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

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I'm looking at an incident in our queue from someone who received a notification on their government mobile phone saying that an unauthorised TikTok analytic was detected. As you know a couple of weeks ago the Australian Government banned TikTok on all government-owned devices.

My response:

Yeah, this happens. It's normal. It's how stuff works. Welcome to the 21st Century.

What's happened here is that you have visited a website that has a TikTok analytic tracker on it, which is common and normal and millions of websites all over the internet have them. Trackers are used by TikTok to determine how often the site is accessed by TikTok users. All social media does this - TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, ******* NextDoor probably. It's normal. It's what social media does.

You get a notification of the TikTok one because the government is paranoid about China and chosen that one specifically to block, despite the fact that all the others have been happily installed in the background on the phone and are quietly and constantly reporting back to their respective owners. Nobody worries about them because they're not OMG China!

Receiving this notification does not mean that TikTok has access to your phone. In fact, the fact that you've got a notification saying that the analytic tracker was unauthorised means that the system is working and preventing that access. Please educate yourself about how the internet works and do not waste everyone's time with stupid issues that are completely normal like this.

No, I did not actually say that.
 
arthwollipot said:
I'm looking at an incident in our queue from someone who received a notification on their government mobile phone saying that an unauthorised TikTok analytic was detected. As you know a couple of weeks ago the Australian Government banned TikTok on all government-owned devices.

My response:

Yeah, this happens. It's normal. It's how stuff works. Welcome to the 21st Century.

What's happened here is that you have visited a website that has a TikTok analytic tracker on it, which is common and normal and millions of websites all over the internet have them. Trackers are used by TikTok to determine how often the site is accessed by TikTok users. All social media does this - TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, ******* NextDoor probably. It's normal. It's what social media does.

You get a notification of the TikTok one because the government is paranoid about China and chosen that one specifically to block, despite the fact that all the others have been happily installed in the background on the phone and are quietly and constantly reporting back to their respective owners. Nobody worries about them because they're not OMG China!

Receiving this notification does not mean that TikTok has access to your phone. In fact, the fact that you've got a notification saying that the analytic tracker was unauthorised means that the system is working and preventing that access. Please educate yourself about how the internet works and do not waste everyone's time with stupid issues that are completely normal like this.

No, I did not actually say that.
Click to expand...


I believe I see where you went wrong in your thinking.
 
arthwollipot said:
I'm looking at an incident in our queue from someone who received a notification on their government mobile phone saying that an unauthorised TikTok analytic was detected. As you know a couple of weeks ago the Australian Government banned TikTok on all government-owned devices.

My response:

Yeah, this happens. It's normal. It's how stuff works. Welcome to the 21st Century.

What's happened here is that you have visited a website that has a TikTok analytic tracker on it, which is common and normal and millions of websites all over the internet have them. Trackers are used by TikTok to determine how often the site is accessed by TikTok users. All social media does this - TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, ******* NextDoor probably. It's normal. It's what social media does.

You get a notification of the TikTok one because the government is paranoid about China and chosen that one specifically to block, despite the fact that all the others have been happily installed in the background on the phone and are quietly and constantly reporting back to their respective owners. Nobody worries about them because they're not OMG China!

Receiving this notification does not mean that TikTok has access to your phone. In fact, the fact that you've got a notification saying that the analytic tracker was unauthorised means that the system is working and preventing that access. Please educate yourself about how the internet works and do not waste everyone's time with stupid issues that are completely normal like this.

No, I did not actually say that.
Click to expand...
But we could hear you thinking that from here! ;)
 
Argh!!!!

Last month:

Them: "We want to use exactly the same logic and definitions and parameters for Project B that you use for Project A!"
Me: "Are you sure? Here's what all of those are:" [writes out in email]
Them: "Yes, yes, yes!"
Me: [sends the data requested, appending the text writing out all the logic, definitions, and parameters to the data itself, just in case...]


Today:

Them: "We don't understand what this is. Why is X? Why is Y? What does it meeeeeaaaaannnn?"
Me: "You said to use the same everything as Project A. Which was" [insert everything yet again]
Them: "Oh, that's all wrong for this."
Me: "Then what do you want?"
Them: "We don't know. What do you think we should want?"

Painful death is my suggestion.
 
Job failure last week

Us: we should change this to stop it happening again
Senior manager: No. Us people from olden times were very wise and did things for reasons, so we must never change them.
Me: (looks for job elsewhere)
 
Boss.

The demanding dickturd of a user we have has demanding I drop what I am doing right now and do this thing that isn't even my job.

If I only have two options.

1) Just go ahead and do it to make him happy.
2) Tell him I won't do it, he calls you, you then tell me to do it and know I have to do it it anyway but in an even tighter timeframe and now the user is pissed off and being a little bratty child about it and this is how interactions with him go every time.

