Why I'm on paid leave over a $5.00 flash drive, with nothing of value on it, getting smashed Tech Support |
- Why I'm on paid leave over a $5.00 flash drive, with nothing of value on it, getting smashed
- yes, loud screeching sounds probably indicate a problem
- The Agency: Part 6 - The Ballad of the Bosses
- Momma calling - Son, your picture is showing up for every contact on my phone, and it's that goofy one where you're smiling weird
- Wrong department? That doesn't matter, JUST FIX IT NOW.
- Broken tv
- The Agency: Part 5 - Don't Let the Door Hit You
- Where bad requests go to die
- Tales from the 1980s Super Mini. That time he almost killed the Sys Manager by Accident
| Why I'm on paid leave over a $5.00 flash drive, with nothing of value on it, getting smashed Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:48 PM PST Some back information, I work for a corporation and or institution where users handle enough information to be able to commit at least 2-3 felonies for every little query they touch (which isn't THAT hard to imagine), as such they have a lot of policies that seem like extreme overkill, But on some level I agree with the attempt, the actual application of the rules I think borders on insanity but the attempts aren't all complete failures. So some info you need to know, there's an "internal" USB connector inside the case. All the "external" USB ports have physical blocks super glued in. This is another story i've already posted. So, Friday morning 8:00 am I'm sitting around waiting for a ticket/something to do. I get a call in that a computer can't login. There's no ticket because.. well they can't log in to start a ticket. Entirely understandable. The computer is network login, so there's 1000 different things it can be. Heck it could just be unplugged and not turning on. Y'al know how users can be. I head up to their cubicle and start checking, everything is plugged in, the computer turns on and there's no internet. I switch her network cord with her neighbhors to check the cord/everything upstream, her neighbors computer connects with her jack. I log into the local admin account and there's no internet connection or network connection at all. Check device manager and there's the problem. The driver for the onboard network got corrupted or something, can't roll it back either. Great, this means I need authorization from cyber security to use a flash drive, and then I'll need to tear the computer apart to get to a USB port that is hidden inside the case that isn't superglued. Now the key for the case requires my supervisor to sign off on it and give me the key for the case lock, as well I have to write up the ticket and put it into the system. I run down to the bat cave and download the driver for her computer and email it to my boss, with a note to stick it on a thumb drive. And then walk to his desk. "Hey boss I emailed you a network driver I need on a thumb drive, I also need you to submit my authorization form to cyber Sec for the use of a portable storage device" (yes that really is two forms) So we sent the form off to cyber security to authorize. request for USB storage device usage, Time estimated on the work: 15 minutes reason: copying network drivers to get the computer back on the network Half an hour later, no response. Head of IT calls down to cyber security to get an ETA. 10 minutes later the request comes back as denied. Reason : Just email the file So we got the biggest Idiot ever reviewing the request... she has a tendency to just completely drop the ball, before they took the job in Cyber security she had neither experience in Cyber security, nor any basic understanding of IT. But it's OK, she can haphazardly enforce rules she doesn't understand and she spends her day helping idiots reset their passwords using the password reset tool. So my boss has to call her and explain the situation. After half 5 minutes on the phone he has to go upstairs to the boss of cyber security and explain why she's an idiot today. Half an hour later the approval comes from cybersecurity comes in to my email and my boss texts me to grab the form from him, and his spare keys and USB drive. So Now I have both authorization forms and I return to the woman's desk. She left a note for me that she's making a starbucks run and will be back. So I power down her computer and turn it on it's side so I can get it open to plug the USB in. I'm standing there fiddling with the flash drive and someone yanks it out of my hand tosses it to the floor and he starts stomping on it. "What the hell are you doing?" "USB devices are banned" he replied. "WHOAH WHOAH.. first of all I have an authorization form from cyber security.. Second of all that's company property, and third of all, you just destroyed evidence" I tell the idiot. So I call my boss and he's still in cyber securities office, or water cooler/breakroom as I explain what went down. Cyber security overhears this exchange. Cyber security decides to open a file on mishandling of suspect data. AKA smashing evidence. Around about 11:00 am my boss comes back to the users desk with a different flash drive and the drivers for the network adapter and another stack of new forms for him to do the work. I spent an hour with cyber security filing out paper work about the destruction of a $5.00 flash drive, giving my statement on the data mishandling, and my statement responding to the accusation of using a USB storage device. So it took 3 hours and 15 minutes of 2 techs time (including the head of IT) to reinstall a network driver. And now they have to pay a data recovery specialist god only knows how much to try to recover nothing of any value on a $5.00 flash drive, to prove there was nothing malicious on it. Oh and I'm on paid leave because they don't know for certain what's on the flash drive. Cyber security told me that as long as data recovery finds what I said is on it, or can't find anything, that i'm in the clear. If the drive hadn't been smashed cyber security could/would have just looked at the USB drive and looked at what is on the drive. Should have taken like 8 seconds to do. Instead I can collect pay checks until the data recovery experts take a few cracks at the USB drive. But the good news is that I got to go home early on a Friday Also I get a long weekend... maybe I'll binge watch Stargate. [link] [comments] |
| yes, loud screeching sounds probably indicate a problem Posted: 05 Feb 2022 11:39 AM PST In my very, very, very first tech support job, I was mostly a gopher for a couple of senior CE/FE guy at a computer company, back in the 80s. We shared office space with a company that manufactured peripherals for us, and they had some fairly old mainframe systems, some we had to support and some we didn't. One system had two old 80Mb (no, that's not a typo) disk drives, each one the size of a shopping cart. These were interesting in that the covers for the bay that held the removable disk pack were clear plastic. So you could watch the platters spinning around and the head assembly moving in and out. One Saturday I was at home and my phone rings (only landlines in those days). Its one of the programmers and he's at the office. He's shouting to me over the phone since there's a terrible screeching sound in the background. He tells me he's in the computer room and one of the disk drives is making the sound I'm hearing. He wants to know if he should shut it off. I've only worked for the company a couple of months and don't really know that much these disk drives but I know enough to know that this sound indicates a Major Problem. So I tell him, sure, turn it off. He puts the phone down to walk over the machine and I listen to the screeching. Then I hear the sound slowly wind down and stop. Guy comes back to the phone and says something like, "I guess that was it". I agree and figure we'll look at it on Monday. Monday I come in and head to the computer room. A couple of other folks are there also we all peer through the clear plastic cover. There are fragments of disk heads and filings from the platters piled up in the drive. Of course what is supposed to happen, is if there's a failure the disk assembly is supposed to unload the heads by fully retracting, a "reset to zero". Clearly this didn't happen and the disk heads got jammed into the spinning platters and torn off their arms. Customer called in the local repair guys since this was a model of disk drive our guys didn't support, and I'm pretty sure it took a full day to repair the drive. Most amount of damage I ever saw in over twenty years in the business. This should give everyone an idea of what the unit was like, the one in Figure 2. [link] [comments] |
