I had to stay almost an hour longer last night hour firing off a missive to Product Marketing. It seems they've been getting so many requests to support Citrix that they decided to do something about it. "OK," the note began, "We've been using terminal services internally in our own data center and Citrix is just TermSvcs on steroids so we should probably go ahead and support it." Without actually running it through QA. Despite Product Defect reports. And with no licenses or copies of Citrix software so that we can actually do testing.

I let him know about all the problems last summer and that, despite coming up with a patch, six months later Citrix is again telling customers that it's our fault. And Microsoft's. But mainly ours. I reminded him of the reasons we never supported them to begin with. I told him where the problem lies. He's the PM and I'm just a monkey; he knows no better.

In my mailbox this morning was: "Oh. So what do the customers do when you tell them that?" Probably the same thing that I do: piss and moan some more about Citrix.

And it continued throughout the day.

Hi,

We only have around 30,000 contacts and 19,000 Accounts but our database is 42GB. Is this normal?

Only if you attached a couple full-length porn films to each of those contacts.

Our Default Time Zone shows "(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada); Tijuana". But our system has the setting for "USE_DATABASE_GMT=TRUE". We're based on the U.S. east coast but we have users all over North America. Should I change the server default and user defaults to UTC?

Only if they all move to Reykjavík. He may have looked at the fucking Knowledge Base but he thumbed through it the way a three-year-old thumbs through Encyclopedia Britannica. Sherlock doesn't understand the difference between how time is stored in a database and how it's displayed to users in different regions. His job: "AIX administrator". There is a serious shortage.

Hi,

We have a problem again with pop-up windows freezing on some of our Citrix servers.

(signed) -- $BritishCityCouncil

Filed last night around 7:30pm to try and avoid having me take it. Hoping that someone would tell them what they finally want to hear. All the monkeys laughed, for all the monkeys around the world know there is only one here who will step into the Citrix cesspit.

$BCC: But only some of the Citrix servers have the problem!
$REC: Because only some of those servers run PS4.
$BCC: How do you know that?
$REC: Because we know the problem happens with PS4 and not PS3
$BCC: But we have to have the servers at PS4!
$REC: Why?
$BCC: Because it's newer and does more!
$REC: It does more?
$BCC: It's faster and better and more efficient! Citrix says so.
$REC: Uh-huh. And do you actually notice any real speed difference?
$BCC: Well, according to the numbers our bandwidth is down by more than 1%.
$REC: So you have to use PS4 because it's supposedly better and cuts bandwidth usage by mind-boggling one percent, but in actual fact, what you need it to do -- run $OurBigApp -- is exactly what PS4 is entirely incapable of doing.
$BCC: But we've already upgraded!
$REC: Why?
$BCC: Because it's newer and better...
$REC: Is there anything you run which requires PS4 and won't work in PS3?
$BCC: Well, not as such...
$REC: So downgrade works, upgrade doesn't. It's your call.

Throughout this day of fuckwits was a continuing conversation via mail and IM with a woman, with whom any attempt on either of our parts to, say, increase our knowledge, has more or less resulted in disaster of various degrees, most of them severe. Despite our inability or unwillingness to find a way to get our squidgy bits together, our discussions about various sexual activities and how they relate to a mutual acquaintance could put the Marquis de Sade off his dinner and probably even make Bob Guccione blush. Apparently MsMutual is a bit confused about how the rôles in certain over/under situations work.

It's getting late but the fuckwittedness hasn't let up. It's Friday and there's a «checking»... full moon. I was hoping to write something smarmy like "38% gibbous moon out" but them's the breaks.

Hi, we're a developer and we need to know how to take your company logos out of $YouBigApp. We think ours should be there since we're developing it. Also, we'd like our company name to be written in the logs and reports.

Uh-huh. Sure thing.

Oh boy! More mail! Judy, our orifice manager and Keeper of the Office Supplies, is going on holidays next week. To inform us of this she sent everyone a 2MB mail, full of animations. She finds it impossible to write more than four consecutive words in a mail without adding a cute, animated GIF to help make it look happier. And yes, every few months she has her heavily-infected computer re-imaged.

But Judy is nice, and such mail doesn't come often. It's just how she is, and in small doses I can take it. What I can't take are the five -- count 'em, five -- fuckwits all dumb enough to REPLY-ALL with the entire previous content quoted and their own added in, blocking my mailbox for 30 minutes due to excess bandwidth usage on a single mail account as I tried to mass-delete and LookOut insisted on mass-opening upon highlighting.

The my-head-shaped-dent in front of the keyboard is almost deep enough for soup, but I'll keep at it. I got my new apartment yesterday and beat out the competition when the building owners saw my monthly pay stub. They're not worried that I won't be able to pay the rent. I never mentioned the grand piano and guitars.