Best insult?

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

So how would you really like to describe some of your callers?

Sperm race dropout?
Mental cannon fodder?
Evolutionary throwback?
Intelligently Designed?
Waste of molecular cohesion?
Pro-choice poster child?

Introduction

[phaedra-13.livejournal.com]

I am a thirty-something year old woman working as a Hell Desk Analyst for an international logistics company in the Chicagoland area.

I officially support a proprietary software for the import/Customs brokerage group in the US (approximately 1400 users). Basically, it's an electronic interface between us (the broker) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection, a subsidiary of Homeland Security); it runs on VMS, but how I wish it was Unix.

There are 6 of us in total who support this group, though our manager doesn't typically do hands-on support. Our group is the redheaded bastard stepchild of the IT division; we have our own SOP that tends to contradict theirs and we are not allowed administrative privileges.

The company I work for INSISTS on running Windows XP Professional on all of it's PCs and laptops, which pisses me off on a regular basis. The Field Engineer in our office and I are scheming to infiltrate with a Linux system, though at this stage it is merely a pipe dream. We use HPSD for service ticket tracking, which is yet another POS software program.

I will have plenty of user-based stories to amuse you all. :)

(x-posted)

(no subject)

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Would you believe that making alterations to two access-lists on two seperate Ciscos (a 2610 and a 1720) could take two hours? At 5pm I started work on making changes for a customer. I pasted in 20 lines of a config and the fucking thing locked up on me and kicked me off my telnet session. The guy rebooted it twice and it finally came back (though things take forever to power up). I did the same thing to the 1720 and that, too, locked up. The poor guy had to drive 10 miles to reboot it. I'm so happy he was understanding about the whole thing, though I felt awful that my fuck-up caused him inconvenience.

It took me two-and-a-half hours to remove an access-list and apply a new one on each router. It was embarassing, to say the least. I left just before 7:30pm. I wanted to cry; I'd already been awake since 3am and just wanted to go home and die sleep.

At the same time, a sysadmin was barking in my metaphorical ear asking for firewall changes internally that really didn't need doing at that second. Gahhhhh.