TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (BASTICH enters the Helpdesk office through a door labeled "COMP HELP HERE.") BASTICH: Ah, my first day working for the Computing Helpdesk. I can hardly wait to start easing the confused minds of the technologically challenged.
PANEL 2 (The SENIOR ADMIN addresses BASTICH.) SENIOR ADMIN: Hi, Bastich. Are you ready to begin? BASTICH: I am indeed. SENIOR ADMIN: Good. Remember, your primary goal is to shield the system administrators from the general population.
PANEL 3 (View of the Helpdesk workstation, which is a thin vertical tower with a large monitor and old-school keyboard.) SENIOR ADMIN: This workstation grants you access to a suite of programs designed to give you a professional appearance without granting you enough authority to solve any actual problems.
PANEL 4 (The SENIOR ADMIN holds a phone handset to his ear.) SENIOR ADMIN: This is the phone. When it makes a ringing sound, you pick it up... Like so... "Helpdesk. How may I lick your boots... er, I mean how may I help you?"
PANEL 5 (The SENIOR ADMIN waves at bastich as he walks through a door leading out of the Helpdesk office.) SENIOR ADMIN: If you have any need of my superior expertise, I'll be right on the other side of this door. BASTICH: Hey, thanks a --
PANEL 6 (BASTICH has a blank expression as he listens to the door locking.) SFX: SLAM WHIRR CHUNG CHUNG CHUNG
PANEL 7 (A massive line of agitated users surround by question marks suddenly appears next to BASTICH's desk as the phone begins to ring.) BASTICH: -- lot. SFX: RING RING RING BASTICH: I'm doomed.
CREDITS Bastich (c) 1997 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
The Helpdesk saga continues!
There were definitely rush times that felt like this, especially early in the semester. New students had to go through us to get a Chico State e-mail address, and this was often their first-ever exposure to any kind of online communication. And they had me as their entry point to all of that.
Meanwhile, our lab was mostly populated with dumb terminals (monochrome CRTs with clunky Soviet-Era keyboard that connected to the mainframe) and X11 workstations (fancier GUI but still Unix). There were also Windows and Mac machines, but those were reserved for coursework, so if you wanted to just read your e-mail or browse the early web (or Gopher), you had to sit in front of some kind of Unix box and figure it out - which people did.