I Got Mad at an Old Guy...

So I met with my nemesis yesterday- the bumbling computer fundi. The headmaster arranged it so that he came to the school and I used the headmaster's office to have a little heart to heart with this guy. Now, those of you that know me know that it is very difficult for me to hate people, generally (with the marked exception of Tom Selleck, but that is really just jealousy). But I'll tell you what, I really, really wanted to hate this fellow for erasing my memories. I was psyching myself up, like punching myself in the chest and getting pumped about hating him. And then I saw him, and felt really, really bad for ever wanting to hate him. This computer man was about 60 years old, and was somewhat poorly dressed (by Tanzanian standards, even). As soon as we got down to it, going over the problems, I could tell he was pretty much computer illiterate. It turns out that one of his friends gave him a Windows XP boot cd and a Microsoft Office cd, so he just goes around formatting all the computers he touches into these identical workstations, comprised only of Office products and without whatever programs and files they had before he got his hands on them. He thinks this is how computers are fixed, every time, and no one has told him different. Therefore, he had no idea that what he was doing to the computer could have negative consequences, such as the deletion of 500 pictures. The poor old fella just wanted to make a buck. I stayed mad for a grand total of about two minutes into the meeting, and then I just tried to show him different ways he could go about his business so as to not delete people's files. Due to his lack of any actual proper business, I couldn't very well ask him to fix the monitor he busted either. I told him the damage would cost several hundred dollars to replace (and at first I had been hoping that the he was working for one of the major companies here that has that kind of money) but that I knew it would be ludicrous of me to ask for reimbursement after seeing the situation. So in the end, all that really came of our meeting was that he gave me back two other cds that, in his words, "somehow ended up in my pocket" which contain all the startup programs of the laptop. That has helped a little bit. But really, you can't get mad at a moderately daft old guy just trying to make a buck, can you? Life will go on, with me feeling like a big jerk and him turning computers into Microsoft Office machines, whether with or without their original files.