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

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Wudang said:
And then you can get some of those WIBNIs and other little jobs you meant to do when you had time.
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Yeah, that would be more fun than just pretending to work and get paid for it. *he said after six months of WFH and a thousand hours of Skyrim*
 
I got a call this morning for someone who assumed that the "expected delivery date" on his IT Equipment form represented a 100% accurate absolute guarantee of delivery at that precise date and time (never mind that the time was 12:00am). He was not impressed when I told him that we absolutely cannot guarantee delivery time because it depends on factors that are outside our control such as staffing levels, workload, and availability of stock. Apparently that was not good enough.

Wasn't nearly as bad as that call the other week, but I did give the director a heads up that they may receive some feedback.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Nothing like being landed with URGENT REQUEST, starting work on it, only to discover that the parties concerned are now out of the office on PTO, "without access to email". When's it wanted, URGENTLY URGENTLY? "By end of day Monday". When do they get back? "Tuesday afternoon".

Guess who needs his questions answered before the work can be done?

Answer: the same guy who's going to be yelled at on Tuesday afternoon for not having it completed on Monday.
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Sucks to be me. The data I was asked for URGENTLY URGENTLY on Wednesday, to be delivered today, Monday, is what the bigwigs want in order to decide this week what clinics to open, what clinics to close, and how many hundred staff get furloughed/unfurloughed/laid off/put back on normal hours. The problem is that EVERYTHING hinges on whether a given piece of data fits into Category A, Category B, or Category C.

I do not have the knowledge necessary to make that determination. My boss does, and her boss does. They are both still on vacation. My boss made a half-ass list on Friday morning, but didn't reply to my IMMEDIATE response "you only highlighted these items, does that mean exclude the rest?" Her PTO was slated to start that "afternoon", and that was at eight a.m.

No reply. So on Friday morning, 10:30 a.m., I sent the best effort I could do with my best guesses to my boss and her boss and said "here are the assumptions built into these summaries, are they correct? Let me know ASAP and I can make whatever changes you want me to, because they want this MONDAY." Naively, I assumed since this is of business-killing job-ending importance they'd check their email, even on vacation.

Nope!

Now Bigwig One is blowing up MY email at 7 p.m. because I didn't send him the data. I replied that I have the data, but am waiting a response (I didn't say from whom) on the question of categorization, and the difference is significant depending on which way the answer goes. It really is significant: between 0 and 160,000 data points may be moved from one category to another, depending on the answers I get (if any). The total number of data points is only 360,000 total. So yeah, knowing which effing category they go in makes one hell of a big difference, even if this wasn't going to be used to radically affect hundreds of employees and thousands of patients and god knows how many millions of dollars.

I really hate everybody for a) putting me into this position, b) not effing paying attention when I ask questions on matters of importance, and c) effing having vacations right now. And I know for a fact they're going to throw ME under the bus when the Bigwigs explode with fury because I kept them waiting. Of course the Bigwigs will be even madder if I give them the "wrong data" because I didn't guess the categorization correctly.

I'm tempted to simply take the 1.3 million rows of raw data this came from and send it to everybody, and let them figure it out if it's so ******* easy.
 
Me: "Hey guys you put in a user request for a new account you wanted named Doej but you already have a user named that. I need an alternative."

Client Company's HR: "Our company police is Last Name, First Initial for user name."

Me: "Yeah I get that. That's fine, a good practice actually. But you just hired a Jane Doe and you've already got an employee called Janice Doe so I can't call the new employee DoeJ as a username because it's already taken."

HR: "But we've already sent the information to a bunch of hospital portals and medical records software people to get created."

Me: "Yeah again I get that but I literally can't create two users with the same username in a Windows domain environment."
 
JoeMorgue said:
Me: "Hey guys you put in a user request for a new account you wanted named Doej but you already have a user named that. I need an alternative."

Client Company's HR: "Our company police is Last Name, First Initial for user name."

Me: "Yeah I get that. That's fine, a good practice actually. But you just hired a Jane Doe and you've already got an employee called Janice Doe so I can't call the new employee DoeJ as a username because it's already taken."

HR: "But we've already sent the information to a bunch of hospital portals and medical records software people to get created."

Me: "Yeah again I get that but I literally can't create two users with the same username in a Windows domain environment."
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So? Just split the domain in two. Easy-peasy. :p
 
JoeMorgue said:
Me: "Hey guys you put in a user request for a new account you wanted named Doej but you already have a user named that. I need an alternative."

Client Company's HR: "Our company police is Last Name, First Initial for user name."

Me: "Yeah I get that. That's fine, a good practice actually. But you just hired a Jane Doe and you've already got an employee called Janice Doe so I can't call the new employee DoeJ as a username because it's already taken."

HR: "But we've already sent the information to a bunch of hospital portals and medical records software people to get created."

