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

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Faydra said:
Dear User,

I know you are very upset that your file watcher job loses its connection when you have an outage, but truly this is the nature of outages.
I'm assure you I am not conspiring against you in any way though you seem to think so.
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You are going to have to send them a schedule of all unplanned outages.
 
I have a generic response that I copy and paste for those kinds of issues:

Dear user:

Please find the nearest fire, and die in it.

Thank you.

IT support.

ETA: On a serious note, I'm level 3 support now, so 90% of those I get to send back to the L1 helpdesk with a note "Improperly transferred to IAM Engineers. Routing to Service Desk for triage."

I love that :D
 
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Hellbound said:
Keep dreaming the impossible dream, arth. I can't help but have respect for a modern-day Don Quixote :)

We can't even get our Service Desk to have a clue most of the time, I gave up hope on users long ago :D
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The problem is that L1 Service Desk is an entry-level, passthrough job. People in that role generally don't last long enough to acquire clues. It really ought to be considered a skilled customer service position.

Yeah, that's another windmill I've been tilting at for years.
 
arthwollipot said:
The problem is that L1 Service Desk is an entry-level, passthrough job. People in that role generally don't last long enough to acquire clues. It really ought to be considered a skilled customer service position.

Yeah, that's another windmill I've been tilting at for years.
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Yeah, agreed. Our "veteran" helpdesk people are the ones that have ~4 to 6 months in position.
 
Things I Wish More People Understood #220: ZIPping files doesn't do what you think it does.

Most file types these days are already compressed as much as they can be. As a result, ZIPping them cannot compress them further. It is useful for containing a number of separate documents into a single file, but it will not make that file smaller than its components.
 
Not that I'm complaining, because it's a nice easy job and it's a Friday afternoon. But I'm stuck on doing VoIP EANs (Exit Advice Notifications). Essentially, deleting people who have left the department off the phone system.

Problem ("problem") is that because of the mechanics of the way the workflows function, a lot of the tasks in the queue are redundant. Either they're for decommissioned service accounts that never had phone profiles in the first place, or they're the result of an automated garbage-collection system that is gathering up old accounts for people who are long gone and whose phone accounts have already been removed. This means that I have to open a task, check it, then mark it as skipped when it turns out that there's nothing to actually do. Again, and again, and again.

Not complaining. I believe that there are review processes underway that will reduce the amount of redundant work, but for now I'm rather enjoying it.
 
arthwollipot said:
It took me two years in a L1 position before I was promoted to L2.
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I spent my career moving in the opposite direction. I started off writing systems software and OS, and ended up supposedly at L3/L2 but with a manager expecting me to do effectively L1 work. I was not upset when he then decided to make me redundant.
 
arthwollipot said:
Things I Wish More People Understood #220: ZIPping files doesn't do what you think it does.

Most file types these days are already compressed as much as they can be. As a result, ZIPping them cannot compress them further. It is useful for containing a number of separate documents into a single file, but it will not make that file smaller than its components.
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Yeah outside a few weird off cases here and there ZIP and other popular archiving programs basically became "Bundle" applications far more than "Compression" applications at sound point in the early-mid 2010s.

And if we're being 100% honest again outside of a weird case here or there raw text files were really the only thing compression applications ever were really as useful as they made them out to be.
 
Hellbound said:
Yeah, agreed. Our "veteran" helpdesk people are the ones that have ~4 to 6 months in position.
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Well yeah because working a help desks sucks. You aren't going to find enough people who will want to or mentally/emotionally can do that job long enough to become that kind of good at at.

It's like saying "Yah know if we could just keep a 'Guy Who Gets Kicked in the Balls' position open for longer than a year, I bet more people would get really good at taking kicks to the balls and that would make it so much easier for the ball-kickers."
 
JoeMorgue said:
Yeah outside a few weird off cases here and there ZIP and other popular archiving programs basically became "Bundle" applications far more than "Compression" applications at sound point in the early-mid 2010s.

And if we're being 100% honest again outside of a weird case here or there raw text files were really the only thing compression applications ever were really as useful as they made them out to be.
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Microsoft apps, particularly Word and Excel, were notorious for file space wastage, and the most compressible. It ended when MS changed to the XML standard, and it was a Good Thing.

What prompted my rant was that someone complained that they couldn't send a PPTX file that was full of JPG images because it was too big for the recipient's mail system (our gateway is huge), and "does our version of zip not work like it's supposed to?"
 
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