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

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TragicMonkey said:
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.
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Names? Pah, people should be made to earn names. Make them use their staff/ID numbers for everything.
 
malbui said:
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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There are at least three of me in Canada; one works for <POLITICAL PARTY> which means that I still occasionally get confidential (or what I assume should be confidential) emails, such as the PM's detailed itinerary and arrangements for visits. Not to mention his e-tickets.
One is a musician (and I believe a rather heavy consumer of recreational narcotics). The third is in a relationship with an "exotic dancer".

This is the third 'me' in Britain, they all seem quite boring. Though this one has an iPad and iPhone so he's obviously demonic....

There are two of 'me' in the USA; one is involved with various Jewish charities and the other is in banking (I've met him, nice person).
All found via Gmail errors, maybe Google should set up a 'meet yourself' service?

I completely agree with the inability or organisations to handle this situation; it has taken me some effort to convince several of this situation and that it's is not my problem and I am not phoning their overpriced support line.
 
Wudang said:
When <global bank> adopted Lotus Notes<>
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That's enough there to condemn them to a fiery, prolonged death right there.

Wudang said:
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.
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Ah, IBM Global Services, I remember it well.
Specifically I remember on one project taking an IBM support manager to a quiet emergency stairwell, using a brush to knock the camera off alignment and inviting him to consider what a fifteen storey fall onto concrete would be like.

On most projects we did firstname.surname@corporate.com and added a middle initial for duplicates.
 
Heh, middle names. I worked somewhere where logins were everyone's three initials plus a number, and if someone didn't have a middle name they'd use X. An extraordinary number of people don't have middle names! Far more than I'd have expected. Only I didn't know about the X thing for a while, I thought they all had really cool middle names like Xavier or Xystus or Xervilla.
 
catsmate said:
That's enough there to condemn them to a fiery, prolonged death right there.


Ah, IBM Global Services, I remember it well.
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I used to work for IBM UK Labs at Hursley. When Global Services moved in we noted the number of door dings went way up because so many of them had company cars so their cars were fixed and nobody else mattered.

I had to walk through one of their blocks to get between the dev and test teams. My usual dress was trainers, jeans and a casual shirt. I was treated totally differently if I was pulling a trolley of kit to set up a new lab nearer the devs than if I was carrying my leather notepad holder. Totally different culture from the lab or North Harbour when I worked there. Or in fact what I saw of the Austin or Poughkeepsie labs when I was there.
 
catsmate said:
Specifically I remember on one project taking an IBM support manager to a quiet emergency stairwell, using a brush to knock the camera off alignment and inviting him to consider what a fifteen storey fall onto concrete would be like.
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You are the BOFH and I'd like to go for a pint with you and the PFY.
 
catsmate said:
I completely agree with the inability or organisations to handle this situation; it has taken me some effort to convince several of this situation and that it's is not my problem and I am not phoning their overpriced support line.
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Even better than the overpriced support line as sole means of contact is the genius-level idea of having contact forms on the corporate website that are geoblocked. I really did want to tell that student loans bank in the US that I absolutely shouldn't be receiving all that account information, but good jesus they didn't want to hear from me.
 
Wudang said:
I prefer to think of them all as individuals rather than just another in a long sequence.
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I think of them as different tentacles of the same eldritch abomination.

The current one here spent $800,000 refurbishing his own office, then laid off half the IT department because finances were tight.
 
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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Several years ago, I had an ERP system that I developed for configured to email me and several other people output from a report run as a background job. As it turned out, my username for the ERP system was different from my email username, and my email address wasn't entered in the user data for the ERP system, with the result that the ERP system was trying to send emails to <my-ERP-username>@<agency>.gov (which would have worked if both usernames were the same, as was usually the case. There was no such email address in <aggency>.gov. So those emails bounced? No. They were forwarded through a Lotus Domino email server, which, somehow, decided that those emails should go to <my-ERP-username>@<some-other-domain>, who worked for a different agency in a different state. I found out when she replied to one of them (which went to correct emails in the list) with a "Why am I getting these emails? email. The fix was simple -- put my correct email address in the user record for the ERP system, but it truly amazes me that someone somewhere (and I have no idea whether this was configurable on the email system or was something hard coded in the email server software) thought it was a good idea, that if an email address didn't exist, then just send it to somebody with the same user name in a completely different domain.
 
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I am several years older than the same first.last but because this person is in IT, he has "stolen" first.last at gmail and other sites. He even stole firstlast.com url. Have to settle for last.first e-mail address.

I have received several mistype e-mails. I get Facebook sending me Israeli Facebook requests for someone totally unrelated to my address. I recently got French invites for me to take job assessments. I'm not at gmail.fr or whatever it is.
 
Years ago I just had a desktop PC at work and was absolutely fine with that. Not too many grunt workers had, or needed, laptops. Those that did were in two tiers: People who worked for a living, and got regular laptops; and executives, who got the small ones.

Then my boss decided I should have a laptop, not because I needed one, but because then I could go to meetings and do presentations so he wouldn't have to. But the company was about to change to different models of laptops and were out of the regular ones, so I got a small one. That way when the upgrade finally came around a few months later, I still got a small one; and was on the small-laptop list for the rest of my time there.
 
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