| The Agency: Part 6 - The Ballad of the Bosses Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:27 PM PST Hello everyone! This is the next story in the saga of my time at $Agency, wherein we find out that there are still more issues despite the dismissal of $BadMike. All of this is from the best of my memory along with some personal records, but ultimately it is how I remember things. There certainly can be some inaccuracies. Also, I don't give permission for anyone else to use this. TL/DR: Yeah, I don't do that. Enjoy the story :) Again, for context, I am not in IT; rather, I'm a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) professional. This particular world is quite small, so I will do what I can to properly anonymize my tale. For reference, during the course of these stories I was employed at a research agency affiliated with a major university. Here is my Dramatis Personae:
When we last left off, I had just achieved my first true victory. I had vanquished my nemesis, $BadMike, and helped to engineer his dismissal. The nightmare was over. From this point forward, we'd be able move forward with our work in a drastically improved way. The worst was past - we had won, hadn't we? Everything would be ok going forward, right? Unfortunately, no. Very, very no. With $BadMike no longer employed at $Agency, we started to see that there were a ton of other problems with the way the organization was being run. Most of these issues had been veiled by $BadMike's awfulness. To be sure, $BadMike sucked, and he really was responsible for the majority of the bullsh*t we had to deal with, but with him now out of the way we could tell that there was just as much to deal with between $MrScott and $DragonLady. What I've got below is less a transcription of what occurred in the immediate aftermath of $BadMike's firing; rather, it is more a laundry list of the crap we'd been dealing with for years by that point. What is important to know is that these problems now began to permeate every facet of our work lives. We'll start with $MrScott. As can be inferred from his name, $MrScott was a terrible manager. He was only placed in his position because he had been working at $Agency for over 20 years. Management by seniority, nothing else. He was a great researcher and actually very good at the GIS work that he did. And he was honestly a nice person outside the professional environment. I still have books that he gave to me. However, as a manager and a leader, he was awful. If you were to take a list of all the traits that can be exhibited by a bad manager, he probably ticked almost every box. For example, he was patently incapable of taking responsibility. If one of us had an error or problem, then that was OUR error or problem. We needed to fix it, to ensure we didn't do that next time, and we would be held accountable in every instance. Nothing could convince him that he held any share of the blame. Similarly, if $MrScott had an error or problem, that was ALSO our error or problem - because, after all, we worked for him, so we should have informed him if we knew there would be any issues. He refused to make decisions, telling us to go speak to $AwesomeBoss (who was usually out of the loop) or $DragonLady (who was usually too busy to see us). When we would ask if we were finished with a particular project, he would never, ever let us know. We probably kept 90% of our projects technically "open" because nobody would tell us when we were through! Ugh. He took great pride in the educational position he held in the academic hierarchy, as well. Dude, the ego that exudes from academia is more noxious than a landfill. As I said in previous posts, he refused to use the GIS system architecture that we created simply because he didn't want to learn it; it was, essentially, "beneath" him. He rarely even used the current GIS software suite that the rest of us were using at the time, preferring to go with one that had been in use in the late 90s! Again, this was because he didn't want to learn how to use it. He would often say things that were extremely dismissive to the rest of us - not because he was explicitly trying to be mean, but because he simply couldn't comprehend that talent and expertise can exist without a piece of paper from an academic institution. He would often state that we "shouldn't go around telling people that we understood what we were doing" because we weren't working towards/had a PhD or anything similar. The very essence of the moronic douchebag that says "using Google doesn't make you a doctor." I am 100% certain that you proper IT folks would have slapped the sh*t out of him on a daily basis. Many of the things that he did were just bizarre. There was one instance in particular that I remember vividly. Do you all remember the Beach Games episode of The Office? During that episode, Michael Scott (the boss) asks Pam (the receptionist) to take notes of everything happening through the day while he awards things to the staff. Towards the end of the day, he asks Pam if she's been keeping score and who is in the lead. Pam doesn't know, as Michael has been giving them random awards. Michael then asks Pam to look through her notebook to see if there's a conversion chart - clearly something that he would have had to tell her about so she could have written it down! Incredibly, I had an experience just like this with $MrScott. At one point, he performed some sort of analysis that used some data he'd saved to his own computer (instead of to the network, go figure). He hadn't recorded the steps he'd taken when doing this, and when it wound up going to final product, there were a bunch of issues and he got chewed out. He knew that I kept a notebook on my desk where I recorded notes to put into our documentation later. After this particular fiasco, he called me into his office, asking me to bring my notebook. When we started talking, he asked if I had any notes on what HE'D done in MY notebook. I just stared at him - WTF? He asked if I'd taken any notes on a process he had not told me about, that he'd saved entirely to his own system, that I had no access to, and that he'd never involved anyone else in?! Is this... is this a thing?!? What kind of moron asks this?!? He then proceeded to have me to look through my notebook for anything that might have been relevant! I was literally floored by this - it broke my mind that a mental deficiency of this sort could even exist. I should have pulled out my pen right there and written "You are f\cking