very old, relatively useless laptops, and decided to unsecure them as much as possible, put buggy releases on them, and watch the magic happen. Unfortunately, I wanted to change the Red Hat machine to a different distro, but it didn’t have native CD support. The line was roughly this:

/dev/cdrom       /media/cdr                         auto       ro,noauto,user,exec      0 0

A really good resource for manually editing fstab is here.

• The command line actions to which I refer are generally the shell scripts I wrote to make my life easier, but also if you’re going to use bash, you REALLY need to know how to use bash. There are a bunch of cool standard shell scripts you can write (just google it) and once you get some practice, you can write little cheat scripts to simplify every task you consistently perform. A friend of mine wrote the “Gre train,” a favorite script of mine. Every time you write “gre” instead of “grep” (something he was apparently doing quite often) a train made of generic keyboard characters chugs across the console. Pretty sweet.
• Riker is second in command. Learn your history!
• I’ll admit I had to google this. It’s been a long time since I wrote that poem, and a long time since I took the T to the comic store. I believe at the time I was going to Comicopia on Commonwealth Ave. It is apparently the green line to Kenmore. And I’m glad I googled it, because I somehow remembered it being the red line.
• “Sudo mount /dev/me –now” is slightly incorrect syntax. The flag wouldn’t go at the end. Sudo is the super user command (as seen in the eminently popular comic http://xkcd.com/149/ ). The mount command mounts a drive. The /dev folder, as seen above, contains devices. In this case, with root privileges someone would mount the device… and well… okay, you get the idea.
• I used to smoke Winston cigarettes. One side of the pack just says “Win” and the name wraps around the box. It always made me think of windows, and I did run into some serious Wink2k problems at one point in my life, so I’m hatin’.

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