Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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Dear Consultants:

You may feel the need to demonstrate your value to the client by finding fault with an existing piece of work or process. This is understandable. However, before you air any criticisms of a piece of work you should probably find out who actually did that work. Or you may wind up accidentally calling a powerful executive an idiot to her face in a conference call that went very, very wrong very, very fast.

Love,
TragicMonkey, who may distribute the monthly XYZ Report, but does not make the monthly XYZ Report, because that's compiled by Senior Vice President "Amy Sauron", aka "The Butcher", who just wants someone else to QC some data then send it out for her.
 
Today I got the treat of seeing my mom handle her online banking. It was quite educational.

Step 1: Log into your bank's website. Okay, that went okay. She did have to search through a sheaf of loose papers and rubberbanded index cards and try a couple of different passwords (she never writes down the capitalization or punctuation of her passwords, so if the password is 1999KittyCat! you have to try several variations) but still, on the whole, it went okay.

Step 2: If you're there to look at your credit card, ignore the link to your credit card. What you want to do is navigate to the PDF of the monthly statement that was generated at the end of last month. You definitely don't want data from today.

Step 3: Look at the PDF, and copy what's on it by hand to a notepad. You shouldn't waste time being careful to get each entry, or write down the numbers correctly. Transposing digits is just fine, it's only money.

Step 4: Using a cheap calculator purchased in 1992, add up some but not all of the numbers you partially copied onto your notepad. Complain about the result, and accuse the bank (bonus points if you accuse a different bank than the one you're doing this with) of messing up your credit card.

Step 5: Ask your son what's wrong, why is he silently clawing at the air, unable to speak.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Today I got the treat of seeing my mom handle her online banking. It was quite educational.

Step 1: Log into your bank's website. Okay, that went okay. She did have to search through a sheaf of loose papers and rubberbanded index cards and try a couple of different passwords (she never writes down the capitalization or punctuation of her passwords, so if the password is 1999KittyCat! you have to try several variations) but still, on the whole, it went okay.

Step 2: If you're there to look at your credit card, ignore the link to your credit card. What you want to do is navigate to the PDF of the monthly statement that was generated at the end of last month. You definitely don't want data from today.

Step 3: Look at the PDF, and copy what's on it by hand to a notepad. You shouldn't waste time being careful to get each entry, or write down the numbers correctly. Transposing digits is just fine, it's only money.

Step 4: Using a cheap calculator purchased in 1992, add up some but not all of the numbers you partially copied onto your notepad. Complain about the result, and accuse the bank (bonus points if you accuse a different bank than the one you're doing this with) of messing up your credit card.

Step 5: Ask your son what's wrong, why is he silently clawing at the air, unable to speak.
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You're on mute?
 
They've got me doing VoIP again, which is a nice break. I actually remember how to do almost everything.

But this is the kind of thing I have to deal with: There were three Call Pickup Group requests in the queue this morning. These are requests to add or remove one or more people from a Call Pickup Group, which is a dedicated number that rings on the phones of everybody who is a member of the group and can be answered by any of them.

Not one of these three requests actually needed to be done. Two of them were to remove a person who is not a member of any call pickup groups from a call pickup group, and the other was to add three people who were already members of a call pickup group to the call pickup group that they were already members of.

Well thanks for wasting my time.
 
arthwollipot said:
They've got me doing VoIP again, which is a nice break. I actually remember how to do almost everything.

But this is the kind of thing I have to deal with: There were three Call Pickup Group requests in the queue this morning. These are requests to add or remove one or more people from a Call Pickup Group, which is a dedicated number that rings on the phones of everybody who is a member of the group and can be answered by any of them.

Not one of these three requests actually needed to be done. Two of them were to remove a person who is not a member of any call pickup groups from a call pickup group, and the other was to add three people who were already members of a call pickup group to the call pickup group that they were already members of.