stupid*" in my notebook and called it a "relevant note." Alas, I wanted to keep my job. There were plenty of other problems, too. He wouldn't communicate on virtually anything, so if you told him something it would fall on deaf ears. If you went to him with a problem, he'd either deflect it onto someone else or just not do anything about it. Eventually, though, we determined that if you just didn't talk to him, he wouldn't come to you with anything. He honestly seemed content to stay cloistered in his office. Later on at $Agency, we'd just speak to $AwesomeBoss for pretty much everything. $MrScott would only be involved if someone specifically demanded it. Unfortunately, in these instances he also wanted to make sure he suitably marked his territory, and instead of peeing all over everything he'd invariably put some obsolete procedure or random bullsh*t into the project to prove his involvement. Peeing on things would have been far easier for us to deal with. Usually, we'd just ignore what he said because he'd never follow up later. Still, it got to the point where we'd collectively groan if we heard that $MrScott was going to be part of anything. Eventually, though, he was so sidelined from our active operations that he was largely a non-entity (except when he wanted to slam his foot in the door). Let's move on to $DragonLady. There were a lot of things to like about $DragonLady. She was incredibly smart, and even better, was exceptionally creative. She was very good at getting support from a number of places. We never had an issue with funding, something that isn't so easy do to when you are in research. Remember that she gave me a big raise and moved me into my own office. And she helped defend me against the accusations of $TheLawyer. In a lot of cases, she was very understanding, and she could be very nice from time to time. But there were a ton of things about her that were just awful (and remain so to this day). And the bad greatly outweighed the good. Buckle up, cause we're in for a ride. One of the worst things was how much she micromanaged. Every one of you already knows this is a terrible trait. She wanted to be involved in every decision, every design, every procedure that we did. Never mind if it was some sort of internal GIS process. Never mind if she literally had no idea what it did. She had to know when we were updating data and how. She had to be able to weigh in on our symbology choices and map designs. There was no such thing as "general guidance" - she had to be consulted for almost every decision we made as a team. She seemed incapable of delegation. As you can understand, this got real old, real quick, particularly once we started ramping up the volume of work. At one point, she demanded that I send her an email with every single decision I made during the day and everything she needed to follow up on. So I did. After flooding her inbox for about two weeks, she demanded that I change this to "only the information she needed to know about." So I stopped sending the emails altogether (see what I did there? :D ). She never said another word to me about it. We had one staff member we hired that I'll call $GoodMike. He was phenomenal at the coding, scripting, and querying aspects of GIS. He crafted a ton of incredibly useful scripts for us. However, these were SCRIPTS, folks - all of you IT professionals know that coding takes time, requires specific parameters, and is crafted for a particular goal or use. It is only as flexible as its design, and adding more flexibility takes magnitudes more time and effort. $DragonLady couldn't comprehend that scripting needed to be maintained and was not a one-size-fits-all solution, especially in a research setting. She didn't understand that code gets screwed up by changes in parameters and data. Consequently, when these scripts were used for purposes for which they weren't designed, they failed. As a result, she thought $GoodMike was an idiot. And she decreed that no scripts could be used unless she checked and confirmed them first. By her - who had no coding skills whatsoever. WHAT?! Pretty sure you IT folks' heads would explode. Yeah, so we wound up using those scripts without telling her and troubleshot them as we could. She was completely erratic in her project management approach, as if she couldn't focus on anything for more than a few minutes. This sucked so much. We'd get to the end of a project and be presenting the final version, and she'd wind up having half a million edits for us in the rollout! We'd get new projects right in the middle of old ones, be told to abandon things "for the time being," and then shift gears. Usually, what we stopped working on would be abandoned for good. We'd get in to the office and see emails she sent at 3 AM giving us a new directive to work on, and she'd complain at 8-9 AM that we hadn't formulated a plan of attack yet. Turnarounds of 1 hour were not uncommon. It was mentally exhausting having to shift work focus so d*mned much. Honestly, the constant disruption in our workflow probably cost us more productivity than any other single thing at $Agency. She also seemed incredibly paranoid about letting us have time off. This was awful. It was as if she didn't think that $Agency would survive if one of us was not at work. And this may have actually been the case due to how chaotic she was in her project assignments. If a particular person was needed to fulfill a "spark of inspiration" she had off the cuff, and this person wasn't available, then her random project idea couldn't get completed. As a result, getting time off was like pulling teeth - h*ll, it was like ripping vertebrae out of your back. We would request time off months in advance only to have it denied the day before we were to be off. Have an industry event you want to attend? Nope. Have a family gathering you'd like to go to? Nope. Need to go to a doctor's appointment? NOPE. Jesus. There was one incident I remember very well. We had hired someone I'll call $GoldPhD. She held a doctorate in her field, had years of experience, and was one of the premier researchers in the discipline. We were incredibly lucky to even have her at $Agency. After working here for about two years, she decided to take a two-week vacation. She had the time accrued, let $DragonLady know around a month in advance, and went ahead and paid for everything. I think she and her husband were going on a cruise. Around a week before she was to depart, $DragonLady came back and denied her vacation. The reason? "I cannot simply let you take this amount of time off when you have responsibilities here at $Agency." The screaming match afterwards was of epic proportions. $GoldPhD quit on the spot, forced $DragonLady to pay out all her accrued leave, still went on her vacation, and had another job with a competing agency at the university the SAME F\CKING DAY. \slowest of claps* Another problem was $DragonLady's abject refusal to share credit on anything. Not a single paper or report had an analyst's name on it. It was as if she treated all the staff at $Agency as her own personal students. This extended even to professional events. She would invariably refuse to allow us time off to attend anything within the industry, stating that in anything we did, "we were representing $Agency and she needed to be in charge of cultivating that perception." As you can imagine, this is absolute bullsh*t. If we ever attend a professional event (especially on our own resources), we are representing OURSELVES, not who we work for. She would get incredibly angry if we even communicated with other GIS