HAY GUYS!!

[ithmarvin.livejournal.com]

Hello! I am a computer technician with a few years of battlefront experience.

( The Circle of Life and a half-eaten candy bar )

Dear Visiting Idiot.......

[patgund.livejournal.com]

1) Yes, I know all the paper you use back in New York is US letter-sized. You're not in New York, you're in Qatar. And since we don't want to spend huge amounts of money importing US letter-sized paper, we get the next best thing, standard European A4. Deal.

Besides, if we could get the paper we wanted, the toilet paper in the bathrooms near IT wouldn't be single-ply.

2) Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. Powerpoint gotta corrupt. It's part of the circle of life. Deal with it.

Please... indicate... the... problem.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

So the shambling mounds who call us up on a daily basis are being constantly misdirected to my team by the crap IVR that another area set up and which we apparently can not change. About 20% of our incoming work is telling people they've chosen the wrong IVR option. The rest is trying to decipher what the mumbling technotards are muttering about.

I've been hammering on management and the phone guys for over a year trying to get this changed. My most recent email from them says that there won't be any need to change it as a month from now they're switching to a new system.

One which will direct callers based on what they answer when asked to describe the problem.

Can anyone else see a problem with this?

A bit of amusement to lighten your day

[krrayn.livejournal.com]

From bash.org:

(Numi) hey, can you guys just check a site out and tell me if it's up?
(Haddock) depends, what is it?
(Numi) just my apache server, it works for me but seems to be down for anyone else
(Haddock) alright, what's the address?
(Numi) http://127.0.0.1
(Haddock) ......
(Haddock) ...Yeah, it's up.

It's not just the users who are $expletive.heads

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

You know, we all sit here and bitch about the stupid users, but I really have a lot more problems dealing with a certain obnoxious co-worker of mine.

Here's the latest dickheadery. (This is a long explanation, sorry, background is all good). We're about ready to move to a new gateway email MTA. Dickhead is the current MTA guru (it runs on soon-to-be-obsolete OS). I am the Exchange admin. We have both, by some miracle, decided that the best gateway solution to replace the dying one is Postfix over Linux. Yay.

At the moment we have an "idiosyncratic" setup, where Exchange mail is delivered individually to each server by the MTA, not to any Exchange bridgeheads. Because of the way the current MTA works, we need a custom hack to each AD user account to make this stupid delivery method work. My aim is to get rid of this AD idiocy; his aim is to never ever use Exchange bridgeheads, and continue delivering to the individual servers.

So, I came up with a method to build a recipient map for Postfix by dumping the contents of the AD for userid, SMTP addresses (there are multiples) and home mailbox server (we have eight). We can then SCP it up to the Postfix box, run a Perl script I made to format all the AD smtp addresses into a suitable format, and generate a recipient map to enable Postfix to deliver to each server WITHOUT using custom attributes in the AD. Yay!

So (getting to the point), I went to show my wonderful (42 line, including comments) Perl script to dickhead and explain the fact that the whole process will take around 30 sec. He totally shat all over it, saying "We're not going to do it that way." End of comment.

Oh? What fucking way were we going to do it? More fucking hacks to the AD? An LDAP lookup to the AD each time we want to deliver a message? What, exactly? And when was this information going to be shared with me?

I asked (somewhat more politely) what he had in mind, and he totally came up with some bullshit that I've never heard of, and ok, I am not an expert on Unix MTAs, but I do know the concepts involved - you can look up addresses in Postfix via LDAP, a map or an SQL database. He didn't mention any of these, and I quite frankly didn't bother asking what he did mean.

So, what do you all do when your constructive suggestions get totally ignored by your supposed "colleagues"?

damn college kids

[knittinggoddess.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll help you back up your hard drive. I'd rather you not copy your entire hard drive to ours, and here's why: you aren't going to need your old library (save a select few files), your old applications folder (that's why you have the software restore disks) or your brother's user directory when he hasn't touched the computer in two years. So just copy what you actually need and it won't take the entire afternoon.

I can't let you copy over Photoshop Elements, especially not after you just told me you got it from a friend. You can get it from that friend again, can't you? Really. I can't. It's an illegal copy and I'm not allowed to let you do that. The party line sucks, but bite me.

My boss on the pirated PSE: "Isn't that free with every scanner? Why don't you actually pirate something good?"

I also had the interesting experience of troubleshooting a computer that only displayed Japanese, which I definitely don't speak. The user instead translated everything for me. "It's saying it's connecting...and nope, still says manual." And even though he was running XP, the options we were given differed from what I know. It was almost like I was doing phone support.

(no subject)

[tertiumquid.livejournal.com]

I got a ticket this morning with a problem description that read "want now if can read 123 org". I understand the problem completely. We hire illiterate morons to work on the console.