Dear Customers

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

I am sorry you're not getting what you feel is "good" runtime for your notebook on battery power. No, its not lasting the "5 hours" Sony says it should. Why? Well, because Sony's (and everybody else's) listed battery runtime figures are not accurate. In fact, it would be best to say they're outright boldfaced no-kidding lies. Sorry. Real world usage will always be less than what the 8x10 marketing glossies say its supposed to be. Deal with it.  In fact, if you look at the "advertised" runtimes they're always marked with a little * with a footnote saying something along the lines of "real life usage may be different".

So in short, take it up with them, there is NOTHING that I can do about this short of telling you to try a more conservative power profile, dimming your brightness, and turning off your wifi, and getting a bigger battery.

My boss is worse than end users sometimes.

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

Dear $BOSS,

Look, I know you're hard-pressed to find fault with me because I really am all that when it comes to my job. I also realize that it's not your job to know exactly what it is I do in MY job (which is odd considering you do my reviews).

Now, let's talk about the events that just happened. I realized it's important for you to send out spam veiled as a "newsletter" to our partner list. I really understand this. And I thank you for at least letting me know yesterday that you were going to kill my outgoing mail server with your marketing crap so I could disable the process warnings in $monitoring_software.

That being said, I still do not understand why you believe an SPF record lookup error is my issue. I gave you possibilities that it could have been an issue such as if the DNS server crashed (it didn't), the server was unreachable (it wasn't from one of $network_monitoring_app), or the remote host couldn't reach the DNS server (possible, but not our problem), but it wasn't good enough for you. Even after I proved to you that it is not by sending a message from that specific server to a Gmail account, then showing you the headers to prove that SPF is working, it just wasn't good enough.

Have you ever thought for a moment that while I realize I *AM* a minor deity when it comes to fixing servers, that I can't fix this particular issue because there is NO issue with our servers for me to fix. I have used the same SPF records for like 2 years now with no problems, so obviously if ONE HOST starts rejecting your marketing swill, it's got to be a problem with their server or some internet issue.

I realize I'm going on vacation tomorrow afternoon and you're absolutely terrified of me being 1,000 miles away, but this kind of behavior doesn't exactly foster any desire in me to actually come back (which you also know is a possibility).

Regards,
~Darkrose

All fingers must be pointed at SOMETHING

[syberghost.livejournal.com]

Ok, keep in mind, my team administrates UNIX servers for the Test and Development environments for several major projects at $FORTUNE500COMPANY. 100% of those servers are UNIX or Linux, and 100% of them are either in $HERE or $ANOTHERUSLOCATION. Administrating these servers also means installed various third-party tools on them, such as $FILETRANSFERSOFTWARE, but we are only responsible for making sure it's up and running and configured to allow the right servers to talk to us and us to them. We don't support Windows, we don't support the other half a dozen major datacenters our company has around the world, and we don't support the 2,000 other projects that aren't ours.

Today I get this email:

Project $FOO, located in $EUROPEANDATACENTER, sends us a file using $FILETRANSFERSOFTWARE and a .done file so we know when they're done sending the file. However, we have this Defect #BAR, because they sent us the .done file before they were done sending the file. They need to change their code to wait until $FILETRANSFERSOFTWARE is done sending the file before they send the .done file; but we don't know how to do that with the Windows version. Therefore, we are assigning this Defect to you.

I'm told I managed to get the email I sent back edited into something resembling polite after a long series of re-edits. I started with "you gotta be f**king kidding me".