Group29.com - What did you expect? - The Web Site is Down surface psychoanalysis

Some clever folks assembled by Josh Weinberg have put together a 10-minute comedy video called Sales Guy vs. Web Dude, also known as The Web Site is Down. Although this is now classified as an Internet meme, I still thought to write about it and describe how some of the psychology works in that dynamic.

Watch the movie!
http://thewebsiteisdown.com

Having spent a number of years in software integration companies I can set the scene. Web Dude has a number of years of Information Technology experience and is a right-brained introvert type. He has been told by management to respect the Sales Guys since they bring in the revenue. He does not want to be bothered, since he has made sure that all his responsibilities are covered by keeping the systems going. In previous encounters with sales guys he has been ridiculed for not knowing anything, which bothers him.

Sales Guy has been living the high life be being close to upper management. He is a last-minute thinker and worker and extroverted. He thinks the web dudes are a bunch of nerds that are un-cool. He does not know what he does not know, but he does not care about the inner workings of technology. In his previous encounters with tech dudes he has come away not learning much except that the tech dudes think that rebooting solves everything, so their technology must be pretty crappy.

Obviously both have too much time on their hands, since both are doing non-work activities at work. Their activities reveal their personalities, Web Dude is playing Halo, a complex online game requiring imagination, and Sales Guy is playing cards and looking at R rated vegetable arrangements.

In this scenario, Sales Guy has the stick and pokes it into the cage of Web Dude. Sales Guy cannot surf the web very fast, and wants Web Dude to do something about it. He has heard “rebooting the web server” and is clearly faking some knowledge. Web Dude cannot be bothered with spending any time diagnosing the real problem, and decides to appease Sales Guy. The long pause is when Web Dude is thinking, al right, what could it hurt to reboot the web server? That way I can get back to doing what I want. Sales Guy thinks that Web Dude can just turn a magic dial to solve his problem. How hard can that be? However, Web Dude definitely does not want to break something that obviously does not need fixing.

In the critical time when the web server does not come back and Web Dude is being ripped by Lazlo then the cognitive wheels start turning. In this state, Web Dude can accomplish more in two minutes than most people do all day. Web Dude quickly figures out how to get out of trouble with his boss by attaching to his mailbox and deleting a sent email, thus erasing an immediate record of a previous warning. In the ensuing hilarity, the web site for the city of Arvado, NV goes down. I guess this could either be that, the company hosts the site, or else Web Dude is making some money on the side selling web bandwidth. Lazlo compounds the problem by cycling the Exchange mail server.

Now Web Dude circles for the kill, he engages to look at the problem with Sales Guy. It turns out, Sales Guy ignorantly has been using AOL to connect to the internet at a company with a fat pipe. Since Web dude has no authority or wherewithal to rip into Sales Guy, he sabotages him by rearranging his desktop.

Sales Guy represents every non-technical desktop computer user at this point. You cannot really tell, but there is likely a whole host of games and software loaded there