needy

[dog-star-man.livejournal.com]

Anybody have any users who are just plain needy? There are about 4 people at my facility that I can count on hearing from at least several times a day. It's getting to the point where, when I see their name on my phone, I sometimes won't answer. One of the guys is onto me and he calls from various other extensions. They're mostly harmless phone calls, except for the time and brain cells they consume every time I get them. I wouldn't mind so much if they were calling me to help them perform complicated tasks or were having a genuine problem. But, it usually winds up being something like holding their hand while they create a shortcut on their desktop or listen to them talk themselves through a problem. I had a guy call me about a database problem today. Through the course of our conversation, which consisted mainly of him talking and myself interjecting an occasional "hmmm" or "o.k." he figured it out all by himself. But his first instinct when he ran into the barest hint of a problem, was to dial my number, even though he could figure it out himself. I'm really starting to get interested in this trend of "neediness" because lately, a guy who has been here for a couple of years and never really bothered me, has fallen into this same pattern. He's worse in a way, because he comes right to my office and I can't sit there and roll my eyes at him or flip him off, like I would to the phone. In his case, he likes to report all of these meaningless network and computer events, like spam, memory crashes, slow network performance, etc, and then try to tie them all together into one mysterious and looming network problem. But he was so nice before. How did this cycle of neediness start and, more importantly, how do I begin to break people of it?

Dear Mr Man Who Does Not Pay Us Nearly Enough -

[codecattx.livejournal.com]

(x-posted to my journal)

Dear Mr Man,

When you call me asking "Why is my server performance so abysmal?"

I want you to look at a few statistics -

Over six years ago, you started with:

Six (6) Web Servers with

One (1) Pentium II 500 MHz
1 GB of RAM (20% utilized at load)
Eight or nine Websites configured with host headers per server

You have now:

One (1) Web Server with

One (1) Pentium II 500 MHz
1 GB of RAM (95% utilized at load)
52 Websites configured with host headers

Performance will always suck for you until you listen to me and upgrade your dren, rebooting will not fix it, defraging the hard drive will not fix it, the only thing that will fix this frelled up setup is a completely re-engineered solution.

And when you come to me with SSL problems due to you saving your SSL Cert in Microsoft Word and then wondering why you can't get the formatted ASCII text file to work, it would be wise to listen to my suggestions and just let me fix things to begin with rather than engage me in a hour long argument as to why That Cannot Be Done.

Now that having been said, I also have to say this:

"I am so smart! I am smarter than you could ever hope to be. Who is your daddy? That's right, I am. I have more neurons firing in my little toe than in that whole big empty head of yours, and don't you forget it!"

Thank you for your attention,

David

I will now nailgun this hint to your face.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Against our will, we have been conscripted to provide TS to a group of people in another organisation. They run completely different systems to us, but hook into one of our data feeds through a lot of mumbo-jumbo. We have been given no information about them, no training, and generally cannot help them in any way whatsoever.

To make life only slightly less bleak, we have an agreement with them that only their outsourced helpdesk are allowed to call us. Their staff cannot call us, their managers cannot call us, their CEO cannot call us. All those people must call their helpdesk first, who will then fail to do any troubleshooting at all and phone us.

So I get a call from some project manager from these guys. After brushing past the connection he was attempting to draw between himself and their helpdesk, I confirm that in fact, he has no relation to them at all, and I can therefore tell him to go screw himself call their helpdesk.

He gets all pissy and complains that this is the same thing he's been told the six other times he called us directly.

I have never before in my life been so tempted to say to a caller "Gee, you think there's a reason for that?"