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Spazz posted:I dig it personally. There's job security, and with the amount of expansion there's always going to be a need for someone to be a computer jockey. There's also a lot of job growth opportunities. Well, schools can be great for the reasons you listed, but typically I find the users are sort of bottom of the barrel. You have kids who just have to do stupid poo poo with the computers and the network, and then there's the adults who feel like they have all rights to do loads of stupid poo poo because they're adults. In school systems, the hassle usually isn't worth the cash. Unless it's a private school, I know very few schools who aren't strapped for cash. They typically aren't going to be providing as good a salary for the amount of hassle. If you're in the early part of your career then they're a great way to get in the door. They need people. You don't have enough experience to justify a big salary, and they can afford you.
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| # ¿ Dec 19, 2008 23:58 |
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| # ¿ May 21, 2013 10:41 |
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Lum posted:Presumably if you wanted to commit fraud, you could then dispute the cost of your new plasma TV or whatever (so long as you didn't get it delivered to your home address!) and when the bank drag up the receipt and it says "Batman" the retailer will be liable for the cost? Your signature, actually, can be whatever the hell you want it to be in most states. If you want to scrawl in Batman, that can be your legal signature as long as it is consistent across your paperwork. I'm not sure that there is any legal requirement that signatures actually be your name. Considering most signatures bear little resemblance to actual letters, I think this is mostly something people are exercising without realizing it. ErIog fucked around with this message at Feb 15, 2009 around 23:16 |
| # ¿ Feb 15, 2009 23:13 |
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Lum posted:Yes but if the signature on the back of your card is your normal signature and the signature on the receipt is Batman then the shop is supposed to deny the transaction. Yes, but we weren't talking about that. We were talking about a guy consistently signing his name as Batman. I understand what you're saying, but that isn't what he was saying. I'm assuming, since he's been using it for years, that he also writes Batman on the back of his card. Now we must know! These are important issues!
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| # ¿ Feb 16, 2009 01:36 |
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Casao posted:We should probably force that, but really, it's a small enough office that it's not a problem. Just a good habit to get into, and if the occasional prank helps them remember, well then that's just my job as part of the IT staff, right? Okay, Mr. Schrute.
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| # ¿ Feb 16, 2009 23:00 |
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NANERPUSS posted:Hell if you don't have any kids this is sufficient money in my parts. Doing my internship this year and my side job I'll pull in about this after taxes and its ALOT. Holy gently caress. Yes, but the issue is that anyone with sufficient experience to be hired solely as a SQL developer has progressed in salary since the point they were making 35k a year. The only people you're going to hire with that salary and job description are really talented people with really awful resumes. The catch 22 is that anyone good enough to be hired in that position is going to have to have a decent resume in order to prove their worth as a SQL developer. I also think it is sufficient money overall, but the price is obviously going to be a lot steeper than a general tech because there are fewer people available with that specific skill set. It's a supply and demand issue as well as an experience issue. ErIog fucked around with this message at Feb 21, 2009 around 01:44 |
| # ¿ Feb 21, 2009 01:41 |
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sm8000 posted:I wonder if Active Desktop has to be enabled? I'm certain Active Desktop has to be enabled. Without it enabled, Windows won't invite IE to the wallpaper party to play your nifty gifs.
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| # ¿ Feb 28, 2009 03:39 |
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nene posted:How about combining the two awesome backgrounds into one? I think the gradient effect comes from how Windows handles JPEG. I'm not sure it would work with an animated gif.
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| # ¿ Mar 1, 2009 16:31 |
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What would be the harm in a company saying to IT people or to desk workers, "Here's $30 to buy all the poo poo you need to do your job," then that person maintains their own toolbox and is expected to replace stuff if it goes missing or breaks? Am I just being polyanna-ish?
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| # ¿ Apr 12, 2009 23:04 |
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Tony Montana posted:Mm, some of the shittiest sysadmins see it as sort of job security. I usually say something to the senior guys (always the worst culprit, why should I have to write anything down?) like 'yeah that's nice what you've done, but how well did you document it? Can somone else walk into this network and understand and maintain what you've just implemented? Individual bits of techcial knowledge do not a good sysadmin make, it's processes and documentation that seperates the pros from the converted gamers'. I just don't understand people with this sort of thinking. On the one hand, if they don't know what you've done then they can't blame you for it, but it's also harder to get recognition for it. I know they do it to make themselves indispensable in a bullshit way, but I can't imagine that sort of confrontational method buys them points with the higher-ups. At every raise evaluation, do they just basically extort more money from the company by saying, "I'll walk if you don't pay me more. I've done a lovely job, but I'm the only one who knows how all of it works." I'm just doing freelance computer maintenance right now for small businesses, but I document every piece of software I change because I want them to be able to hand it off to someone in the event that something goes terribly wrong while I'm on vacation. It also looks very impressive to the client to see a big long list of changes or procedures. Even if they don't understand most of it, it's still impressive to them. They can't come back and say that I didn't do anything while I was dicking around with their computer. gently caress, it's also useful to me to know what I've done in the case that I have to go back to it at some point. I can't imagine how long somebody like that spends loving around with things because he didn't document them. ErIog fucked around with this message at May 28, 2009 around 14:23 |
| # ¿ May 28, 2009 14:17 |
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Crowley posted:(ok, they are pretty drat smart and will close the doors, close the drapes, start up the projector, switch the sound on and start your DVD with a single press on the screen) We have these at my university. It doesn't stop professors from staring at the screen for a while before attempting to get where they want. It's cool. It is more convenient than screwing around with a million remotes, but I don't think it will make too much of a dent in your support calls.
