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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Medieval Help Desk

I always wondered whether medieval scribes had a Help Desk. You can imagine the kind of thing. "Well first the ink doesn't run at all, and then it goes all blobby. One side of the nib always breaks. " "What were you doing when this happened?" "Oh, nothing. Just saying my vespers." "You mean you hadn't dipped the pen in the inkwell." "Oh yeah, I guess I did that." "And then ....." You get the picture.
Having just spent some considerable time reinstalling my husband's virus checker, only to have it insist that it still wasn't working, I found myself on the international help desk. Seems it is a "reporting error" with the program. It really is working, it just doesn't think it is. All will be well in the morning, don't panic. Meanwhile it periodically puts up messages in screaming scarlet shouting YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT PROTECTED!!! I hope the helpful man on the desk is correct in his diagnosis. I was a bit worried when he sent me a follow up email addressed "Dear Richard ...", but maybe they had had a lot of calls.
However, it seems I am not the first to want to put this into a medieval scenario. Some crazy Norwegians have put out a Medieval Help Desk Youtube video. Maybe you have seen it already. I can be a bit slow to catch up with some of these things.

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