Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

[Wudang]

Yeah tell that to witch hunt looking to crucify you for not seeking a definitive answer. At the bank I worked for we called them the wagging finger brigade. Nowhere to be seen when decisions need to be made but popping up when things go pear shaped and pointing out how every decision you made was wrong.

 

[quadraginta]

Sheesh, guys, save it for emails to project management. My post here was obviously a description of what I actually said in real life to those bozos, it wasn't literally a transcription, so there's no way they could have interpreted it as a logical statement they could evaluate in that pedantic programmer way. It actually went like this:

We can do THIS:

[illustrative example given]

OR we can do THAT:

[illustrative example given]

[A couple of sentences pointing out the difference]

Which should I do?

Yours In Christ,
Ramhard X Beefslab (that's my porn name)

If I can be pendantic for a moment "both", which IMO could be states as "yes please" is a valid answer to the question “do you want a or b?”.

cf the truth table for “or”
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs103/tools/truth-table-tool/

If you don’t want “both a and b” to be a valid response technically, you should be asking “do you want a xor b?”

Of course colloquially speaking when people ask “do you want a or b?” they usually mean “do you want a xor b”

I'm guessing you overlooked the words in TM's post which were in ALL CAPS.

They should have sufficed to satisfy even the most pedantic moment.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Remember in this exchange I'm the pedant. The others are all nontechnical managers so they don't grasp basic logic, much less pedantic subtleties of logic.

In any event, it's all over with, I got in writing what I needed to C my A, and did the incredibly stupid thing they wanted. This week's contretemps is that the party responsible for FTPing files to another party changed the files' names "to make it easier". Since the files get automatically rejected by the other side if their names don't match the expected input mask this has resulted in less-than-success. Those two parties are now about thirty emails deep in an exchange where neither of them understands the problem, and I'm not about to interject to help out: it's outside my area so it's now a NMCNMM situation*.

(Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys)

 

[Dr. Keith]

Remember in this exchange I'm the pedant. The others are all nontechnical managers so they don't grasp basic logic, much less pedantic subtleties of logic.

In any event, it's all over with, I got in writing what I needed to C my A, and did the incredibly stupid thing they wanted. This week's contretemps is that the party responsible for FTPing files to another party changed the files' names "to make it easier". Since the files get automatically rejected by the other side if their names don't match the expected input mask this has resulted in less-than-success. Those two parties are now about thirty emails deep in an exchange where neither of them understands the problem, and I'm not about to interject to help out: it's outside my area so it's now a NMCNMM situation*.

(Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys)

Somehow, this may be one of your funniest posts. I was literally laughing out loud because I know those people and I know that feeling. Enjoy!

 

[Faydra]

Remember in this exchange I'm the pedant. The others are all nontechnical managers so they don't grasp basic logic, much less pedantic subtleties of logic.

In any event, it's all over with, I got in writing what I needed to C my A, and did the incredibly stupid thing they wanted. This week's contretemps is that the party responsible for FTPing files to another party changed the files' names "to make it easier". Since the files get automatically rejected by the other side if their names don't match the expected input mask this has resulted in less-than-success. Those two parties are now about thirty emails deep in an exchange where neither of them understands the problem, and I'm not about to interject to help out: it's outside my area so it's now a NMCNMM situation*.

(Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys)

I need to do this more, I often inject myself into discussions when I see people going around in circles missing the ENTIRE point.

No, you don't need to redesign the multi-million dollar landscape of the company, just take 5 minutes to do x.

I HALP!

This has come back to bite me SO many times.

 

[arthwollipot]

I got a call last week from someone who needed to run the login script to manually map their network drives. It's literally two clicks of the mouse. But they insisted that I remote to their computer to do it for them. Yep, that's why I get paid the big bucks - so I can click your mouse twice.

In other news, I have to be very careful when typing the word "account". My fingers have a tendency to omit the "o". This is unrelated to the above.

 

[Norman Alexander]

I got a call last week from someone who needed to run the login script to manually map their network drives. It's literally two clicks of the mouse. But they insisted that I remote to their computer to do it for them. Yep, that's why I get paid the big bucks - so I can click your mouse twice.

In other news, I have to be very careful when typing the word "account". My fingers have a tendency to omit the "o". This is unrelated to the above.

Here you go.

 

[quadraginta]

Here you go.

The first time I heard that joke it was about Nikola Tesla being called in to get a giant dynamo working.

That was about a half century ago. I expect it's older than that.

 

[Wudang]

Ruskin trial 1878 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#Ruskin_trial

 

[alfaniner]

IIn other news, I have to be very careful when typing the word "account". My fingers have a tendency to omit the "o". This is unrelated to the above.

Many years ago I created a COBOL accounting program that had tables of costs for local and national credit unions. Due to the large tables and space requirements, each item had to begin with an abbreviation. Doing a massive copy/paste I used CULO-xx for the local data. I'd used "NT" for the corresponding national data tag until I saw that massive paragraph of "MOVE CU(national data)-xx TO yy" commands. I changed it to something less... provacative.

 

[JoeMorgue]

That's actually the whole problem with some of the more extreme outliers of the "Working Class Hero" mentality, it ignores the effort it takes into getting to the point where the job is easier to do and sort of by default venerates people who are purposely inefficient.

 

[Firestone]

User on Friday: we need "this" ASAP
Firestone: I'm finishing my current task next Tuesday, I'll do it Wednesday
User this Monday morning: have you managed to do "this" yet?

As it happens, the current task is almost finished, and I do have time today

Firestone: what EXACTLY is "this"?
User: I don't know yet

 

[arthwollipot]

Someone just asked me if a shared mailbox can be added to Outlook before it has been created.

 

[arthwollipot]

Here you go.

Would you like to see my collection of old engineer jokes?

Here's one:

A man is flying a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts, "Excuse me. Can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below says, "Yes, You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. Latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude".

"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.

"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "Everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."

The man below says, "You must be a manager."

"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," says the man below, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going, You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

 

[Norman Alexander]

The first time I heard that joke it was about Nikola Tesla being called in to get a giant dynamo working.

That was about a half century ago. I expect it's older than that.

Probably an ancient Greek joke about Archimedes.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Someone just asked me if a shared mailbox can be added to Outlook before it has been created.

Send them the list of all unplanned outages for the next 12 months.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Would you like to see my collection of old engineer jokes?

Commonly called "War Stories". By all means!

Here's one:

A man is flying a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts, "Excuse me. Can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below says, "Yes, You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. Latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude".

"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.

"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "Everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."

The man below says, "You must be a manager."

"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," says the man below, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going, You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

I expect there's website full of these.

 

[arthwollipot]

Commonly called "War Stories". By all means!

I expect there's website full of these.

A pastor, a doctor and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. The engineer fumed, "What's with these guys? We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!" The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such ineptitude!" The pastor said, "Hey, here comes the greenskeeper. Let's have a word with him. Hey, George. Say, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?" The greenskeeper replied, "Oh, yes, that's a group of blind firefighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime."

The group was silent for a moment. The pastor said, "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight." The doctor said, "Good idea. And I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there's anything he can do for them." The engineer said, "Why can't these guys play at night?"

 

[CORed]

To an optimist, the glass is half full.
To a pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To an engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Sigh. Yet again I'm going to have to explain to someone that if they put more than six different fields into their Excel pivot table it's going to be unusable. It'll be the size of a tablecloth and contain almost as much data as the detail tab it's being pivoted from.

Why can't people picture in their mind what they actually want before they ask for it?