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| # ¿ May 28, 2009 18:14 |
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I don't work helpdesk, but I do get to put out immediate fires when our contracted IT guy isn't there. He's only contracted to come in twice a month so that's quite a bit of time. I don't want to like be a dick to him because in a lot of cases he really does know what he's doing. It's just that he doesn't like to listen to the people he's supporting. I'm in charge of planning for a large-ish archives project we're doing, and so I look at how much data we're likely to be churning through. I tell the guy how much data it's going to be, and he says that everything will be fine. The server we have with 500GB of free space will be fine. He says this without reading the documentation I've written up for it. At the time I didn't press the issue because I'm a new hire, and my boss' boss thinks this IT guy is just the bees knees. So I let it go. So we begin the archiving. We start churning through data to the tune of about 10-12GB per day. We're actually hobbled by lack of equipment for what we're doing so we should be realistically going through about 20-25GB per day. We do this for a few weeks, and magically the IT guy comes back to tell us we have a storage problem. We finally worked out the storage issue by making a compromise on where full quality stuff is ending up versus what's going into our database, but it's just that it took like 2 months longer than it needed to take. While this guy was dragging his feet, we've been working. This means that we have to go back and redo some of that work from the last 2 months. In a lot of cases I think IT people have more trouble with other IT people. I don't know what it is, but for some reason IT people really get used to the idea that no one but them knows how anything works. So they just assume anything anyone else is saying is wrong. Meanwhile this guy doesn't know dick about image file formats, DPI, and reasonable file sizes for archival quality scans which is what I'm trying to tell him about. On a lighter note, a guy in my department who was recently fired after years of doing gently caress-all for the company decided to lightly sabotage his computer. I don't know what the gently caress he did yet, but his G4 tower is now kernel panic'ing on boot. The fun part is that I know this means his data is probably still there. It's now my mission to see what he decided was so important that he had to sabotage company property to protect it. Sunblood posted:My boss called me in to work two hours early today so I could change his homepage from Google to "something else." Because I have decent job security, I asked, "Why?" and this was his honest-to-god verbatim response: This sounds like my dad. ErIog fucked around with this message at Jul 14, 2009 around 01:06 |
| # ¿ Jul 14, 2009 01:00 |
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Lum posted:Because there are so many idiots in this industry (usually holding MCSE or CCNA certification, thus making them senior) a lot of people end up just assuming that everyone is an idiot until they prove otherwise. I forgot a funny part of the saga. He was talking to me about how much I should be getting the file sizes down, and he pulls me into his office to show me a 5k 250x400 70% JPEG as some sort of evidence of how we're clearly just wasting space because we can since we should be able to get all the files down to 5k.
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| # ¿ Jul 14, 2009 13:03 |
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So I finally brought my tools into work with me today to take a look at the fired guy's computer. I spent about 15 minutes laughing when I saw what he did. He first did what might be considered defensible and pertinent, he threw everything from his personal folders in /Users/hisname/ into the trash. However, then he decided to be very safe, and he tossed /System/*.*, /Library/*.*, and /Applications/*.* into his trash. He then hit the magic empty trash button, and the only stuff not deleted from the trash was the system files. I was told to see what it was that he deleted, and lo' and behold there was some very interesting stuff. Gigs upon gigs of short porn clips, porn pictures, and some bookmarks to swinger websites. Weee... I'm glad he's gone. I don't want to create trouble, but there's a very special place in hell for people that sabotage company property in a way that requires me to investigate and spend a few hours bringing the system back up so an intern can use it.
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| # ¿ Jul 15, 2009 15:54 |
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I love the audacity of them lying about it. That's just such an immature impulse. What I want to know is if they really believe that you believe them. I mean you told them exactly what it was. That's just nutty. I'd love to give users more credit, but it wouldn't be so bad if they weren't actively maliciously stupid.
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| # ¿ Jul 28, 2009 03:03 |
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From my first few weeks of being IT coordinator and dealing with our Windows Server support contractor. -Same 3 passwords for everyone = Good. -Corporate wi-fi = a security nightmare. -Unsecured corporate wi-fi = Good. -Outlook Web Access = Completely impervious to any security vulnerabilities. -Internet-facing MS Terminal server = same as OWA. -VPN = a security nightmare -internet-facing IMAP = a security nightmare. -iPhone email = a security nightmare, and a general support nightmare. This was in a meeting with him where I was trying to lay out future planning for their IT to both meet the needs of users and improve security. ErIog fucked around with this message at Sep 1, 2009 around 23:10 |
| # ¿ Sep 1, 2009 23:06 |
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Unskilled Labour posted:One of our clients has their own level 1 help desk, who log jobs through to us if they can't resolve the problem. It's bad enough when some petrol station operator refers to a case as a cpu. But when the client help desk logs jobs such as "Computer screen frozen and power button on CPU is pushed inside" or "Power buton CPU is pushed inside the panel" I die a little on the inside. What's really strange, and I forget where I saw it, but I saw like an HP computer or something advertised where they were pointedly calling the tower the CPU.