colleagues, admonishing us not to do that. After all, this meant that she wouldn't have complete control over our career development. As you can imagine, this generated an immense amount of resentment among the GIS staff. We NEEDED to keep on top of technology and industry changes. She seemed incapable of recognizing that we were not her graduate students - we were PROFESSIONALS, and we expected to be treated as such. But probably her worst sin was how f*cking vague she was. She was a researcher and a professor, and invariably seemed to think that we should be "exploring the questions" rather than taking orders. The problem is - that's not how professional project management works. In many cases, it was as if we had to read her mind to figure out what we were supposed to f*cking do in the first place! I remember one specific instance where we were discussing a project, and I brought up a question about a particular directive she had demanded. I asked her what it meant - her response was "What do you think it means?" At the time, I responded with my best guess (which was invariably wrong, how surprising). But if I was in the same position today, without a second's hesitation my answer would be "I should never have to guess what my responsibilities are. Either tell me or don't expect anything." This crap irritated us all, but I remember $AwesomeBoss being particularly infuriated by it. Christ, this was so frustrating. And it eventually broke $GoodMike. He was much like many of you, I'd expect. He was used to reasonably clear instructions, a development methodology, and a systematic approach. He was used to iterations, troubleshooting, and refinement. $DragonLady's chaos was simply impossible for him to adapt to. After only a few months at $Agency, he was actually demoted since $DragonLady couldn't comprehend how useful he could be and had no idea how to leverage his skills within our team. Eventually, thankfully, he found employment elsewhere - at a company that has a much better and more mature management style. As you can imagine, he is thriving there :) There are honestly more things I could think about, but I'm getting sick of listing it all. Just know that as a manager, $DragonLady had a lot of severe problems, ones that I feel really hampered our ability to be a world-class GIS team. As for the name $DragonLady - I didn't make that up. That is her nickname at the state departments that have to deal with her. I'm sure she would be thrilled to know that, lol. When she doesn't get her way, she can be a nightmare. It's ok, Moss, you can swear if you want to. PLOPPERS! Man, I need a beer. I'll be right back. And I'm back. As can be seen, there were a ton of structural issues plaguing $Agency. At the time, I continued to roll with it. But something was about to happen that was going to change my life forever. In early spring, roughly a year after $BadMike had been let go, my wife came into our bedroom holding a pregnancy test. She had a look that was equal parts excitement and terror in her eyes. She blurted out, "I'm pregnant!", squealed, and threw herself nervously on the bed. I was going to be a father. I did everything I could to get ready for it. I didn't tell $DragonLady until I could be 100% sure, though I did let $AwesomeBoss know (as I liked her and trusted her). Since we pretty much couldn't take time off, even for doctor's appointments, I made sure to "call in sick" on each of my wife's gynecology appointments. Y'all, I nearly fainted when I saw my little one's heartbeat for the first time! Eventually, after a few months, we made the announcement. I told $DragonLady that I'd be taking five weeks off for paternity leave. She was remarkably ok with it. I would expect the FMLA regulations that I informed her of played no part in that >:D Anyways, we got to the end of the year and I started my leave so that I could be with my wife whenever she went into labor. In the delivery room, I was a little shell-shocked to see my daughter for the first time - I remember the nurse gave me my wife's phone and said, "You'd better take a picture or she's gonna kill you!" I nervously responded with yes ma'am :) Once things had settled down, I sent the pictures on to $AwesomeBoss. She texted me back shortly thereafter saying that every one of the ladies in the office were huddled around her phone, trying to get a peek at the new addition to our family! That night, as I held my sweet little girl in my arms for the first time, I swore that I would do everything in my power to advance my career and provide for her as best as I could :*) I would work tirelessly to ensure that she could have a decent life and that I would be able to be part of it. And I would get started the moment I returned to work. Tomorrow, you all will see how that panned out. Thanks for reading, everyone :) Thanks for everything, folks! Here are the other parts to the Agency series: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Here are some of my other stories on TFTS if you're interested: A Symphony of Fail Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2022 02:50 PM PST Everyone's mom's will eventually call them for tech support, even if it's not your field. I'm not exactly an Android tech support person, but when it's your mother... So my Mom has the worst habit of throwing around jargon and meaningless details when asking for assistance. But she's my Mom, so I've got to usually hear the long version of her tech support nightmares. Well, this time I short-circuited some of it. But the pertinent details are that my contact photo had mysteriously replaced literally everyone's contact picture of those contacts still on her phone. However, the vast majority of contacts, including yours truly, had vanished. So she asked a friend or relative what my number was, just to place this frantic tech support call to the only one willing and able to fix her phone. Me. Like 4 days after trouble started. Reversing course a little, I had repeatedly told her last fall to buy a new phone when they went on sale for Christmas ... and she hadn't. Told her to get the cheapest Samsng A model. Didn't happen. I think hers is running Android 7 and it's always filling up its memory. She also moved away so I can't do this in person. One little tidbit had gotten me on track with solving this disaster, and that was that she claimed that her phone did a "massive reset." Son, I've got a massive problem here. I've lost the normal stuff to get online to my bank... Google did a massive reset on my phone. Your face is on everything new that is on my phone, and when I'm calling someone, it's your face. You are the domain administrator for my phone (which is correct) ... I tried to talk to Vzn, and I don't know how I can get into my bank, and I don't know my user name, and the closest bank to me is ... blah, etc., I've got a major situation... I've got only 8 or 9 numbers for anybody, and John called me so I have his contact now, and so I don't know anybody's number and I've been, ah, I can't login to my bank because I don't know my user name... (There's about 3 to 5 minutes of this mess that's happened due to the "massive reset") (Too long, didn't listen.) Well, while my Mom broadcasted to an empty phone, I hurriedly googled "google massive reset" to see if she had gotten into some kind of phishing email or app. I couldn't figure out if she had done a soft/hard reset, or what she got herself into, to be honest. That would be for further investigation later. So after some figuring ... out popped a possible solution to her mess ... having the volume turned down helped.
