Christopher B. Wright


Christopher B. Wright is the creator of the webcomics Help Desk and Kernel Panic. Born July 2, 1971, in Virginia, he is a Technical writer by profession. For a brief period of time, Wright served as editor in chief of .

''Help Desk''

Help Desk was a webcomic by Wright that was a satirical and cynical view of computer software companies and operating systems in general, and of the antics of Microsoft, Apple Computer, OS/2, and Linux in particular. This is done through the employees of Ubersoft, a fictional computer software company that markets a number of software products, including a computer operating system called Nifty Doorways. Alex, Help Desk's protagonist, is a technical-support technician working on Ubersoft's telephone support lines. Alex's job has been described as "not necessarily to solve a customer's problems, but to make the customer feel that what they think is a problem isn't really a problem and they're wasting my time and yours."
The comic draws heavily from real-life events in the computer software industry and lampoons those events through its cast of characters. It features a daily slogan on the title bar. Examples include "We code what angels fear and dread", "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt", "Our lawyers are better", "It's not a bug..... It's just really really bad", "Standing on the necks of giants", "Four out of five dentists reboot", and "We put the pain in painstaking".

History

The comic debuted on March 31, 1996, making it one of the older webcomics on the Internet. The comic was as a regular feature of OS/2 eZine.
In 2000, Wright moved it to the ubersoft.net domain and began publishing it independently. Shortly after this he joined Keenspot, and a year later he began publishing Help Desk 5 days a week. In 2001, Wright created a second strip, Kernel Panic, which ran for a short time on an IBM Unix site, updating twice a month. When the site closed down, Wright moved his comic to Keenspot on September 2, 2002.
Due to problems with trying to run a database-based website under Keenspot, Wright moved all of his comics to a private host under his control in July 2007.