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

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TragicMonkey said:
I always found being on call on holidays to be a double-edged sword. Yeah, the overall volume should be a lot lower with so many people not working...but some of the ones who are working are really pissed off about having to work on a holiday, so they find/make problems and magnify them and take their temper out on you.
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I've often worked on holidays. Being a national organisation with offices in every state and major territory, there are holidays that happen in the ACT that don't happen in other states. So we have to have a few people on deck. The nice thing is that the majority of callers are in the ACT, and are therefore on holiday, so we get very few calls on those days. And because we're working a public holiday we get paid double time.
 
arthwollipot said:
I've often worked on holidays. Being a national organisation with offices in every state and major territory, there are holidays that happen in the ACT that don't happen in other states. So we have to have a few people on deck. The nice thing is that the majority of callers are in the ACT, and are therefore on holiday, so we get very few calls on those days. And because we're working a public holiday we get paid double time.
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A concept that may be perhaps news to some Americans??
 
arthwollipot said:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure most Americans have never heard of awards.
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Awards that apply nationwide, across industry sectors, not just per company. Also medical insurance that is divorced from employment. But that's another conversation...

We had a Canadian stay with us while she started her first job here in Australia. She had not heard of this either, which sort of surprised me. She was very surprised to be paid extra for working weekends and public holidays.
 
When we go off-queue, we have a code that we set ourselves to so that the system reports it accurately. On our old system this was called "Lunch". Now it's called "Meal".

Which means that when I post into the chat "It's mealtime!", it sounds so dystopian.
 
arthwollipot said:
When we go off-queue, we have a code that we set ourselves to so that the system reports it accurately. On our old system this was called "Lunch". Now it's called "Meal".

Which means that when I post into the chat "It's mealtime!", it sounds so dystopian.
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Number 84391-019, is this your designated time for fuel consumption? Report to the punishment matrix after shift completion.
 
When first hired on with the company they used a payroll company who's app only had "Clock In" and "Clock Out."

Last year we migrated to a new payroll company and THEIR app has "Clock In Day", "Clock In Lunch", "Clock Out Day" and "Clock Out Lunch."

Now quick with no training to you Clock Out Lunch to go to lunch or Clock In Lunch to go to lunch?
 
arthwollipot said:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure most Americans have never heard of awards.
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Around here its call a premium. Night and weekend work as well a holiday work pays a premium. One company I worked for had it for 6th and 7th consecutive day as well. Night work and holiday work still gets a premium but they knocked off the weekend premium. It was so confusing sometimes that they had to send out a spreadsheet you could punch the dates and hours you worked into, so people could make sure they got all the premiums they were entitled to in their paychecks.
 
The Man said:
Around here its call a premium. Night and weekend work as well a holiday work pays a premium. One company I worked for had it for 6th and 7th consecutive day as well. Night work and holiday work still gets a premium but they knocked off the weekend premium. It was so confusing sometimes that they had to send out a spreadsheet you could punch the dates and hours you worked into, so people could make sure they got all the premiums they were entitled to in their paychecks.
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One general contractor I worked for had a fairly simple system. They made the week of Xmas/New years the vacation week for the entire company. After all, there was going to be very little going on anyhow. As many projects often had one subcontractor or another needing to work that week for whatever reason it required a skeleton staff (read 'one guy') to be on-site. These lucky individuals got their week's vacation pay and their regular week's pay. Essentially double-time for the week.

It was excruciatingly boring, but there were a surprising number of supers willing to volunteer.

I got in a lot of reading.
 
Best part of being an atheist in the military. I could usually duty swap a 3 or even 4 day if I was lucky long holiday weekend for sitting in the Radio Shack or a Computer Room on the ship doing next to nothing on Christmas Day.
 
quadraginta said:
One general contractor I worked for had a fairly simple system. They made the week of Xmas/New years the vacation week for the entire company. After all, there was going to be very little going on anyhow. As many projects often had one subcontractor or another needing to work that week for whatever reason it required a skeleton staff (read 'one guy') to be on-site. These lucky individuals got their week's vacation pay and their regular week's pay. Essentially double-time for the week.

It was excruciatingly boring, but there were a surprising number of supers willing to volunteer.

I got in a lot of reading.
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One company would shutdown over the 4th of July week and was everyone's summer vacation. One year they did that over Christmas/New years without telling anyone that they weren't coming back. Fortunately, another company bought us and everyone came back and basically had to reapply and interview (with the new owners) for the job they were already doing.
 
JoeMorgue said:
When first hired on with the company they used a payroll company who's app only had "Clock In" and "Clock Out."

Last year we migrated to a new payroll company and THEIR app has "Clock In Day", "Clock In Lunch", "Clock Out Day" and "Clock Out Lunch."

