(no subject)

[wignersfriend.livejournal.com]

Not looking forward to work in 8 hours...

Last week we launched a new call-center app to a test group in our call center. Was supposed to be so much better than the one we are running, which seemed to crash every damn day and their tech support was worse than failure, and it was as far as our call-center reps were concerned. The day after the customer experience manager from this new app's company left our office after helping with the launch, we started getting all sorts of weird and funky errors on the IP phones they provided us - IP conflicts on phones that get their IPs from DHC-FUCKING-P - miscommunication abounded and the tech working on our problem thought it was fixed and headed home for an early weekend.

This Wednesday, we are expected to roll out to the entire call-center (about 40 more people).

Meanwhile, the first group of new call-center agents to be trained only on this new app are about to start this Monday.

Management expected us to have this new group set-up in the middle of dealing with migrating our main database server (which is on only one server and means us getting new jobs if it fails) that the new app takes data dips from, dealing with the weird problems from the new IP phones, and dealing with problems we've been having with our entire network infrastructure since the power outage that occurred last week and completely devastated our internal infrastructure because, since my boss has worked at this company he has begged them to let him buy UPSes, time and again management (all the way up to the CEO) have refused to sign off on the "unnecessary expense".

So, with no time to order new systems we had to deal with what we had, which included two computers with a ton of useless crap installed by corporate users who had way too much time on their hands - we also had to wire up the cubes in our company's "old" site for the new phones for this incubation group and figure out how to stay within the seating chart created by our trainers and managers considering half of these cubes are no longer wired for power. All this while hoping that our PDC, which is running on a generic box that has an ambivalent attitude towards detecting the hard drives sitting inside it, wasn't corrupted by the power outage, won't be pooched by MS's absolutely critical patches, and will migrate smoothly to a server we think might actually be able to handle the load of a PDC.

Our CEO just demanded that we install Exchange because the cute new HR Director explained to him how nice it would be if she could see his schedule. This, after 6 months of us (the two standard nerds of the IT Infrastructure team) begging to get the expense signed off.

Eh...
Anyone work for a company in the East SF Bay Area that's hiring tech? I'll take help-desk after this and love it. I swear. As long as I don't have to work with anyone from the marketing department.

Comments

[major-error.livejournal.com]

The marketing types aren't so bad when they're situated right next to the policy types (and a VP...)

[canray.livejournal.com]

Marketings job is to negotiate everything, and they have a hard time wrapping their twisted little minds around the fact that, no matter how much you wheel and deal, you can't compromise with the laws of physics and stupidity.

[wignersfriend.livejournal.com]

See, according to the marketing types here, I work with them. They get to come up with all sorts of crazy ideas and I do all the back-breaking work - in addition to what's above - to implement their crazy schemes and then I'm expected to give them daily reports on it. I've been stuck working on their dumb predictive dialer and e-mail "blast" campaigns. Ugh.

Sometimes, for fun, I go around with them in circles just like they might do to me to see how long it takes to get them break. One guy who works here looks like one of the eastern european terrorists from a Die Hard film. I got him to turn straight up ff0000 once. He deserved it though, for keeping a mailbox that was over 3GB and took me 6 hours to transfer to his new machine.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Jesus... I think I used to work for that company! Or one sufficiently alike as to be Twilight zone scary!

I got fired about a month ago, for being sick too much [yeah, all three weeks of it, at least one of which I spent in hospital], but having recently heard what happened to them next I'm not bitter, more relieved at having avoided what was a near identical flustercluck as the OP's.

The way I hear it, the screw up is so bad at present that the parent company is going to pull the plug on the whole project, flushing a few million down the toilet, and kicking everyone out of the door. It's that bad it can't be fixed.

[kerberos.livejournal.com]

I implemented,programmed ,scripted and designed a complete website for registrering domains in under a week.
This generated about 5000$ in revenue first month in operation.

When I emailed the whole company to tell people about it I got a nasty letter back from the Marketingdepartment Biatch berating me for not involving marketing in the design cause "ALL designs and webprojects should go through me! And the design of the new website isn't useing our correct grapical profile!"

IF I had involved her I would now 3 months later still have been in meeting to pick the right fonts and the right shade of mauve to go with it.