(no subject)

[the-anguisette.livejournal.com]

Note:  This woman's first language was English.  She was at least 30, and she did not sound like she suffered from any mental retardation.  I swear. 

Tech support for an ISP.

Me:  Thanking you for holding, you've reached ______ technical support, blah, blah, blah.
Moron:  What's my email address?
Me:   That'd be your screenname @ ______ .com.  
Moron:  My screenname at WHAT?  What's an AT?
Me:  Your screenname, the one you use to sign onto ______ with.  Then hold down SHIFT on your keyboard, and tap 2 once.
Moron:  Oh, okay.  Wait, s 2?
Me:  No.  The key in the bottom left that says the word SHIFT on it.
Moron:  So my screenname shift _____?
Me:  No.  Your screenname, hold down shift.  Press the number 2 once.  Then _______.com
Moron:   I think I did something wrong.  There's lots of little circles.
Me: Okay, lets try it again.  Your screennamee, hold down shift.  Press the number 2 once.  Then _______.com
Moron:  Okay, now what's a dot? 
Me:Ummm...a period?
Moron:  Where's that?
Me:  Near the question mark key, just to the left of it.  Bottom right hand side.
Moron:  What's a question mark?
Me: ....
Me: ... *ranting commences, on mute*
Me: Ummmmm...it's a question mark?
Moron:  Well, what does it look like?
Me:  *mutes phone, rants loudly*  It looks like an upside down fish hook, with a dot under it.

...............
This goes on.  For 25 minutes. 

(no subject)

[twistedsyx.livejournal.com]

This I just had to share with you guys. Just looked up this email incident moments ago:

"HOW DO I CHANGE MY PASSWORD TO YOUR SOFTWARE?
I am web-savvy & internet-literate AND I AM GET REAL FRUSTRATED WITH THIS SOFTWARE.
Please reply. Thank you."

I really don't think I need to say much else. Please add your own punchline. The best part is, our software doesn't use passwords.

(no subject)

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

I'm a network technician for a major telecoms company. Weeeeeee! I'm not sure I like the job yet, but it's double my salary and half the work, so I'll stick it out for now...

Well, it only took two weeks for the asshattery to start.

Amongst other things, I handle some escalations from the customer-facing NOC. Some dude calls the NOC and says his public LAN IP subnet isn't working. And then it gets punted to me.

First of all, the guy in the NOC e-mails me two traceroutes, asking why the first one goes through Comcast. The second one stops at our (Cisco) edge router in Dallas "even though he is based in Austin". Grinding my teeth I pore over his e-mail and very carefully type a response that won't get me fired.

"[Felipe],

The first traceroute goes through Comcast because you have mistyped the IP address. The IP in question belongs to Comcast (verifiable through a WHOIS) and is not one of our /14s. The second traceroute stops at Dallas because this is the edge router his T1 is connected to. This is the last hop that responds to ICMP requests. The customer has a firewall that is configured to deny ICMP requests. There is no issue with routing, as evidenced in this output:

show ip route [x.x.x.x]
[Output snipped; shows correct serial port for the subnet to routed to]

Kind regards,

[Me]"

Thirty minutes later he e-mails me again saying, "The customer is still complaining something is wrong, please check these show ip route outputs. The subnet has a /30 mask on one router (referring to our redundant edge router) but a /28 on the other. Please advise."

Howling like a banshee and foaming at the mouth, I respond:

"[Felipe],

There is nothing wrong with routing. You have mistyped the IP address in your show ip route command to show routing for a /30 block. Here is the correct subnet, as well as an output that shows routing is perfectly fine. We cannot ping the customer's side of the WAN nor his LAN IPs because his firewall does not permit us to ping them:

[Snipped]

[Me]"

I understand why people disable ICMP, but it's fucking annoying when it's a new service and we're trying to verify connectivity. Jesus, nobody's going to DoS you as soon as your connection comes up/up.

(FWIW, I think the guy has his firewall misconfigured. But of course he's going to call us first.)