My plan of attack was:
Part 1: easy. Part 2, which I listed second but was the first thing I needed to do, well, this is my Mom. "Ok, Mom, that is way too much information in order to fix your phone... I need you to go into settings..." She had apparently been practicing a lot in phone settings, because it only took about 2 minutes to get her into the "Add Google account" screen, working blind because her OS was much older than mine and going from memory from 2018 or whatever. I got her to login, and amazingly, her password worked and she actually knew it. I didn't even have to do Step 1. I was <5 minutes in on the fix, and it was fixed. But she was underwhelmed because it wasn't an immediate fix. Because ... remember this? Google can't do its thing without WiFi. Her phone told her that it needed to download 1.1 GB of data, and it won't do that until it has WiFi. The next 10 minutes are repeatedly informing her that she had to actually go do that. "Mom, you'll have to go to Wal-Cart or McRonalds or someplace and shop for an hour or something while it updates... No, you have to get WiFi... Well, no they have WiFi at your friend's place, but you'll have to ask for their WiFi password..." Well, ok, say hi to the wife and kids, I've got to go. Hey, your face is changing to someone else... I think it's starting to work... Hopefully I can get into my bank... "Mom, you have to go connect to WiFi." (clik) I heard back from my teenager a few days later that "everything came back and it's working again and thanks." Pretty sure that was the short version. Hopefully my goofy photo is no longer the contact picture for her doctor, bank, and best friend. It is pretty weird. I put it there as a joke before she left, so maybe it's payback. But it's very therapeutic to think that my duck face was on every contact on her phone. [link] [comments] |
| Wrong department? That doesn't matter, JUST FIX IT NOW. Posted: 04 Feb 2022 04:59 PM PST Quick backstory: New Years Resolutions, Christmas Presents, and incompetence combine into one horrific force of destruction . . . meaning that the first three months of every year, we get bombarded to hell and back with endless calls and emails. It also means that our wait times are horrendous. And I mean hours long. Not just a couple, even, I've had people who called in the morning and didn't get in until my evening shift. Now, I'm in the software department for these fancy treadmills, not the hardware -- I got no training or authorization to mess with the hardware. This results in callers who just waited 2-3 hours to get to me, but are now being told that since I can't help them they need to get in a queue for another few hours. Of course it sucks, but I've got no influence on it. Anyways, just got this absolute GEM of a human being. $ME: *general introduction including my name* $GEM: "So my resistance isn't working at all." $ME: "Ah, I'll have to transfer you to parts and service." $GEM: "No, I want you to fix it." $ME: "I'm sorry, but this is the software department. I can't help you, I need to send you to parts and service. Here, let me get you their direct number just in case - " $GEM: "No, I need you to get me to someone who can fix it now." $ME: "I can transfer you to parts and service, do you want their number as well?" $GEM: "Let me speak to a manager. What's your name?" $ME: "I'm [name], sir, and (after checking with sup) my supervisor is unavailable. I can give you their ema - " $GEM: "I want your name, now, and I want a manager to call me ASAP." $ME: "I'm [name], and I can ask them but I have little control over their schedule." $GEM: "Just give me your name." $ME: "I'm [name], sir, that's the third time you've asked." (I only give my first name, which works cos I'm the only me in the place, except for the one guy with same first and last name in an entire other department which is another story, but they don't work with customers at all) $GEM: "Then I'm asking again, what's your name?" $ME: "[name]" $GEM: "Your full name." $ME: "I'm the only [name] here." $GEM: "Your supervisor better call me, otherwise I' returning this machine. This service is horrible, and I've waited way too long." $ME: "I'm very sorry, we're super busy this time of year." $GEM: "Well you weren't too busy to take my money. [insert long and largely repetitive rant] and I hope that customer service becomes good again. Otherwise I'll be returning this machine and cancelling all my orders." [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2022 03:04 PM PST Years ago, my wife worked at a local TV station helping people with the changeover from vhf to uhf signal. Some TV's required flicking a switch on the back or just doing something behind it. One gentleman called up, very agitated, claiming that the changeover had caused a split in the picture. Literally one side of the screen was a different definition to the other side. My wife and the local tech support were pulling their hair out to try and figure out what might have happened. Obviously nothing like this had happened before. It took ages, and some very heated discussions until the gentleman finally realised that his TV was coated in dust and while playing around at the back, he'd rubbed half the layer of dust off the screen. Quite sheepish after that one. [link] [comments] |
| The Agency: Part 5 - Don't Let the Door Hit You Posted: 04 Feb 2022 12:44 PM PST Hello everyone! This is the next story in the saga of my time at $Agency, wherein $BadMike receives everything he so richly deserves. All of this is from the best of my memory along with some personal records, but ultimately it is how I remember things. There certainly can be some inaccuracies. Also, I don't give permission for anyone else to use this. TL/DR: Yeah, I don't do that. Enjoy the story :) Again, for context, I am not in IT; rather, I'm a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) professional. This particular world is quite small, so I will do what I can to properly anonymize my tale. For reference, during the course of these stories I was employed at a research agency affiliated with a major university. Here is my Dramatis Personae:
