quadraginta
Becoming Beth
And tend to fall into two groups. The ones who are offended that you might suggest they didn't, and the ones who are offended that you might suggest they ought to.
Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)
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And tend to fall into two groups. The ones who are offended that you might suggest they didn't, and the ones who are offended that you might suggest they ought to.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Oh, I've spoken to many people who are genuinely surprised that the information they are asking me for was already sent to them in an email, or available in a SOP document or something.
We have a client-facing Knowledge Base. Practically 100% of people I refer to it had absolutely no idea it existed. And it's not like we hide it away. We've done all the publicity we can to bring it to everybody's attention. But people absolutely refuse to read.
Sideroxylon
Featherless biped
Attitudes that keep the paycheques coming.
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
I get that all the time,
Them: "Why didn't you tell me?"
Me: "I did, multiple E-mails have been sent to you on the subject."
Or
Them: "I didn't know we had to do that!"
Me: "It's literally been part of almost every safety training course you've had to take in the years you've been here."
One of my coworkers has like 3,000 unread E-mails in his work account. So when he asks why he wasn't told something I usually say "It's probably only one thousand and fifty fifth in the e-mails you ain't read yet".
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
A previous boss in another lifetime not long ago found one of his staff in exactly this predicament. He was clearly not up with the work because he had not read all his emails, just being a slacko on Facebook all day and so on. A pointed inquiry found he had hundreds of unread messages waiting, including many clearly tagged Important and Urgent dating back weeks and months.
Said boss took him aside and gave him exactly one working day to sort this out completely. He also urged him loudly in short Anglo-Saxon words from a distance at about six inches from his face to "reconsider his attitude towards timely communications", on pain of a sideways promotion to a less salubrious position (the words "mail room" were somewhere in this conversation). This attitude adjustment did work, apparently...
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes to highlight the top email, ctrl+end to the bottom email while holding shift, then hit "delete". This is the same efficiency I bring to all my work.
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
Oh no, he wasn't allowed just delete all of them. He had to read, sort and respond adequately to everything needing a response. His boss was able to "oversee" his email account, and checked on him hourly for "progress". It was like being sat in the naughty corner.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
"Is this still an issue?" is a good time-wasting response. It proves you care about the problem, and are trying to make certain it's either fixed itself, been fixed by someone else, or still needs fixing. It shows that I care deeply about the user, and am so, so anxious that everything's going well for them. It's just my incredible efficiency that demands I verify this three-month-old issue is still an issue before I go to the effort of starting to begin thinking of making an initial look into it.
Eventually every ticket will get resolved, if only because the company switches to a new ticketing system and the old one gets deactivated, taking those tickets with it. The cosmic ballet continues!
Me: Sitting at a user's desk while I fix something, install something, or do other tasks.
Some random other user(s), without fail, usually multiple times: "Well hello (Person Who Usually Sits There), you sure look different, hardy har har."
Over and over. Every time. The same joke. The saaaaaaame joke. Every time. Over and over. The same joke.
Some random other user(s), without fail, usually multiple times: "Well hello (Person Who Usually Sits There), you sure look different, hardy har har."
Over and over. Every time. The same joke. The saaaaaaame joke. Every time. Over and over. The same joke.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
I think that's the IT equivalent of "the price tag is missing, it must be free!" that checkout workers get.
Lifehacker ran an article asking people for the most worn out jokes they hear in their profession. Both of those example appeared in it.
https://lifehacker.com/your-jokes-not-funny-anymore-1838498517
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
*read list quickly to make sure I've never said any of those*
Whew!
I think the best one was on an old episode of The Simpsons, the model gesturing to the display car for a contest prize was asked "do you come with the car?" and she giggles "oh, you! tee hee hee!" and then the next guy comes up and says the same thing and she giggles "oh, you! tee hee hee!" the exact same way.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Now that the process is more or less complete, it definitely is better in a number of ways. It's faster and less prone to random errors, and Outlook doesn't seem to drop into Working Offline for no apparent reason any more.
The transition has been pretty tricky, but I think we're better off for it.
catsmate
No longer the 1
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[OT]Our local supermarket has a policy that item item's barcode is unreadable it's free.
