Photoshop-eater

Originally written 2005-07-13.

I'm sitting here putting software on a freshly reinstalled PC, and I cannot recall ever posting this story about Melissa. Melissa was quite a piece of work, and in the few years that she worked here, I could probably write a book about the things she did to her computer.

Nice woman. No question. But not technically savvy and, honestly, underqualified for some of the items in her job description. Everyone in the helpdesk/user support industry has someone who just doesn't "get it". That person may decide to sort every file in C:\WINDOWS into new folders, alphabetically, by file extension, and then think nothing of it when calling for help as soon as everything suddenly stops working. Me? I had Melissa. Melissa had a vague idea of what to do and what not to do with her computer. I'm confident that she knew viruses were bad and she shouldn't open attachments from strangers but, as is often the case with someone who doesn't do computer work for a living, she had no real grasp of terminology, or even if certain things might be relevent details in troubleshooting. She had a gift for being completely unable to proffer any information for a problem she was having, other than "it doesn't work and I've tried it, like, a million times." Of course, she never did anything that would break her machine. Angels in Heaven don't have halos as big as Melissa's was.

I remember specifically an incident in which her machine was acting up yet again. It had just so happened that her department was headless, as in "Melissa's boss got sick of it and quit", another frequent occurance, and so as a result she had a week-long period wherein she was able to use her old boss's PC instead of her own. This finally gave me the opportunity to take her 1GHz system, blow Windows 98 off of it, and give her a nice, shiny Windows 2000 install. I could use all the same hardware and just install a newer OS on it.

I was most happy to do this for her, mostly because Windows 2000's default user controls meant she was less likely to fuck everything up the way she could in Windows 98. She could still do all the things she needed to do: browse the web, send and receive e-mail messages, and compose documents in Microsoft Office. She wouldn't be able to install her own .exe screensaver, or Bonzi Buddy, or Gator, or what-have-you. She'd also have a hard time "accidentally" dicking around with her TCP/IP settings and knocking herself off the network like she used to with Windows 98. (I'm certain Melissa didn't break her machine intentionally, but I'm also certain she lacked the filter mechanism in her brain that other people have. It's the part that tells them "Maybe I shouldn't be doing this to my PC because I'm not sure what will happen.")

So I set it up. I took her machine, reformatted it, put Windows 2000 on it, service packs and all, and ran it through windowsupdate.microsoft.com about a dozen times. She got Office, Netscape, Adobe Reader, and the works. Since she did a lot of graphic stuff, she also got a copy of Adobe Photoshop. And thus begins the mystery.

I'd finished the install one afternoon, and notified her that I'd be ready to return her machine the next morning. At around 10 AM, I hauled the gear up to her office and reconnected everything for her. (Melissa would not have been able to plug anything back together herself. I genuinely suspect that if I'd let her reassemble her own PC unassisted, she'd have inadvertently found a way to get the power cord to her desk lamp wedged into her USB slots. Furthermore, she would be completely oblivious as to how it got that way.) I turned the machine on, verified that it would start up, that the keyboard and mouse worked, and left.

About an hour later, I got the phone call.

"Photoshop isn't on here," she tells me. Or rather, Photoshop was on there, but she can't get it open. Photoshop is not running on this pristine, freshly rebuilt machine. It took her 60 minutes to break a Windows 2000 box and destroy data. The Pentagon would love to send Melissa into foreign embassies and covert army bases.

I went into her office, and sure enough, Photoshop was gone. All of the program files were still there where I'd put them, but let's be honest: Melissa's never heard of "C:\Program Files". She knows her Desktop, and she knows the Start menu. And damned if every mention of Adobe and Photoshop are gone from the menu. She of course has no idea what happened, and, technically, neither do I. In retrospect, many months later, it occurred to me that I might be able to duplicate this behavior if I right-clicked on the Adobe folder item in the Start menu, selected Delete, and then confirmed that yes, I wanted to delete the Adobe folder and all its files. Then, I would have to go on to empty the Recycle Bin's contents before picking up the phone and calling to report that Photoshop had vanished.

Of course, Melissa didn't do any of this. She couldn't have, because she never does anything to her computer that she would consider harmful in the slightest. I "fixed" the problem by making a new shortcut to photoshp.exe for her. To this day, I remain unsure of what exactly she did to botch her Photoshop install.

And of course, Melissa never said a thing about it.