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

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Norman Alexander said:
Simple reason: You need EVIDENCE you attended this conference so the boss will pay for the next one soon. All the little branded doohickeys, post-its and USBs, etc. just don't cut it. But nice, thick, important looking binders full of printed documents you can fill your office bookshelf with, alongside the useless certificates...that's much more impressive! ;)
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It was actually quite surprising to me at first that an industry that is generally so progressive and socially liberal was entirely run by people who are personally so very conservative.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Self-interested. Conferences are usually a great goof-off. So you rig the system so you get to more of them. ;)
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No, that's the thing. The international aid and development sector is inherently altruistic. I got to know some of the people involved, and they were very earnest in their desire to help developing and disaster-stricken countries.
 
arthwollipot said:
No, that's the thing. The international aid and development sector is inherently altruistic. I got to know some of the people involved, and they were very earnest in their desire to help developing and disaster-stricken countries.
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That doesn't prevent them having to justify their attendance at conferences to their managers. And that needs hard evidence. Otherwise the conference has not "achieved something". Which means the prospect of a repeat event is lower.

Of course, "evidence" varies from one group to another. For politicians, "success" at conferences equals publicity. Patting hands and shaking babies on TV, etc. A politician who does not make a splash at a conference effectively did not attend it.
 
Norman Alexander said:
That doesn't prevent them having to justify their attendance at conferences to their managers. And that needs hard evidence. Otherwise the conference has not "achieved something". Which means the prospect of a repeat event is lower.
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In this case, they were the managers. I was routinely bumping into the CEOs of Oxfam, World Vision, Caritas, The Fred Hollows Foundation, CARE, lots of others.

Norman Alexander said:
Of course, "evidence" varies from one group to another. For politicians, "success" at conferences equals publicity. Patting hands and shaking babies on TV, etc. A politician who does not make a splash at a conference effectively did not attend it.
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And then, of course, there are the politicians. One year I was, in addition to being "the IT guy" for the conference, also tasked with being the semi-official photographer. John Hewson happened to be speaking at this event, and I distinctly remember at one point he saw me with the camera, turned and smiled (*click*), then turned back and continued his conversation as though nothing had happened. He was the politician, I was the photographer. He gave me a photo, with the ease and naturalness of someone who had spent a career doing it.
 
arthwollipot said:
In this case, they were the managers. I was routinely bumping into the CEOs of Oxfam, World Vision, Caritas, The Fred Hollows Foundation, CARE, lots of others.
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Cool! You do realise those are "publicity" opportunities?

And then, of course, there are the politicians. One year I was, in addition to being "the IT guy" for the conference, also tasked with being the semi-official photographer. John Hewson happened to be speaking at this event, and I distinctly remember at one point he saw me with the camera, turned and smiled (*click*), then turned back and continued his conversation as though nothing had happened. He was the politician, I was the photographer. He gave me a photo, with the ease and naturalness of someone who had spent a career doing it.
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Also cool! And there you go.
 
So once every 3-4 weeks or so I spend a week "on call" just being the generic after hours guy to call if anything goes wrong. This isn't a problem; I'm ex-military so I'm used to fully standing onsite duty every 3-4 days as a matter of course, and my client doesn't ask to get a gun and stand outside their office guarding it for 4 hours in the middle of the night, and our client is strict 8-5 business hours, no after hours or weekends so very rarely does anything actually come up after hours. I think on average I get like maybe one call a week from a Doctor working late or from home who forgot a password and in 3 years I want to say I've actually had to physically go to an office like once. So no big deal 99% of the time.

But last week on 3 separate including I got the following call from our Dispatch/Help Desk, all of them in the middle of the night or very early morning.

Dispatch: "Hey Joe sorry to wake you but we just got an alert for (Client that totally isn't my Client.) Looks like power is out at (data center belonging to said client that isn't my client)"
Me: "That (Client) is in (totally different city.) I'm not on their contract. I contract to (my client) in (my city.) I don't have admin access, or indeed any access, to (other client's) systems nor any physical access to their buildings. Also I'm like...a 9 hour drive from (other client's building)"

Long story short both clients have vaguely similar names and there's a Joe (Vaguely Similar Last Name to Mine) who works at THAT client and dispatch got confused. 3 times in a row.
 
I used to be on call for a particular area of IBM mainframe tech at a big bank. I got pinged at 2am (AlarmPoint System) and phoned ops. The op told me a whole production mainframe image (LPAR) seemed frozen, all the tasks just hung etc. I replied that was obviously not my area so why did he call me. In a slightly panicked voice he replied "We're calling everyone!"
Fair enough, I thought.
As it happened my second guess was correct as there's only a tiny number of problems that can cause something like that.
 
Dear Users,

No the fact that you have a problem literally everytime you see me is nowhere near as funny or charming to me as it is to you.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Dear Users,

No the fact that you have a problem literally everytime you see me is nowhere near as funny or charming to me as it is to you.
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Surely it depends on the problem. "Tee hee hee, my bountiful bosom keeps spilling out of my teeny tiny bikini! I sure could use an extra pair of hands! Tee hee hee!"
 
Here's a fun thing I encountered today in a sample test for my upcoming recertification in the software I use at work; multiple choice question was "Which of the following would be found on a table of type [whatever it was]?" and one of the choices was "zero or more foreign keys". Zero or more. Hmmmm. What else could have zero or more foreign keys? Oh yeah: everything. Everything that exists or has ever existed or will ever exist can be described as having "zero or more foreign keys".

I got that question wrong because I read that and thought "this is so clearly stupid nobody on earth intended to word it this way, this is obviously an error and I should not select it." Nope, they meant it. It was the right answer.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Here's a fun thing I encountered today in a sample test for my upcoming recertification in the software I use at work; multiple choice question was "Which of the following would be found on a table of type [whatever it was]?" and one of the choices was "zero or more foreign keys". Zero or more. Hmmmm. What else could have zero or more foreign keys? Oh yeah: everything. Everything that exists or has ever existed or will ever exist can be described as having "zero or more foreign keys".

I got that question wrong because I read that and thought "this is so clearly stupid nobody on earth intended to word it this way, this is obviously an error and I should not select it." Nope, they meant it. It was the right answer.
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On my computer course we encountered the definition of a forest as being “zero or more trees”. (Trees being some sort of diagram, I forget exactly which sort.)
 
I've found that on a test that if there's an answer that's vaguely correct but wrong if you take it literally, that's the answer they're looking for.
 
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Still peeved about a health class test question: (T/F) Hydrostatic Weighing method of measuring body fat is as good as Bioelectric Impedence measuring.

The answer I gave was that the statement is False. It's not as good, it's better.

The teacher wanted "True" because it was at least as good (which wasn't how the question was phrased). I hadn't learned my lesson about disregarding subtle nuances of logic.

Being aware of the possible ambiguity, I wrote about a paragraph explaining my answer, hoping that by demonstrating my understanding the question would be graded as correct. Nah, the teacher ignored all that because it wasn't the intended answer.
 
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TragicMonkey said:
I never shame people for their perverted fantasies.
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shiva-300x272.jpg
 
zooterkin said:
On my computer course we encountered the definition of a forest as being “zero or more trees”. (Trees being some sort of diagram, I forget exactly which sort.)
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Yeah, that will be Active Directory.

For some reason AD domains are described in terms of trees and forests.

"The main difference between Tree and Forest in Active Directory is that Tree is a collection of domains while forest is a set of trees in active directory. Active Directory is a directory service of Microsoft. It stores information on objects such as user, files, shared folders and network resources"
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