When last we left off, all pretensions of cordiality that the GIS team had towards $BadMike evaporated. He had mouthed off to me in a meeting, blaming me for his own failures that had clearly resulted from his laziness and incompetence. In response, I'd filed a formal complaint against him. I didn't really expect anything to come of it - after all, we'd been putting up with this behavior for over two years at that point - but at least I had been honest and said what I needed to say. After all, if a person looks, sounds, and acts like dog sh*t, more than likely they are dog sh*t, not a GIS Analyst. Following the IncidentTM, $BadMike and I rarely spoke with one another. H*ll, we rarely looked at one another. We were in a shared, open office, but there was an invisible wall running right down the center that everyone knew was there and everybody respected. I was ok with this, in fact. My anger burned brightly. I would keep this up until one of us broke. And I intended not to break. A couple of weeks later, I walked into the office to see $BadMike hunched forward at his desk. He was reading some sort of paper - and his eyes were red. As I sat down in front of my own computer, I glanced over and could tell that he was actually crying! Honestly I really didn't know what was going on nor did I care. I didn't think that $DragonLady would have acted this soon on any sort of direct punishment for him. I didn't think she'd act at all, in fact. So I figured this was something else. For most of the day, I just ignored him. The entire day he held that paper in his hands and kept glancing at it. Periodically he'd turn to me like he wanted to say something, but I never turned back. Yeah, I suppose I was acting kind of heartless, but I had given up having a heart for someone that had caused me so much pain and frustration. The next day, he seemed to have recovered, and we were back to the same old indifference. Around midmorning, though, $AwesomeBoss came into the office and told me that I needed to speak with $DragonLady. My eyes popped open, the proverbial "uh oh" situated on my tongue. This couldn't be good. I grabbed a notepad and followed her. Once I entered $DragonLady's office, $AwesomeBoss shut the door and left. It was just me and $DragonLady. My mind was racing. What had I done? I felt certain that I was getting fired or at least a stern talking to. All manner of things went through my mind. But it was $DragonLady that spoke first:
As she said that last sentence, there was an odd, knowing smile on her face. I smiled back and thanked her profusely. Like I said before, $DragonLady and me had our issues, but I certainly wasn't upset about something like this :) And my mind was completely blown here - it wasn't expected at all! Seriously, I thought I was about to get walked out! Also, consider the insinuation here - I was given a 20% raise to "bring me on par with others performing similar duties." To me, that meant $BadMike had been making about 20% more than me to come in and f*ck up things for years! Sweet baby Jesus... Anyways, I got back to my desk in the company of a smiling $AwesomeBoss, who opened the new office for me and told me to start gathering my things. As I did so, I saw $BadMike look over to me. The look on his face was... quizzical? No, not that, more like vulnerable. His expression read something like "You're leaving?" As if, despite all the hostility between us, he didn't want me to go. I didn't say anything to him as I gathered my things and turned off my PC. Once I had everything, I just walked out the door - leaving him behind me. The new office was the best, and $AwesomeRed would come in there pretty much every day so we could talk to each other. It was so cool! I'd never had anything like this before. Also, I didn't have to veil my speech or anything, we could just talk. Very soon, our conversations turned to $BadMike. I brought up the piece of paper I saw him staring at the other day and the fact that he was crying. $AwesomeRed immediately morphed, transformers-style, into gossip mode.
I shook my head in utter disbelief. This was it! The light was shining at the end of the tunnel! I could see us being rid of this cancer forever! Then, of course, reality set in. I told myself that there was no way that they'd actually go ahead with this. $BadMike would spin something he did onto someone else, diverting blame or throwing out just enough plausible deniability to keep from being held fully accountable. Or $MrScott or even $DragonLady would decide to overlook a "minor issue" and keep him onboard. Or this could just be yet another of their continual "grand proclamations" that never amounted to anything. Or any of a dozen other things. However, for me, it was less of an issue now. So long as I didn't have to deal with $BadMike, and so long as we could just bypass him in everything we did, it didn't really matter. I wasn't going to actively persecute the guy anymore. My life had taken a substantial turn for the better. It was time for me to move forward. He wasn't my problem anymore. As it turns out, the impetus for $BadMike's downfall did not come from me, but rather from those that had previously been his allies - $MrScott and $DragonLady. A few weeks later, $MrScott called me into his office. He wanted me to check something for him. Turns out, $DragonLady and $MrScott had issued a mapping project to $BadMike, and they wanted to see if there were any problems with it. Checking it would have to happen while he wasn't in the office, so they wanted me to come in after hours to go through this. Would that be ok? I knew exactly what this meant, though I don't think that $MrScott understood that I was aware of the details of $BadMike's action plan. Y'all, it wasn't my intention to be the one to kick $BadMike in the testicles at the time, but if he just placed them right in front of me, I wasn't going to waste the opportunity. If this could guarantee that he was dismissed, then not only me but the rest of the team would be rid of his awfulness. I said sure. I hope $MrScott did not detect the glee in my voice. I spent 10 hours going through every possible facet of that project. $BadMike had been given a cloropleth mapping assignment meant to show different characteristics, each with its own color ramp and symbolization. What I found was that he had used the correct symbologies and notes throughout the maps - but he had forgotten to change the underlying data! So, for example, if Map 1 was supposed to show "Number of Dog Poops Cleaned Up in City Parks," while Map 2 was supposed to show "Number of Dog Poops Set on Fire on Doorsteps," he had not changed the data when he produced Map 2 from the first one. So the two maps actually looked identical, they merely had different color schemes. About half of the maps were wrong. There were some other minor issues but these were the most egregious. I wrote up all my findings and hand-delivered it $MrScott. (Yes, I sent him an email too) After that, I really didn't hear anything back. I wasn't made privy to anything that $BadMike was working on, so I just sort of ignored him. Again, I really didn't think that there was going to be any resolution to any of this. I spoke to $AwesomeRed every once in a while about it, but she hadn't heard anything herself. And while I hoped that all the work I'd