Closing Time

Goddamn I hate when the phone ring. It was Meathead, my new manager after his recent promotion and the latest management shuffle. Having himself spent so much time kill floor he's much more tolerable and understanding of our problems than any of my previous headaches.

"Hey, Dog. I need to see you in my office." Fuck. What did I do now?
"Gimme five to write up this ticket solution and I'll be there."

x-posted to da brog.

Make Room! Make Room!

In comparison with the cost of our software licensing and support contracts, the cost of a the hardware is negligible, even with the most expensive OS running on it. In fact we could probably give away racks of 2U dual-Xeons with 16GB RAM and dual 300GB hot-swappable SCSI drives in order to push our applications. We could even throw in copies of Windows Enterprise Datacenter edition for those companies too cheap to outsource their operations where competent UNIX/Linux admins can be found.

Over the expected life of the hardware, the cost of the equipment is statistically 0 at a confidence level over 95% as compared to the costs of the software and people to make it work. Few idiots realise this -- not even our own. So perhaps I shouldn't have been as surprised to receive the following question:

x-posted to da brog.

Charting the Present

A picture rather than the usual thousand words.

x-posted to da brog.

Mail

If your job is "Solution Specialist" and you're the manager of a department which is about to offer a training in some gee-whiz neat-o new stuff a particular upcoming release includes, I have a few tips for you.

x-posted to da brog.

It's the End of the World! Oh noes!

In the run-up to Y2K there was no shortage of doomsayers. Systems would shut down. Banking software would go tits up and fortunes, if not lost, would be reduced to their 1900 or 1970 values. Planes would drop out of the sky. Software everywhere would crash.

And then came January 1, 2000. The world didn't end. It wasn't even thrown back into the stone age. Planes didn't fall from the sky. Systems didn't shut down. Banking software kept working. The worst problems most of us saw were nuisances, dates like "January 4, 19100" and old calendar apps mistakenly adding a February 29th to the year. The doomsayers disappeared and the IT industry was mocked by a flood of fuckwits chiding us for having made such a big deal about Y2K.

But for the alarms three years prior, it could've gone very differently.

x-posted to da brog.

This Frog's For You

From: Configuration Duty Monkey
To: SysAdmin Duty Monkey, REC
Subject: area change

Hi,

New ticket in from $FrenchBank. This looks like a typical REC issue :-))
Can I move this to SysAdmin?

Fuckers.

I oughta call this A Minute in the Life. Cold turkey was a bad idea. Lunch made me feel even worse. Details inside along with a stupidity poll.

x-posted to da brog, sans poll.

Friday Fuckwit Festival

It's been a veritable cavalcade of cunts, cocksuckers and incompetent crackheads, made worse by my having to be the Duty Monkey this morning.

Mini-me has been out all week on training, checking in only a couple times a day during breaks. One of his tickets came from some fuckwit who wanted to confirm that the full packages he loaded were indeed the full packages and proceeded to send in a list of every subdirectory in the installation, asking if this was all he needed. Paul confirmed. The customer came back asking the same thing, but this time about the patchset. Paul confirmed.

In my mailbox came an urgent request, CC:d to Paul's manager and mine, stating that the customer's called twice demanding to talk to Paul but unable to get through. The fuckwit switchboard neglected to check the availability chart and put the customer through. The fuckwit manager demanded I do something. Paul happened to be on-line at the moment and after telling him the fuckwit reasoning why we're expected to make calls to idiots, called the fuckwit... who was at home and for whom the call wasn't actually urgent.

Inside: prurient interest poll

x-posted to da brog.

Error: An Error of Type "ERROR" Has Occurred

My knee hurts. Maybe it's the weather, maybe it's excessive strain, maybe I bashed it into something when I was ratted last Thursday. It's probably a combination of all of these.
My back hurts. Carrying oversized packing boxes home each night ain't helping. Nor is dismantling the humongous IKEA-style furniture
My brain hurts. I'm dealing with Microsoft error messages.

x-posted to da brog, sans poll.

No, nein, non, nei, niet, नहीं, нет, いいえ...

September 29:

We are in the process of upgrading the Hardware and Software Environment for the Windows operating system, not $YourBigApp.

Well that sounds easy enough. Everything you need to know is in the Supported Systems guide. And you're too fucking lazy to look at it or your grasp of English and ability to look at simple tables is so tenuous you need your hand held. But dammit, when I give you the answer, quit asking me the same fucking question!

x-posted to da brog.

Update: Either the Chinese or Korean word for "No" borked the intro. Chinese and Korean removed from title.

Once upon a time I had a blog on my own website but those posts are now archived offline. I made a handful of good posts there and now I want to post them to HuSi. What follows is the first of these pseudo-cross-posted blog entries. The post has been gently edited, lightly foot-noted, and lightly spritzed with Febreze^tm.

Cleaning Up

Ah, it's a fine day. Ripa's not around. All of my tickets have been answered and most of them are final. The only thing I expect to receive back is mail telling me the problem is resolved and that I can close the ticket.

I play a game of Age of Empires and completely wallop 5 other civilisations by building a giant army right at the beginning and whacking the others into nothingness before I even reach Tool Age. Huge map and game over inside 45 minutes.

Time to read some blogs but first, a look at the incoming tickets. Nothing special here; most of them are in areas outside my knowledge. Oh, wait! Here's one. One workstation is having problems. That's right up my alley. Take ownership but first, it's time to read a few blogs.

x-posted from brogspot

Running Around in Circles

With locations in the US and Europe a customer had chronic speed problems in Europe. E-Mail was slow, adding attachments resulted in time-outs, queries could take half an hour, often timing out as a result.

Inside I will make you say "LOL WHATTF".

x-posted from brogspot

Secrets

While I'm a fan of Open Source, $OurBigApp is closed source. Despite six years with the company and making a pretty strong case to a buddy who has access the source code, I was denied my request (read: repeated begging) to see a little bit of it to help a customer.

x-posted from da brog

Poll: What to write tomorrow.