When you're at your parents place, cleaning out the old computer...

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

... and you ask them what the old computer's operating system is, because you want to get your USB key working to let the photos your father has clogged up the hard drive with...

... and your father calls it the "Windows 95" machine...

... don't just assume he's being pedantic and doesn't know the name of any other operating systems...

... and try not to cry when you realise there is no way in Hades you are going to get a driver for your USB 2.0 to work on the single USB port on the Windows 95 machine.

(no subject)

[inahandbasket]

( tech support job opportunity in NYC. click for details. )

Bah, co-workers

[harry-whodunnit.livejournal.com]

This place runs on two helpdesks — the one which looks after the applications related specifically to what we do here, and my crowd who do everything else, plus the majority of the sysadmin work.

Today an issue came up which overlapped our two areas and I found myself discussing the problem with their team leader. It ended with her telling me not to worry about it, she'd deal with it. That was surprising and a little bit touching, because while they're all good people over on that side, they've never been particularly zealous in chasing work. Guess that's why they made her team leader.

An hour later (45 minutes after the other helpdesk closed) I start wondering what progress she'd made on the issue, as my line had been choked with users running up against that same problem ever since the two of us got off the phone.

She took care of it, alright.

By writing up a ticket and forwarding it to me before she went home...

Dear mail admins

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

I am implementing a new mail gateway. I would like to use some simple antispam checks. But it's quite difficult to do that sometimes unless
you make sure your goddamn server sends out a FQDN with its HELO (it's in the RFC!), and also make sure that that hostname is resolvable via DNS lookup!

Ok, I know that some MTAs might need a bit of configuration to get that happening (*cough*Sendmail*cough*), but Postfix is configured that way out of the box, and so is bloody Exchange - if you can't fix up your own MTA, then you SHOULDN'T be a mail admin. If you can't read an RFC, you SHOULD get into another line of work.

Thanks to you incompetent admins, I need to relax one of my rules, so that I am no longer blocking 70% of inbound messages as spam - I'm now only rejecting 30% of messages due to the 0.1% of you who can't get it right... and who also happen to be important customers, as I found today. *cries*