done after hours wasn't wasted, ultimately I tried my best to put it out of my mind. Months went by until, eventually, we got to the end of the fiscal year. The last day came... and went... and $BadMike was still here. I had actually gotten myself a little hyped up for an announcement or something, only to have it fizzle after the year ended. A few days later, I spoke to $AwesomeRed. We brought up $BadMike - why was he still here? Had $DragonLady and $MrScott reneged on the whole action plan? $AwesomeRed told me that the big bosses had given $BadMike "a few more months," working month-to-month until he found a new job. He wasn't on a contract anymore. Lol - this meant that, despite knowing he was about to get canned, he still hadn't started looking for something new. Dipsh*t. Anyways, it was... news. Not what I hoped. I'm not even sure what I hoped at the time. But to me, I felt like "a few more months" could mean anything, from 1-2 all the way to a year or more. As I was speaking to $AwesomeRed, I said something about never being rid of him, that nothing I could do would ever change that. I must have looked really upset. That's when $AwesomeRed stopped me. She countered that I couldn't be more wrong, that I was the main reason why he was about to get the boot. I had been the one to constantly report on his bad work; I had been the one to formally complain about him; and I had been the one to discover his errors during his action plan. Her words were pure encouragement, music to my ears. $AwesomeRed, I know you will see this; thank you so much, you're the best :) Honestly, I started to gain some encouragement from her words. And I even became hopeful that we'd hear something about his imminent dismissal. Two months later, we all received an email:
As soon as I read it, I shot up from my chair to go say something - but before I could do so, I saw $AwesomeRed and $AwesomeBoss standing in the doorway to my office. Both of them had the biggest sh*t-eating grins on their faces. The moment I saw them, I had only one word on my lips:
I started counting down the days. $BadMike's "going-away celebration" was to be held on his last day there. The whole celebration itself was sort of a farce - virtually everyone at $Agency knew that he was on an action plan, that his contract had been canceled, and that he had basically been fired. But we went along with the pretensions anyway. At the restaurant, I sat as far away from him as I possibly could. Most people were in good spirits, even those talking to him. I wonder why? >:D Even I was happy, getting the chance to have a breather and just chat with my coworkers. After I finished eating, I walked outside. I didn't really want to be in there anymore. Just before the party ended, $BadMike came outside to talk to me. He said that he learned a lot while he worked with me, and I said the same. He wished me well, and I did the same, and I shook his hand. And then he was gone. That was the last time I ever saw or spoke to him. I walked home from the restaurant that evening. It was a beautiful day - hot and muggy, just like any other here in the South, but still beautiful. I stopped at a bunch of the street corners along the way just to take it in. As I walked, I felt the burden, the stress, the anxiety, all of it lifting from my shoulders. When I got back to the apartment I shared with my wife, I just fell backwards onto our bed, completely serene. Ah yes, the soft delight of vanquishing a foe. This was it - this was that soft delight. I closed my eyes and fell into the most peaceable sleep that I have ever known. :) That is, of course, until other events at $Agency were to rouse me from that peace. But those are stories for later. I hope you all have enjoyed this, and until tomorrow, take care! Thanks for everything, folks! Here are the other parts to the Agency series: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 6 Here are some of my other stories on TFTS if you're interested: A Symphony of Fail Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2022 02:08 PM PST I was reviewing my organization's ticket-queues to see if there was anything odd out there. I normally don't have to do this; we have several queues, but one is our Front queue, and is where everything starts. The other queues are for different groups of people, so they don't have to be notified of all the new stuff; only the front queue has notification. We have a whole helpline to monitor that queue, and we get text messages if critical tickets appear in it after hours. In addition, there's a place in this software to indicate the application which applies to a ticket. We have some jobs which run reports based on Our application. We don't support anything else, so we don't look for anything. We get these reports daily, so we can see old tickets, unassigned tickets, and so on. But today, I was looking at all the queues, not just our front one, and I found three tickets. They hadn't been created by us, so they were put into one of queues that wasn't the Front. In fact, they used the queue for the highest-level group of people who rarely directly deal with clients. These tickets had the wrong application selected. And they had been created in October and November, involving the same agents from one of our manufacturing plants. As far as I can tell, these guys created a ticket to get an account setup for a new user, then decided to send it to our deep, dark queue to get processed. They used an application we don't support, so it wouldn't have been caught that way. They did this three times. I should also mention that account requests go through an account request system that is wholly independent from the ticketing system. So these agents used the wrong system, to create a ticket for the wrong application, and put it in the wrong group, in order to get an account created. They'd marked it low priority, anyway, but wow. I hope they weren't blaming us. Also: There are how-to documents in the ticketing system that tell you "If you need help with application X, then mark that as the application and assign to group X-group." There's a document out there for us. They didn't use it. [link] [comments] |