Now quick with no training to you Clock Out Lunch to go to lunch or Clock In Lunch to go to lunch?
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Logically it would be Clock In Day to start the day, Clock Out Lunch to go to lunch, Clock In Lunch to resume working, and Clock Out Day to end the day. However, knowing that most businesses are not logical, especially when it comes to anything related to HR, I'm going to say in this case the Clock In Lunch was meant for the start of your lunch and the Clock Out Lunch was meant for the resumption of work; whoever wrote it assumed people would more naturally focus upon the start and stop times of events rather than the nature of those events as being paid or unpaid.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Logically it would be Clock In Day to start the day, Clock Out Lunch to go to lunch, Clock In Lunch to resume working, and Clock Out Day to end the day. However, knowing that most businesses are not logical, especially when it comes to anything related to HR, I'm going to say in this case the Clock In Lunch was meant for the start of your lunch and the Clock Out Lunch was meant for the resumption of work; whoever wrote it assumed people would more naturally focus upon the start and stop times of events rather than the nature of those events as being paid or unpaid.
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Correct. You Clock In Lunch to go TO lunch and Clock Out Lunch to return FROM lunch.

They could have just used clear verbiage like "Clock in from Lunch" but no...

Also my wife is fighting with one of her clients and sent me a message to vent and I can honestly say it's the first time I've ever thought of Tragic Monkey while talking to my wife

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I'm reminded of a very strange one...

A report that has worked flawlessly since forever.

Written in SAS.

Suddenly stopped working, and of course the organisation didn't have anyone who knew SAS anymore.

Somehow they found me, I have no idea how, maybe they asked everyone in the organisation with an IT role.

It had been about 10 years since I'd worked with SAS but agreed to look over the output from the mainframe, and found hundreds of errors, all starting with the first time the code tried to load an input file.

So I asked the 'user' if he could open that folder and give me a copy of the file, thinking that a previous step may have produced a malformed file.

User says: "Oh it's not in that folder anymore, I didn't like having it there, so I'm keeping it in a new place now."
 
Ugh. It reminds me of when people complain that their files are missing, when they're trying to access the files through a Quick Access shortcut and the files have just been moved.
 
arthwollipot said:
Ugh. It reminds me of when people complain that their files are missing, when they're trying to access the files through a Quick Access shortcut and the files have just been moved.
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I know that it's probably part of 'grumpy old man' syndrome, but towards the end, I was frequently surprised by the number of people, working in IT, who didn't understand anything in IT.

Your example above is hopefully from people who have to work with computers, rather than people that are supposed to be IT workers, but I was shocked by similar things from IT personnel.

People who treated computers as magic boxes with pictures on them, without even the slightest understanding of what is going on behind the scenes.

Surprisingly, I'm the kid that used to program other people's video recorders for them, and set the clocks on their various appliances. At sixty, I'm stunned that I'm still that person.

(Note that back in the day, the clocks on ovens were mechanical, and people still had that problem)
 
novaphile said:
Surprisingly, I'm the kid that used to program other people's video recorders for them, and set the clocks on their various appliances. At sixty, I'm stunned that I'm still that person.
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Ours is the only generation in human history that knew how to programme a VCR.
 
novaphile said:
I know that it's probably part of 'grumpy old man' syndrome, but towards the end, I was frequently surprised by the number of people, working in IT, who didn't understand anything in IT.

Your example above is hopefully from people who have to work with computers, rather than people that are supposed to be IT workers, but I was shocked by similar things from IT personnel.

People who treated computers as magic boxes with pictures on them, without even the slightest understanding of what is going on behind the scenes.

Surprisingly, I'm the kid that used to program other people's video recorders for them, and set the clocks on their various appliances. At sixty, I'm stunned that I'm still that person.

(Note that back in the day, the clocks on ovens were mechanical, and people still had that problem)
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I'm not bothered by people simply not knowing things, it's when someone demonstrates zero interest and no attempts to figure it out that bugs me. People who use the same application day in, day out for years and have never even clicked on all the menu options at the top to see what's there. People who just say "it's broken again" without watching how you fix it to learn from it. People who never think to just fricking Google the problem in case there's an easy solution.

In my view, "being a technical person" isn't about what you know, it's about having the drive to find out.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I'm not bothered by people simply not knowing things, it's when someone demonstrates zero interest and no attempts to figure it out that bugs me. People who use the same application day in, day out for years and have never even clicked on all the menu options at the top to see what's there. People who just say "it's broken again" without watching how you fix it to learn from it. People who never think to just fricking Google the problem in case there's an easy solution.

In my view, "being a technical person" isn't about what you know, it's about having the drive to find out.
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Could not agree more.
 
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