Me: "Yeah again I get that but I literally can't create two users with the same username in a Windows domain environment."
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There was a marysmith and a marysmith1 at my work. Mary Smith works in the cafeteria. Mary Smith 1 was an operating room software implementation expert. For nearly three years during the build work Mary Smith would log into her email once a week, and wonder why she had thousands of emails relating to nurse security, surgical scheduling, instrument and equipment lists, and invitations to meetings for fifty hours a week. She would reply to perhaps one in a hundred of those emails, with "who are you why are you sending me this I don't know how many lasers you need in the other hospital stop sending these" and similar.
 
In my department there are two people who have the same name - first name and surname - working in the same team. They have desks next to each other. Probably. That's what I'd do.
 
For total fairness, both persons should be compelled to legally change their names to something different. That you assign! Give them names that will never, ever be confused, and are really unlikely to not be unique to them.

I suggest "Haverford Daverford Xplodalicious-Smacky" and "Lil' Gushy Bbabbyccakkess". Both convey appropriate gravitas. "Appropriate Gravitas" is a good name, also.
 
arthwollipot said:
I got a call this morning for someone who assumed that the "expected delivery date" on his IT Equipment form represented a 100% accurate absolute guarantee of delivery at that precise date and time (never mind that the time was 12:00am). He was not impressed when I told him that we absolutely cannot guarantee delivery time because it depends on factors that are outside our control such as staffing levels, workload, and availability of stock. Apparently that was not good enough.

Wasn't nearly as bad as that call the other week, but I did give the director a heads up that they may receive some feedback.
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Try this one: "You can't get the wood for this because it's all held up in China."
 
TragicMonkey said:
There was a marysmith and a marysmith1 at my work. Mary Smith works in the cafeteria. Mary Smith 1 was an operating room software implementation expert. For nearly three years during the build work Mary Smith would log into her email once a week, and wonder why she had thousands of emails relating to nurse security, surgical scheduling, instrument and equipment lists, and invitations to meetings for fifty hours a week. She would reply to perhaps one in a hundred of those emails, with "who are you why are you sending me this I don't know how many lasers you need in the other hospital stop sending these" and similar.
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:D Two stories.
Some Years Ago I worked for <LARGE TECH COMPANY #1> we had a Resource Manager, basically the person that ran the consulting division in my country, telling nine teams and a hundred or so people where to go and what to do. Far more important that the actual managers. Her email was shortenedfirstname.surname@techcompany1.com
Then we were bought by <LARGE TECH COMPANY #2>. They already had a shortenedfirstname.surname@techcompany2.com. Who started to get literally hundreds of new emails, from a different company and utterly different function to hers. Then this increased to the RM's full email load, of perhaps 5,000pw. Chaos ensured....

Just yesterday I logged on to email address #6; this is an old gmail address, dating back to the 'invite only' phase that I've had for >15 years and use for personal stuff. It's not a spam bucket and I've kept it to keep in touch with people.
I find a series of emails from a large UK supermarket chain, the UK National Lottery, Apple, eBay and more notifying me about account changes.
I have no such accounts.
Some idiot, with the same name as I, in Britain has created a Gmail account as mis-entered it. Many times.
A quick look around gives me his home address, NIN, credit card numbers (2), mothers maiden name and more.
 
When <global bank> adopted Lotus Notes my manager was getting various problems with people trying to email him. Details fuzzy now and my dumped her Lotus manuals years back. I knew Notes from IBM days so had a dig. I'll change his first name. He was John Roberts, no middle name. Another John Roberts had been registered first. So some bogon sink decided my boss would be John Rogers with short name rogersjohn. I can't remember all the problems this cause. Type ahead for addressee in emails couldn't find him. I can't remember all the problems.

I spoke to them. They defended themselves. Almost no education in how Notes/Domino worked (which never improved btw). I asked what they would do if they hired a John Rogers, how would they register him. I think finally I persuaded them to do what IBM did and he became John1 Rogers.
Years later I raised a ticket as UK bank holidays in the Domino calendar were all wrong. They said they'd have to ask IBM. I told them it was a simple case of editing document X and location Y. Simple. No, they had to raise a case with IBM.
 
catsmate said:
Just yesterday I logged on to email address #6; this is an old gmail address, dating back to the 'invite only' phase that I've had for >15 years and use for personal stuff. It's not a spam bucket and I've kept it to keep in touch with people.
I find a series of emails from a large UK supermarket chain, the UK National Lottery, Apple, eBay and more notifying me about account changes.
I have no such accounts.
Some idiot, with the same name as I, in Britain has created a Gmail account as mis-entered it. Many times.
A quick look around gives me his home address, NIN, credit card numbers (2), mothers maiden name and more.
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I'm sure I've mentioned this before but...

My gmail account is in the traditional format firstname.lastname@gmail. My name isn't rare-rare but not desperately common.

To my endless amusement there is a freelance movie cameraman in NYC, an unemployed accountant in Maryland, a church administrator in North Carolina, a retired dude in Florida, an IT support worker in Texas, a gas pipeline engineer with really interesting leisure interests in Canada, a student in Nottingham and a surfbum in Perth, all of whom share my name and are incapable of providing their correct email address to organisations they're dealing with.

The mails I receive are interesting enough. The inability of many organisations to deal with me informing them that they have the wrong address is really funny.
 
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