| Tales from the 1980s Super Mini. That time he almost killed the Sys Manager by Accident Posted: 04 Feb 2022 10:20 AM PST tldr: This is long and more detailed than the usual story. It really kinda needs the detail unless you were in tech support back then...sorry in advance: Honestly, it looked shorter in openwriter for some reason... Preface: This promises to be the first of many technical and detailed recounts of a short-list of people I worked with closely during the 1980s, supporting a very popular and successful computer company in the Super mini computer market place, particularly involving On-Line Transaction Processors (OLTP), for uses in manufacturing, sales, and many of the early Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications of that day, prior to the official use of ERP as a market tool definition. As a new, fresh out of Ace training CE, I was paired with a senior CE, who we will call Joe. If you passed him on the street you would surmise he was a farmer. He WAS a farmer. He owned a Cow. He had 9 kids. He lived in the Rural outskirts of Baltimore, when there was such a place. He always looked like a farmer, even with his tie on. He had facial hair. On this day, He has a call for a possible disk drive crash, and I had recently finished training on the model 7933 unit, which had a mind blowing 404MB of storage, with all of the newest things like data interlacing, whereby the drive would write a file in a staggered fashion, as it flew down the disc track, with the knowledge that, once written, it would be able to be recalled or read at full speed, owing to the embedded knowledge of all the remaining latencies that hardware between it and the CPU induced. No need to write it continuously, since the eventual reader could not handle all of that data in one bite. I hope that explains it well enough.\, but comment if you want more tech info. Well, before I get back to the technical, lets paint a picture of this company with the down computer. All generic as I wish to throw no one under a bus here. The Sys Admin was not a friendly guy, and took every opportunity to berate or take advantage of Joe, as Joe was assigned to this account. Joe wasn't particularly interested in using this client for my training, but suggested I better get used to seeing the "fixing people AND computers" side of the business. We arrive on site and Mean Sys Admin is fit to be tied, and using us as the personification of the computer brand at fault.Joe does his best to align, triangulate, and ignore the rantings, and finally, once the bad guy in this story has convinced himself that he has exacted his pound of flesh, we get to work. Yep, the drive has crashed and so we had to replace the disk pack, all of the heads, and realign them all. Most especially the servo track head, which was how this drive measured where the other heads were, in relation to each other. Now in this day, the disks themselves would expand and contract slightly, based on the surface temperature, which was affected by the amount of seek speed and write or read activity they were enduring.To compensate for this reality of physics, each head was adjustable, using a long narrow tool that was used, in combination with the LED readout on the unit front bezel, to dial in each head to a tolerance, close to where the servo head was. Every five minutes or sooner, based on the ambient temperature of airflow within the 7933, the Servo head electronics would force a Servo Head realignment function, that would cause the heavy head carriage to do a full inward and outward seek of all 1300+ tracks across the compare and offset what it was seeing in signal strength, with all of the other heads. This was a very violent push pull event of maybe 5 pounds of mass jamming forward and backwards in the fraction of a second.For this reason, there were two clips that needed to be shorted on the Servo Drive PCA, such that no auto head temperature realignment function would occur while the CE had his or her hands in there holding an alignment tool that resembled a hard metal spear...During this manual alignment of each disk head, much of the protective cowling is removed, and so this was an important jumper to have in place whenever adjusting disk heads manually. So Joe has been taking a bit more time doing these things to make sure I am picking up all of the nuances, and the Sys Admin has come back several time to get an update on when his users would once again be able to get back to work. Recall that this was before PCs, and when the main frame went down, anybody in data collection or analysis was free to have some coffee, chat amongst themselves or use this time to remind their bosses of how hard their job is , when their tools don't work right.In addition to his facial hair, Joe has no ability to hide it when his blood pressure rises, and he is really getting farmer mad about this guy that is pushing his last button. So as we are completing the manual head adjustments, Joe is explaining and congratulating me for being able to do a usually simple series of tasks, and just as he is reminding me that the override jumper is very important, he takes it off the Servo drive PCA, except the high grade steel head alignment tool was still connected to a head on the actuator. This drive is up and running. Heads are hovering over the disk surface at the equivalent height of a Boeing 747 flying 4 inches off the ground. The drive takes its first opportunity to fix the pesky temperature variance, that the jumper was cock blocking it from correctly, so as soon as the first clip from that jumper was pinched open, the 7933 sprang into action and performed a MOASS (Mother of all Servo Seeks) that, in addition to surprising the hell out of both Joe and I, it snapped off the adjust tool, which went flying to parts unknown. That was not the end of this story. This is the end of this first episode. Joe had a large flat blade 12" screw driver in his hand, as he was already contemplating buttoning up the outer shell and top bezel, which would have benefited from such a tool. We look at each other, and even though the drive itself was undamaged, the combination of trying to maintain decorum with the client, teach me, and fix a major disk drive crash, was just too much in one day for this Farmer. He hauls back and axe throws this heavy screw driver across the room towards the door Just as said Sys Admin was coming in to interrogate what had just happened, since the entire computer room was wrapped in glass and visible from the offices. The screw driver impaled itself into the drywall portion of the wall nearest the door, and about 5 feet in front of the guy right at eye level. Right were he might have been in 1 second.He looked at it, turned around in the direction that would allow him NOT to look at us or make eye contact, and left the room. We collected all tools broken or still functional, checked out everything, and had the operators start their reloads, and we walked out. The Sys Admin manager decided to give us our space, as he was certain Farmer Joe had made it clear were the boundaries were. Joe never heard anything derogatory from the customer, and actually life got better for him when working on that site. [link] [comments] |
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