$BigInsuranceCo has the same problem with Citrix that everyone else does and on Monday submitted a ticket about it despite our Knowledge Base being chock-full of entries from me about this specific subject. In their ticket they also demanded one of us attend a conf call they'd set up with Microsoft and Citrix. Not gonna happen. Not necessary.

I sent 'em the boilerplate that spells everything out: what the problem is, what causes it, how we proved it's purely Citrix, how Citrix admitted fault last year, the works. I included the fact that the Citrix monkeys have all had lobotomies or suffered from mass amnesia and are trying to claim it's us. Again. I even included the original Microsoft and Citrix case numbers. I summarised everything, sent it off, and at around 3:30 went home as I always do on Monday. Everything they need to know is in the ticket. There's no need for a conf call; they can just quote the case number to Citrix which will give them a magic moment of re-enlightenment.

And that should've been the end of it.

At 5:30 came a mail whinging that no one from $MegaCorp had attended the conf call.
At 5:40 came a mail from their Technical Account Rep bitching about the same.
At 6:12 came another mail from the TAR demanding an immediate response.
At 8:09 came a demand from the TAR for escalation
At 8:17 came another demand from the TAR for escalation, CC'd up the management chain
At 9:42 came another monkey who proceeded to "help" this mutt
And that was just the start.

As I logged in this morning I quickly found out that over the course of the day, as I sat at home doing very little beyond some experimental cooking, much mail moved back and forth. My blood pressure rocketed ever higher with each communication I read.

In short, the monkey colleague decided to play along with $BigInsuranceCo and start working on the problem, never mind the fact that we don't have Citrix software nor licenses to get it running. Worse still, this monkey had no fucking idea what Citrix actually was and made this painfully clear in mail sent to $BigInsuranceCo who ignored this fact, happy that we were apparently accepting responsibility for the problem. With every response the monkey cage got smellier.

The worst was yet to come: an internal mail to me from the idiot monkey:

Hi REC!

I was asked to assist in your ticket, I think you posting regarding Knowledge Item C-225 Citrix not supported is maybe correct. This issue is not reproducible without Citrix and is really not supported. What are your thoughts?
thanks,

My thoughts? My thoughts are to strangle you until that scrawny chimp neck of yours is the circumference of CAT-5 plenum! If you read what I wrote and think that Citrix is maybe kinda sorta possibly unsupported then why the hell did you start trying to get testing running and asking them for full-on logs and screenshots, you dumb fuck?!

Things only got worse, starting with the coffay running out.

After setting $BigInsuranceCo straight with a very long and further detailed explanation which also quoted my entire testing protocol from last year, I set to work on the next formidable task since I was Duty Monkey today: get all those damned tickets that have nothing to do with us out of our fucking queue. The other Duty Monkeys were also on the ball and there was much passing of tickets and gnashing of teeth.

And more mail from $BigInsuranceCo: they'd managed to reproduce the behaviour without using Citrix or Terminal Services. Impossible. We know what happens and why. We know the cause. It only happens in Citrix. But now my management was all over my sore monkey butt. "It can be reproduced in bog-standard $OurBigApp! Get to work, REC! Escalate!"

They sent repro instructions:

Here are the steps to recreate the issue:

- Logon to a Windows XP SP2 workstation
- Start task manager
- Kill the explorer.exe process
- Use task manager to start iexplore (Internet Explorer browser)

Kill the explorer shell and -- SURPRISE! -- the application which uses ActiveX as well as shell dialogs and APIs doesn't work correctly. Oddly, this won't reproduce the problem every time.

And why did they kill the shell? "Well, since we only publish IE and not explorer, it was the only way we could think of to replicate the Citrix environment." Clever admin. Stupid fucking clever admin.

I essplained once more that this was the same old Citrix and it's up to Citrix to fix it. I did toss 'em a bone though: I agreed to be on the conf call later.

No, I haven't gone soft. I can't wait to tear the fucks from Citrix a new asshole for pulling this shit again.