GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive46 charts

Computers, Phones and Tech Support, in Charts

Charts drawn by the people who get called when it stops working.

Forty-six charts here, and a striking number of them were drawn by people at work. The formats give it away: summary tables, resolution rates, time-spent breakdowns. This is the collection where the archive’s borrowed business idiom stops being a joke about business, because the people drawing these charts actually had to file reports that looked like this.

The helpdesk charts

IT Helpdesk Summary and Tech Desk Call Resolution are the two clearest examples, and their titles are almost indistinguishable from real internal reporting. Neither image is among those recovered, so what each one actually showed is not on the record. Likelihood of a computer issue being solved by… names the dominant slice out loud. People who bring their computer into a repair shop profiles the caller rather than the fault.

Computer skills I have vs what friends and family think about is linked from two sites and plots the gap that creates unpaid support work. She found the power button herself, the last entry in the collection, is the same joke told once more in October 2010 with the chart already lost.

Printers, and the one true chart

Chance that the Printer is Working is the collection’s most reliable joke, because it needs no setup in any decade. Likelihood of ever getting more ink for my printer extends it into procurement. Between them they cover the whole relationship.

Microsoft Office Autoformat and Time Spent with Adobe belong to the same family: software that does something you did not ask for, plotted as if the software had intentions. What people do when the WinRAR trial expiration message comes up documents a piece of software behaviour that outlived nearly everything else in this collection.

Phones, in the year the answer changed

Nine entries here are about mobile phones, and they cluster tightly in 2008 and 2009 because that is when the object changed. iPhone Use by Application, from October 2008, is a genuine snapshot: the categories are what a smartphone was for in its first year of mass use. Cell Phone Features plots the features against the ones anybody used. Most Common Cell Phone Uses puts telephony low on the list, which was still a surprising claim at the time.

Cell Phone’s Ringer Status when You Lose It and Chance the phone will stop ringing relative to your distance from it both plot the same physical injustice. Probability of Remembering a Phone Number records a skill in the process of being outsourced.

The platform argument

Usability by Operating System, Apple Computer compatibility, Anything’s Possible with Windows, Why People Hate Windows and Mac vs. PC are five positions in an argument that ran through the whole period. Anything’s Possible with Windows is linked from four sites, the most of the five, which tells you which side of that argument was reading.

None of them settles anything, and read together they are more interesting than any single one: five charts, drawn by different readers over two years, plotting the same dispute with the same borrowed authority and reaching no agreement whatsoever. That is a fair record of what platform arguments were, and are.

Charts here
46
Images recovered
24
Published as plates
2
Referring domains
61
First posted
Apr 2008
Last posted
Oct 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    Anything’s Possible with Windows

    · 4 domains still link here · image not recovered

  2. A2

    Drunk in MS Paint

    · image not recovered

  3. A3

    Intentions of the Women on My Mind

    · image not recovered

  4. A4

    cell phone companies vs. how much they suck

    · Drawn by Kyndra Woodbury

  5. A5

    What Your Cat Thinks

    · Drawn by Maria H

  6. A6

    I Think vs I Am

    · Drawn by Don S

  7. A7

    Time spent involving Microsoft Zune

    · Drawn by Ben Hamel

  8. A8

    Waking time spent thinking about boobies

    · Drawn by Rhiannon Miller

  9. A9

    Alternate Uses for a Phone Booth

    · Drawn by Ian McGonnigal · image not recovered

  10. A10

    % of people in pursuit of trivia

    · Drawn by Chris T

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Why you drink

    · Drawn by Ferris

  13. B2

    Chance that the Printer is Working

    · Drawn by Alexandra F

  14. B3

    Time Spent with Adobe

    · Drawn by elocin277

  15. B4

    iPhone Use by Application

    · Drawn by The Cox

  16. B5

    Why People Hate Windows

    · Drawn by Chris McAdams · image not recovered

  17. B6

    Laser Pen Usage

    · Drawn by Alex Tierney

  18. B7

    IT Helpdesk Summary

    · Drawn by Mike C

  19. B8

    Chance the phone will stop ringing relative to your distance from it

    · Drawn by Jimni Cricket · image not recovered

  20. B9

    Probability of Remembering a Phone Number

    · Drawn by Gcolleenusa

  21. B10

    Tech Desk Call Resolution

    · Drawn by Heather B · image not recovered

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    Microsoft Office Autoformat

    · Drawn by mtcal

  24. C2

    Percentage of five year olds who think crayons are

    · Drawn by Mmmbop · image not recovered

  25. C3

    Cell Phone’s Ringer Status when You Lose It

  26. C4

    Usage of my Cell Phone

    · Drawn by vanitytree · 6 domains still link here · published as a plate

  27. C5

    Cell Phone Features

    · Drawn by Askeptykal

  28. C6

    Most Common Cell Phone Uses

    · Drawn by mana122 · image not recovered

  29. C7

    Likelihood of ever getting more ink for my printer

    · Drawn by lelila84 · image not recovered

  30. C8

    Apple Computer compatibility

    · Drawn by pirroplato

  31. C9

    Computer skills I have vs what friends and family think about

    · Drawn by KSho · 2 domains still link here

  32. C10

    Time Spent on the Computer

    · Drawn by buncatsmom · image not recovered

  33. Side D
  34. D1

    Shit I’ll Get Fired For

    · Drawn by Scarlet_letterman84 · image not recovered

  35. D2

    People who bring their computer into a repair shop

    · Drawn by digitalmaniak3k · image not recovered

  36. D3

    Why people think I’m a lesbian.

    · Drawn by xGothiChickx · image not recovered

  37. D4

    Likelihood of a computer issue being solved by…

    · Drawn by EliCarro

  38. D5

    Headphone Paradox

    · Drawn by Rickey123 · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  39. D6

    Who calls you?

    · Drawn by arturh

  40. D7

    What I think of when Graph Jam says “Pick a Flavor”

    · Drawn by hellojilli · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  41. D8

    “Extreme” Mountain Dew Drinkers by Demographic

    · Drawn by djxealot

  42. D9

    Snapple Ingredients

    · Drawn by john costlow · 3 domains still link here · image not recovered

  43. D10

    Time it takes to run a DNA analysis

    · image not recovered

  44. Side E
  45. E1

    What people do when the WinRAR trial expiration message comes up

    · Drawn by QWERTYCommander · image not recovered

  46. E2

    Repair wireless

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  47. E3

    Tech Support

  48. E4

    Mac vs. PC

    · image not recovered

  49. E5

    Do you have what it takes

    · image not recovered

  50. E6

    She found the power button herself

    · image not recovered

Queries answered

What is in this collection?

Forty-six charts about hardware, software and the support of both, drawn between April 2008 and October 2010. Printers, phones, operating systems, helpdesks and the specific despair of being the person in a family who understands computers.

How is this different from Life Online?

Life Online is about the network — browsers, forums, spam, social sites. This collection is about the machine in front of you and the person who has to fix it.

Which chart is the best known?

Chance that the Printer is Working, from September 2008, and IT Helpdesk Summary from November of the same year. Both plot a professional truth in a format the profession itself uses for reporting, which is why they circulated inside workplaces.

Do the phone charts still make sense?

Only as history, and that is their value. iPhone Use by Application from October 2008 records what a smartphone was for in the first year that question had an answer, and Most Common Cell Phone Uses puts calling well down the list.

Why are some entries listed without a chart?

Every original chart image was hosted on a service that no longer serves them, so a surviving copy had to be found for each one. Where none survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address rather than a substitute image.