Well thanks for wasting my time.
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Is there a suitable RESOLUTION option? Action Not Possible or similar?
 
arthwollipot said:
Oh, yes, I can just complete the activity with the text "user is already a member of this call pickup group".
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Due to technical difficulties with our manipulation of the space-time continuum, I am unable to process your request. Please resubmit your request when time travel has been achieved.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Today someone questioning my logic thought to ask rhetorically "how many X can there be?" Don't ask rhetorical questions of the person who runs the database queries. There are 2,140,119 Xs as of this morning at 12:03 a.m. I can send you the list if you'd like to spend a few years reading it, Nancy. Do you want that, Nancy? Shall I email you two million rows of data in Excel? I can write a Perl script to automate an email, and run a query to retrieve the complete list of X every day and automatically email it to you every morning. Or every hour. Or every second of every day for the rest of your life, Nancy. I can build a necromantical apparatus that will send this data after you into the next life, Nancy. I can hound you down the corridors of eternity, throwing billions and billions of lines of data at you through heaven, hell, and everything inbetween. Don't **** with me, Nancy. Don't. ****. With. Me.

So how's your Monday going? Mine's a teensy bit irritable.
 
Today, I asked a colleague how he'd done a thing, because I needed to do the same, but over here, not over there. He said he didn't even know if he'd done it.

So, I asked our "techie team" what I needed to do to request the thing.
"Fill in the form"
Do I need to, can I just say "make this thing exactly like that thing my colleague asked for, but over here?"
"No, that may confuse things. We need a complete form using the template"
Well, do you have an example of a completed form so I can see how it's done?
"It's a new form. Fill in the form and we can tell you where you've gone wrong."

looking at the set up of the thing over there I found a reference to the the form that my colleague completed 14 months ago. It's the same form as I'm supposed to be using now. So I copied it and changed "there" to "here" couple of times. I may get in trouble as it might be some awful right of passage that we're all supposed to endure.

Ironically, at the top of the form it says, "if you have any problems completing this form, please contact the techie team"

Hell of a catch, that Catch-22
 
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Hellbound said:
Due to technical difficulties with our manipulation of the space-time continuum, I am unable to process your request. Please resubmit your request when time travel has been achieved.
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Too good an opportunity to miss by saying that.

"Just for you, I got into the TARDIS we keep for really important requests, went back in time and performed it before you asked."
 
Hellbound said:
Due to technical difficulties with our manipulation of the space-time continuum, I am unable to process your request. Please resubmit your request when time travel has been achieved.
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Users are advised that any use of this technology will increase the amount of entropy in the system. While no liability is implied, this will eventually lead to the heat death of the universe.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Today someone questioning my logic thought to ask rhetorically "how many X can there be?" Don't ask rhetorical questions of the person who runs the database queries. There are 2,140,119 Xs as of this morning at 12:03 a.m. I can send you the list if you'd like to spend a few years reading it, Nancy. Do you want that, Nancy? Shall I email you two million rows of data in Excel? I can write a Perl script to automate an email, and run a query to retrieve the complete list of X every day and automatically email it to you every morning. Or every hour. Or every second of every day for the rest of your life, Nancy. I can build a necromantical apparatus that will send this data after you into the next life, Nancy. I can hound you down the corridors of eternity, throwing billions and billions of lines of data at you through heaven, hell, and everything inbetween. Don't **** with me, Nancy. Don't. ****. With. Me.
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:D :thumbsup:

TragicMonkey said:
So how's your Monday going? Mine's a teensy bit irritable.
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It was quite pleasant, still munching the left-overs from Saturday. Today I think we'll need to cook again. I shopped. The weather was changeable. No lightning or flooding here.

How's your Tuesday?
 
catsmate said:
How's your Tuesday?
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My boss's boss has been misrepresenting the data I've been collecting, and now I have to go to a meeting to explain what my data actually means and how I get it, and it will be in her best interests to discredit me. She fired my previous boss last summer. So, it's a fun day already!
 
Users,

If you can't get to a webpage but you can get to every other webpage and the webpage is not returning an error/message from our firewall, antivirus, or content filtering...

... then the webpage is down and we can't do anything about it.
 
TragicMonkey said:
My boss's boss has been misrepresenting the data I've been collecting, and now I have to go to a meeting to explain what my data actually means and how I get it, and it will be in her best interests to discredit me. She fired my previous boss last summer. So, it's a fun day already!
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Is recording conversations legal where you are? Here we have the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act to allow us to gather evidence for later action.....
 
TragicMonkey said:
My boss's boss has been misrepresenting the data I've been collecting, and now I have to go to a meeting to explain what my data actually means and how I get it, and it will be in her best interests to discredit me. She fired my previous boss last summer. So, it's a fun day already!
Click to expand...

Any way to give her some of the credit for figuring out the problem (however undeserved), so that she has to embrace the accurate methods?
 
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