Ha! Talk about your adulthood fantasies. I never entertained violent fantasies until I started working with the public.

Now THAT'S a compelling fantasy.

I used to actually have dreams of hitting people very, very hard with their laptops. This was at a top 5 MBA/GSM school with a very IT intensive environment and "laptops mandatory" requirement.

Only a very specific few people - specifically the ones that came in to the lab/helpdesk with an inflated sense of entitlement, the lazy rich ones that sucked up 90% of our time by asking us to do things for them that they were repeatedly trained to do (say, simple backups.) and that we were not supposed to do for them.

In particular, this one extremely wealthy Korean girl, and this cokehead salesman guy.

The Korean girl was a dual citizen, and spoke flawless upper crust Queen's English outside of the lab, but when she came in she'd often feign ignorance and a language barrier to get the help staff to do her shit for her. All while somehow maintaining the ability to subtly lilt and condescend in such an insulting manner it made anything else like it I've seen in person or on film clumsy and haphazard by comparison. She was a delicately overwrought piece of work, for sure. She eventually was banned from the lab for abuse of policy after repeated warnings, and had to buy support by the hour thereafter. I really hope she had at least a marginal idea of how close she came to wearing a laptop screen like a necklace.

The cokehead salesman, well, he was a cokehead salesman. Rubber jaw, personal space invasions, terrible jokes, brusque and near-abusive back slapping, etc. He basically only came in to jabber about barely cutting edge technology, and to try to get us to support/install/configure his latest (unsupported) toys.

One of the senior techs eventually wiped out his collection of seriously nasty pr0n and his mp3s. When he came back, red-faced and obviously pissed off and screaming about lost files and "seriously important documents", the tech calmly raised his eyebrows a notch and said "Sir, can you accurately describe these missing files and documents?", raising his eyebrows another subtle notch. The look of recognition and realization crawling over his face was one for the books. We never saw him again.

I know the above might sound like run of the mill opportunistic Bastard Operator From Hell behavior, but we ran a really clean, tight and friendly lab. We busted our asses, and we were very friendly and flexible. I remember moments - usually at semester starts - where we were up to our eyeballs and assholes in laptops. Doing actual support and trouble shooting with a crew of 3 or 4 on as many as 50 machines at once, working like clockwork, leaping from machine to machine getting everything done real-quick-like-yesterday. And still being friendly to incoming support requests.

It was like nerd ballet or something. God I miss that place.

If all the short films on the Internet that substitute violence for any semblance of creativity or wit were laid end to end, I'd beat the shit out of you.

That, and bad acting. But not everything has to be witty. But then I consider NASA crash test videos and nuclear weapons tests to be fine and entertaining filmmaking.

But that's some pretty convincing fictional violence. It's amazing how fast that huge guy goes over the counter.

One week's work.

Snail.

Snail rocks.

Ah, student and student-esque short films, where the credits are quite often as long as the film. Those were the days.

It was like nerd ballet or something.

Man I wish someone had filmed that instead.