Sorry, you're a what again?

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

We're a large organisation. We have developers. The developers use PCs. And to show their egalitarianism, these PCs fail just as often as the PCs of the non-developer staff. The difference being that if you're a developer, you already KNOW about the unreliabilty of computer systems and as a professional, would have measures in place to handle unexpected failures, yes? You'd at least have a backup of your data, yes?

You'd think so.

So this developer's PC goes boom. It's reported to us, we pass it on to our vendor to go have a look at. Their turnaround time depends on how many employees they have in that town for the next couple of days, and how many other problem computers they have to look at first. We have no maximum turnaround time in our contract, you see.

The developer has been calling us every couple of hours asking where the vendor is, because (guess what!) the decided that the best place to store the only copy of their data was on the now-smoking crater of their PC. And it's SOOOOO IMPORTANT! They might have to WORK ON THE WEEKEND if it's not fixed NOWWWW!

Newsflash, sparky. You are not important. Your PC is not important. There's no guarantee that the hard disk will even be salvageable. If you, as a so-called professional developer, have not stored a copy of your work on (a) backup media, (b) a backup PC in your group, or (c) the humungous networked data store that you're supposed to store it in, that's your problem, not mine.

In summary:
1) No, I will not communicate your impatience to our vendor. They would only ignore me anyway.
2) Stop phoning and go and make yourself useful, if that's possible.
3) You have just been given valuable lessons about backups, redundancy, and your relative importance in the organisational hierarchy. In life, you will continue to be taught these lessons until you learn them.
4) Sucks to be you.

Flaming Idiot Co-workers!

[grayhawkfh.livejournal.com]

First, this alleged "IT Security Specialist" continually tries to farm all of his work off onto us at the helpdesk. Then, this fucknugget came down this morning, asking for more memory for his PC. He said he could install it, so we gave him a stick of memory.

Not 1/2 hour later, he comes down and claims that it doesn't work. Being the hardware guru around here, I went down to look at his PC.

Shit-for-brains put the memory in BACKWARDS!!!

Thanks be to {$deity} he didn't damage it. IMNSHO, they need to fire this asswipe and give that job to me. Hell, I already do half of it...

(x-posted to my LJ)

Suck it.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Dear caller -

When you have called about a corporate PC problem for which the fix is to clear out a directory of all files, and there are over three thousand files there, and it's clear that you don't have the first frickin' clue as to how to select all files at once apart from using Ctrl-click, don't interrupt me while I am attempting to suggest you click on Edit-Select All. Because I will shut up and let you go back to selecting each file individually. And then tell you sweetly that you're halfway done and there's another directory to go.

Firing a user

[omg-teh-funnay.livejournal.com]

OK, I was outta town for a few days, but it appears that several of ya wanna live vicariously though me and hear the story of Firing a User.

I used to do support for a large online university (fully accredited, it was the online campus of a real school) - started in student support, went to faculty support and ended with being a team lead/escalation point and Exchange admin (this is a big deal, the classes were built as public folders on an Exchange cluster and shared out as newsgroups. I had to make sure that happened right.)

Students, faculty and staff all have provisions in their contracts that says they'll be respectful and polite with staff.

So one day I get a call from a faculty member who'd called in earlier that day and broke her Outlook Express again - she'd changed a setting after she got off the phone with the previous tech and lo and behold, she was disconnecting from the Internet. That's what happens when you CHECK the 'Disconnect after sending and receiving" box.

Her previous problem was with an address book, the other tech didn't even go INTO that area. EU is CONVINCED the tech did it. Calls her every name in the book. Call started off angry (Yeah, you jacka$$es broke my computer again, Why the f*ck can't you ever fix anything?) and went from there. I politely reminded her that she needed to be civil or I couldn't fix her problem. That worsened it.

Fortunately, I was recording the call. See, $University's VoIP phone system had a 'record to voicemail' feature that we could enable, and I was logging all of this one.

I was able to get her to shut up long enough to figure out her problem and fix it, then she started off again, I again reminded her she was supposed to play nice, as I was playing nice, and got an earful. I let her know that her conduct WAS a terminatable offense, she continued to question my parent's marital status, my sexuality and my relationship with beasts of burden.

Finally, I was able to get in a word edgewise, told her that I'd revoked all her access, that I was locating a replacement for the three classes she was teaching and that her last paycheck would be sent post-haste. I wished her well and offered to fax her a copy of my official complaint, she declined and terminated the call

I exported the recording to my desktop, repackaged as an MP3, filled out my forms, sent them to the faculty managers, and her contract was terminated before I left for lunch.

My Burger King double cheeseburger, extra mustard extra pickles tasted especially fine that day.

(no subject)

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

a little bit of my soul dies each time a customer calls in asking about speed problems at this one particular cable plant.

the cableco information page (for internal use only) indicates: "Bandwidth saturation issues are ongoing at this cable plant. The cable operator knows. no upgrades are currently planned. Tell subscribers we are aware of the issue and are investigating possible solutions."

The cableco advertises a connection rate of 2Mbps.

They have about 600 subscribers.

They have a 4.5Mbps pipe.

I want to scream at the phone "RUN! Switch to the competitors like you keep threatening to! They have bandwidth for you, and this is just a waste of your money and my time." But instead I say "Our network operations crew is working hard to relieve the network congestion, and in the meantime all we can really do is be patient," trying to swindle one more month's worth of cable bill out of him.

I feel like a criminal.