Within reason.
[/OT]
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
I've just finished a re-read of this entire thread, and I was surprised at how many things I've posted here three times.
Filippo Lippi
Philosopher
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Please raise a ticket and we'll look at the problem for you
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Whew! I read this thread mostly to remind myself how lucky I am that I moved to a job that's pulling data out of the database rather than application support. "Yes, indeed, I have no problems," I congratulate myself. Then this morning I wake up suddenly at five a.m. thinking "holy crap, that last data I pulled for those very important senior executives--the data of the numbers they're using to make important business-altering decisions with--did the OVER partitition bit process before or after the WHERE clause? Because if it happened before my numbers would be wrong, so wrong, so very wrong. And it would embarrass the hell out of my boss's boss to admit that her data monkey were that incompetent, and she just fired my boss for much less."
Forty minutes later my heart rate was almost back to normal after I looked at my SQL from a month ago and saw that to make it easier on myself I'd done it all as a CTE and then used the partition's row number as the only criterion in a WHERE over the whole thing, thus bypassing the whole issue of what order the crap happened. My data is correct because I lucked out and happened to do it in a way that avoided a question I hadn't thought to ask at the time.
With support there's always so much going on mistakes are both inevitable and forgiven. A datamonkey is comfortably isolated...until he ***** up and then he's all alone in the spotlight... Ugh!
Forty minutes later my heart rate was almost back to normal after I looked at my SQL from a month ago and saw that to make it easier on myself I'd done it all as a CTE and then used the partition's row number as the only criterion in a WHERE over the whole thing, thus bypassing the whole issue of what order the crap happened. My data is correct because I lucked out and happened to do it in a way that avoided a question I hadn't thought to ask at the time.
With support there's always so much going on mistakes are both inevitable and forgiven. A datamonkey is comfortably isolated...until he ***** up and then he's all alone in the spotlight... Ugh!
alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
I once confused the term M-ACCT with M-ACCOUNT in a COBOL program. This was for a data collection suite that was to run for six months. I discovered my error four months after implementation. Now, the top accounts might still have bubbled to the top, but most of the info lower down on the list would be out of order, although it wouldn't be obvious, and not likely that anyone else would be able to get deep enough into the program and know the history to figure it out.
I spent several minutes agonizing what would have to be the reveal to my boss. I'm not sure what repercussions he experienced but I ended up a few months later getting "demoted" back to my operator position on third shift. (With the union rules and the night differential, I actually ended up making more money and milking the company for another 18 months or so until I got another programming job.)
I mentioned this earlier in the thread.
While I was in the Navy the Captain of my ship (at the time I was stationed on a Guided Missile Cruiser, about 350 crew members) asked me to create a whitelist of approved sites; military sites, government sites, banks, colleges, etc, that could be implemented in the event the ship had to go to limited bandwidth restrictions, which happened in certain parts of the world where satellite coverage was spotty, certain weather conditions, stuff like that.
So I build a list of .Gov, .Mil, .Edu sites, the all the financial institutes I could think of, and a couple of other essential sites.
And then accidently implemented it as a blacklist instead of a white list in the ISA Server, so the first time I turned it on it blocked all the essential sites and left the non-essential ones open.
Lucky it was literally a 15 second fix.
While I was in the Navy the Captain of my ship (at the time I was stationed on a Guided Missile Cruiser, about 350 crew members) asked me to create a whitelist of approved sites; military sites, government sites, banks, colleges, etc, that could be implemented in the event the ship had to go to limited bandwidth restrictions, which happened in certain parts of the world where satellite coverage was spotty, certain weather conditions, stuff like that.
So I build a list of .Gov, .Mil, .Edu sites, the all the financial institutes I could think of, and a couple of other essential sites.
And then accidently implemented it as a blacklist instead of a white list in the ISA Server, so the first time I turned it on it blocked all the essential sites and left the non-essential ones open.
Lucky it was literally a 15 second fix.
I still think my spreadsheet programme for the Amiga that couldn’t add correctly beats all those fails! We sold I think about 50,000 units of it.
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