Meeting Gibson… that sounds sort of like the title for a play or an art film. But it’s not.

My friend Colin sent me an email a couple of days ago mentioning that William Gibson, author of the famed and revolutionary cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, will be visiting the local Powell’s City of Books on Sunday, February 9 at 7:30p to pimp his new book, Pattern Recognition.

I’m considering going, but last time I went to see someone at Powell’s (Bruce Campbell, for his autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor), I got there two hours early and the line filled the entire top floor, went down two flights of stairs, and filled half of the second floor. It was ridiculous. I can only imagine the sort of crowd that William Gibson will garner. That alone has me thinking that I probably won’t. I’m not much for standing in line for hours on end.

William Gibson has apparently started a blog this month, which I hope he keeps up because it could prove out very interesting. I shall have to keep tabs on that.

Annoying user story of the day: There’s this guy at work who seems to have an inordinate number of problems lately. He’s filed probably 10 help desk calls with us, and as it turns out several of those were redundant in nature. I mean, if you can’t access any network, chances are you won’t be able to access any web sites or other machines, right? Does that mean you should file a help desk ticket for each web site you can’t access? Probably not. This guy did, though. Love that.

So he files this help desk ticket because he doesn’t have a certain piece of software installed on his machine so certain things aren’t working properly. I’d handled a similar case earlier, so I sent him a step-by-step list of how to fix the problem and install the software to make things work. Later he calls me up and says he keeps getting these error messages when he tries to follow my instructions. He’s all, “I keep getting this error when I do the last part of step one.” So I ask him what exactly he’s done so far.

“Well, first I did step three. Then I went back and did part of step one, then step two, and now I’m finishing up step one.”

You know, I never realized that I would have to specify that you need to do the steps in the order specified by the numbers, but apparently that’s something I’ll have to communicate. Numbered steps just aren’t clear enough.