A casual note to the Sony VAIO Design team.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Dear guys,

Run. Run far away as fast as you can. Because should I ever find you, I will take gleeful pleasure in visiting serious harm upon you for unleashing your crap upon the world.  Seriously, guys. Its like you sit down with some sort of horrid demon that is a cross between MC Escher and Machiavelli and plot out how to deliberately design a machine to suck as much as possible and to be as frustrating to service as possible. Its like you're trying to out-Apple Apple. I'm frankly amazed that people buy your products given the build quality and support you offer.

Here are some pics of a good example of why you should all be sent back to engineering school to have some sense clubbed into your thick skulls behind the cut:

( Click here for pics )

That is one of MANY VGN-SZ series machines I've had come in with physical damage issues to the casing. And if you had not elected to make the sides and rear of the machine out of cheap ass flextastic ABS plastic, none of them would have come across my bench. Those parts save you what, a nickel a machine? Yet you're perfectly willing to pay me to tear the entire machine down to replace them.  And the less we say about actually getting service information for your machines, the better.

I hope you all die in a fire, screaming like little girls.

Have a nice day

laptop_mechanic

Yeah.... Real Frak'n Critical....

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

A "Critical" ticket just came in.

I quote,

wireless keyboard button needs to be reprogrammed. when %user launches %user's browser by pressing button on keyboard browser opens to incorrect home page. when %user launches browser via shortcut on desktop it opens to correct home page.

Get in line.

I sure picked a bad day to stop sniffing Magnum markers in the warehouse....

Dear Dude...

[azzy23.livejournal.com]

When your autorun service fails on 20/150 machines, requiring you to reinstall the automation, do not tell me how unacceptable this is, how you paid for this and it's totally unusable. Cut it out. Also, the following items will only earn you negative points:

1) Telling me how you had somebody in my group set this up for you, which is a service we sell, meaning you nagged someone until they gave in just to shut you up.

2) Using the words "This is unacceptable" in a tech call. Dude? Shit happens. Sometimes, things break. Use the logic button with me for a minute. If your automation app breaks..... you'll have to fix it locally. Why is that so unbelievable?

3) When I blow an hour of my time finding the most expedient process, one containing ONLY THREE STEPS, do not... NOT whinge about a reboot.

4) Do not tell me my product is useless when the majority of your machines are working JUST FINE, have always worked JUST FINE, and have saved you HOURS of onsite work.

No love,

Moi.

I broke in a newbie....

[gythiawulfie.livejournal.com]

I arrived to work this morning to find out we had no power.
No power, means no network, and in our case no phones.

ETA of power to come back on was 1:00 PM.
They actually had it up by 11:30.

It is my job to notify the network guys if the network is down and out for any reason.

So, since my PDA only transferred over the email addresses and NOT their direct phone lines, and since I could not email because of lack of power, I had to call the general Help Desk.

I got a new person.

Poor thing, I am sure I confused the hell out of her.
She had never heard of us, and she wasn't quite sure how to word the ticket.
(We are a tiny division of a college division of a univeristy with 4 main campuses and 4 remote sites. We are one of them)
I told her how to find us in the drop down.
I told her how to word the ticket and to make sure they knew it was a power outage causing the issue not something else.
I told her how to escalate it so someone else in the general helpdesk didn't try to call to resolve the issue. There was nothing to 'resolve'.

I walked her through everything, EVEN GAVE her the email addresses so she didn't have to look them up.
Took her 20 mintues.

I hope I wasn't too rough.
She sounded a tad flustered. However once email was up, I got my copy and she did everything beautifully.
I was able to close the tickets and thanked her.

Sure enough, when everything came back up, there were 2 messages from networking on the phone.
I thought they had my cell #. Gonna rectify the phone issue now I have my compuerized dialadex available.

Do not delete what you do not understand.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Dear lusers:


QUIT deleting random programs off your notebook in an effort to "make it go faster". Or I will HURT you. 

Nevermind that you leave crap like WebShots and LimeWire pro running. Idiots.

symantec livestate

[heidl.livejournal.com]

is anybody here using symantec live state delivery in his or her company?

it's a tool to install computers automatically. the whole suite also involves a discovery tool, so you can make a neat and easy to use (haha) discovery database, where you should be able to find every computer in the whole company.
and there's also a thing called symantec patch manager, with that you can roll out patches, updates and security bulletins on every machine, that runs the symantec live state agent.

well, our company do, in fact we at the IT department do. it took us almost a year to fullly integrate this whole system into the corporate network, to inventory every machine, to make sure, there is a nice, litte testing system, where we can test new patches. we even were working on complete images for automatic installation of all the desktop and notebook systems. it took forever to fully complete them, so that even the LUSERS out there can set up a machine with the image discs. we went to trainings and developed a new image with every new series of notebooks etc...

all in all we have now fully integrated the whole symantec livestate system in our company and are handling over 2000 machines in this network.

and now symantec doesn't even tell us, that there won't be any more product updates. no we had to stumble upon this information accidentically on the net.
there won't be any more updates, there won't any more licences for discovery database and there won't be any fucking more service and support by the end of 2008.

and we paid 100.000s of dollars for licences, gold support and trainings... i won't even mention the time involved in this whole fucking project.

great!
i. love. my. job.

I AM BUT ONE WOMAN. STOP BUGGING ME.

[red-scully.livejournal.com]

Dear Finance Luser

Yes, I know you are having trouble changing your password.  Thank you for telling me earlier that you'd been in the pub all lunch time, before hanging up without letting me finish talking you through logging back in with the default password.  It's not my fault that when you called back to admit that you hadn't been listening properly, I was on another call.  It's also not my fault that the official turnaround on these jobs is 2 hours, so if I decide you can wait ten minutes whilst I call someone else who's been waiting for something else for days on end, live with it.  DO NOT CALL ME SEVEN TIMES IN SEVEN MINUTES.  (I'm not even exaggerating.  The call logger looked like she might cry)  If she tells you I'm on the phone, and will call you back as soon as humanely possible, how about you just sit back and work on something that doesn't require the computer for a few minutes?  If my manager then pulls me into the hallway for an urgent 2-minute discussion, try to refrain from calling and shouting, "I'M STILL WAITING" when the call logger answers the phone.  And when I finally DO call you, do NOT answer the phone, "YOU ARE A WASTE OF SPACE."  I'm sure it seems funny to you, but I'm not amused at all.  Let me finish my sentences before talking back.  Do NOT interrupt me before I've finished reading out the new password to you - especially by announcing "DUZ NOT WORK!"  Of course it doesn't work.  You haven't finished yet.  If something isn't working and I'm trying to figure out why, how about letting me think for a minute?  Do you honestly believe that endlessly repeating, "I NEED TO GET IN NOW I'M BUSY ZOMG!!ELEVEN!" is going to help me figure your problem out?

I hope you drown in a pile of invoices.

No love,

Me.