I a) have zero reason to not just give him what he wants as soon as he wants and b) that functionally makes him my boss, not you.

Bosses are annoying when the client always eventually is going to get what they want and everybody knows it.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Boss.

The demanding dickturd of a user we have has demanding I drop what I am doing right now and do this thing that isn't even my job.

If I only have two options.

1) Just go ahead and do it to make him happy.
2) Tell him I won't do it, he calls you, you then tell me to do it and know I have to do it it anyway but in an even tighter timeframe and now the user is pissed off and being a little bratty child about it and this is how interactions with him go every time.

I a) have zero reason to not just give him what he wants as soon as he wants and b) that functionally makes him my boss, not you.

Bosses are annoying when the client always eventually is going to get what they want and everybody knows it.
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3) Do it, but do it badly. If confronted about it your defense is how could you do it right, it's not your job so you aren't familiar with it. And if you did it badly enough they're not going to ask you to do it again.

I only had to destroy two copy machines before they stopped asking me to fix copiers, or use copiers, or go into the room where the copiers were kept.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Bosses are annoying when the client always eventually is going to get what they want and everybody knows it.
Click to expand...
That's exactly what happened with the hell client I was talking about the other week. Our boss said that we should just immediately transfer her to someone in Premier Support which is exactly what she wants. Our boss told us that so that we could avoid any of us having to deal with her again, but the effect is the same - a problem child learns that throwing a tantrum works.
 
I feel like there needs to be something standard in IT development where a requirement is formally noted: "This functionality goes against our recommendations and we are only including it because it's technically possible and the client absolutely insisted on it despite our warnings."
 
gnome said:
I feel like there needs to be something standard in IT development where a requirement is formally noted: "This functionality goes against our recommendations and we are only including it because it's technically possible and the client absolutely insisted on it despite our warnings."
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My old partner actually did sort of that once. The customer insisted on a very odd implementation of a calculation. We tried to tell them about the problems that would eventually come up but in the end we did what they wanted. In the documentation he referred to the calculation as the CYBI process. No one ever asked us why it was named that, but a comment in the source code said CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!
 
gnome said:
I feel like there needs to be something standard in IT development where a requirement is formally noted: "This functionality goes against our recommendations and we are only including it because it's technically possible and the client absolutely insisted on it despite our warnings."
Click to expand...

That could be done as a note in the comments of the affected program, or in the commit message if source control is in use. Additionally, there should be a memo from the development team's manager to the client, and the memo itself referenced in the commit message.
 
There's an APS5 Team Leader position going in a specialist Service Desk environment in my department. I'm going to apply for it. I've got to update a couple of things first.
 
arthwollipot said:
That's exactly what happened with the hell client I was talking about the other week. Our boss said that we should just immediately transfer her to someone in Premier Support which is exactly what she wants. Our boss told us that so that we could avoid any of us having to deal with her again, but the effect is the same - a problem child learns that throwing a tantrum works.
Click to expand...

While it's unfortunate that this person has received yet another confirmation that being a pain in the ass works, this time it's a win/win. She gets direct access to Premier Support and you no longer have to deal with a difficult client.

I feel sorry for the folks in Premier Support.
 
Putting in a ticket at 4:30 on a Friday of a holiday weekend and then clocking out puts you on our **** list. Personally, I think those should be withdrawn, but lucky for you my name isn't on the letterhead.
 
gnome said:
I feel like there needs to be something standard in IT development where a requirement is formally noted: "This functionality goes against our recommendations and we are only including it because it's technically possible and the client absolutely insisted on it despite our warnings."
Click to expand...

Yeah but like I keep saying covering your ass is

A) Not a free action and takes time and I can't put "covering my ass" on my timesheet.

B) After a certain point just wears you the hell down if you have to do it all the time.

The other problem is the contractors life of "At Will Employment Times 10."

Sure our contract lays out what actually are our duties and responsibilities, but they are under the unwritten rule of "Keep the Client Happy Or They Will Find Other IT Guys."

They can decide to cut the contract any time the want so "Well technically the contract says that's not my job" is often times rather academic.
 
Donal said:
Putting in a ticket at 4:30 on a Friday of a holiday weekend and then clocking out puts you on our **** list. Personally, I think those should be withdrawn, but lucky for you my name isn't on the letterhead.
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Back in my days of support, in that situation I'd wait ten minutes then email them back with some question about their issue, note in the ticket that the customer couldn't be reached to provide this vital information necessary to proceed, and change the ticket status to "pending customer response".
 
gnome said:
I feel like there needs to be something standard in IT development where a requirement is formally noted: "This functionality goes against our recommendations and we are only including it because it's technically possible and the client absolutely insisted on it despite our warnings."
Click to expand...
I've done this for deployment projects, for standard build layers.

Included due to specify client request, signed off by IDIOTNAME, not recommended by implementation team and unsupported in all cases.
 
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