Rant 1. Working in IT and all its joys... Why does my PC always break?

So I work in IT and it's very frustrating...

The problem is, is that people have taken for granted the complexity of these systems and do not understand how things snowball very quickly to caused them for reasons unknown into early cardiac arrest when suddenly they can no longer send an email...

I'm going to use car for an analogy to explain...

You have a car I presume, it has wheels, and engine. You put petrol in it and it drives. It's a mechanical tool to get you from somewhere to somewhere else and hopefully it does that well. 

Your wonderful car is a little old and it drips a little oil perhaps. That's OK you know about this little niggle, it's not an inconvenience really... more just an addition of character to loved Bessie...

The engine, is completely separate from other things of your car... apart from power (your car battery) and fuel (umm your fuel?) it doesn't depend on anything to run... If your steering wheel is broken, it will still run, if you have a flat tire, it will still run. 

Also keep in mind that a mechanical device will usually tell you when something is wrong or going wrong... It will make bad or different noises and you know to get it checked before you crash and die or it blows up killing you... and your children... and your granny... or whatever...

NOW

A computer does its thing silently... (which is good because you don't want it yelling at you code which you don't understand or binary commands "01010111 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101111 01100111 01101100 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101001 01110100 "

I'm not going to explain binary but if you're smart you might be able to figure out what the above says...

SO

It does its thing quietly which we are happy about and then... a hiccup. no biggie... its deep down in the depths of your computer everything is working OK... but then you press send AND ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE (nothing happens...)

That button uses a teeny tiny bit of code with the hiccup... and therefor will not work. Because computers rely on the same information for many different things. If that one thing breaks, a lot of things break. You could say "why don't they use different information for each part then?" Well... aren't computers already complex enough? 
It can be easily repaired BUT! In your frustrations and 'strict deadlines' of telling Sally about some guy you boned on a Frankston train (and yes that is usually what "important emails" seem to be) you have pressed every button known to man and woman that you can see, overwritten any file that you can click on and pulled the powercord out of your PC so many times before calling us that effectively you have broken the machine completely and now I have to completely rebuild it and thus stumble upon your dirty smutty emails to Sally... 

So... please don't try everything your Uncle Bob told you to do because he also uses a computer at work... to be honest your Uncle Bob doesn't know shit and really your smutty email isn't that important. I will fix it if you let me but believe me when I say this here... I do have more important things to do with my time...

DG