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| # ¿ Sep 11, 2009 18:01 |
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Xenomorph posted:I hope bad poo poo doesn't happen next week, because that would mean I'd have to get up at 4AM to fix stuff, or go in after 5PM to fix stuff. If you're worried about this then it just means that you haven't been drinking enough.
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| # ¿ Sep 11, 2009 20:17 |
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angelfoodcakez posted:I deal with stupid users all day for my livelihood and I am a teetotaler. You'll never get promoted like that.
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| # ¿ Sep 11, 2009 22:06 |
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angelfoodcakez posted:I work for my own company, and as such I have just promoted myself right now, this instant, just to spite you. I'll do a shot in your honor.
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| # ¿ Sep 11, 2009 22:32 |
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Jesus christ. Like clockwork, I just had to fix the configuration on Remote Desktop Connection for another higher up. Our server guy always sets them up with the local IP, and then he leaves it because he shows the user that it works. The user gets home(2000 miles away), and then finds out that they can't remote in. Then I only hear about it 3 months down the line when the higher up visits the office. The guy knows the outside address for the remote machine, but he never sets it up properly. He also won't set it up so that it will work with that outside address from within the building. This means that it's impossible to really know if the settings I'm entering for the user will actually work until they get home. I wish I had the authority to tell him to fix it, but I'm new, he's old. The only thing I can do when I take care of something like this is to keep reiterating that this guy set it up wrong until they get the message that maybe he should be listening to me on a few things. Nobody knows anything about IT here, and it's always his word against mine. He's always always always attempting to convince everyone they don't need the very legitimate functionality they're asking for. I know the question you're going to ask, "Why was the server guy setting up user machines?" The answer is that this company had no IT except for this contract server guy up until I was hired.
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| # ¿ Sep 17, 2009 16:25 |
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Cerv posted:Had one of our client relationship managers call today because a report had a breakdown of Yeah, you're right, but you should be mindful of rounding for percentages so as not to confuse people. She's stupid, but the question could have been avoided.
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| # ¿ Sep 21, 2009 22:20 |
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Spermy Smurf posted:I dont get it. Do you mean you had a report later that had: It's that 3.6% + 5% != 9.5% because of the rounding.
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| # ¿ Sep 21, 2009 23:09 |
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Casao posted:3.6% + 6.0% is 9.6%, which is close enough to figure out it's rounding errors. I had the numbers wrong, but you get my point. It could have been avoided.
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| # ¿ Sep 22, 2009 04:17 |
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porktree posted:8/84 is 9.5238%, so, really 9.5% was right. Just sayin'. ErIog posted:Yeah, you're right, but you should be mindful of rounding for percentages so as not to confuse people. She's stupid, but the question could have been avoided. Screw off.
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| # ¿ Sep 22, 2009 14:36 |
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afflictionwisp posted:I want to see what the quality is like on that final paper copy. Was it even readable? Are you saying he should scan this mess and post it?
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| # ¿ Sep 23, 2009 16:20 |
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thelightguy posted:But what would SysRq do? These are important questions. You mean the Break key, you loving heathen with your SysRq key.
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| # ¿ Sep 24, 2009 00:32 |
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Cryptic Edge posted:Well I don't know about your crazy backwards keyboard, but I have a SysRq and a Break key, On separate keys. Oh hey, you're right now that I look at my keyboard.
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| # ¿ Sep 24, 2009 13:05 |
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Sister Miyagi posted:My mom used to be the only woman working for an armored truck company. The women's bathroom, which only she used, had like 3 stalls, good lighting, etc. The men's bathroom looked like a closet someone had stuck a toilet in. Yeah, but with bathrooms like the ones described where there's only one toilet, there's no reason to have gender attached to either of them. Only one person is going to be using it at a time, and with a staff that small it would be pretty easy to figure out who the douchebag is that isn't treating the bathroom properly. If there's the possibility that more than one person could be in there, then I'm fine with assigning them to the different genders. That makes sense. Assigning gender when there's only one toilet and there's a huge disparity in the makeup of the staff is just silly.
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| # ¿ Sep 25, 2009 14:02 |
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Griz posted:you're bragging about script kiddie poo poo in a thread full of IT workers. what the gently caress did you think would happen? How do you think most of us started out? I wouldn't know poo poo about computers if it weren't for being into warez a real long time ago. I got banned from my high school network for a year because I was using it very tamely as my playground. I should dig up the GBS thread I started where I documented all the broken network poo poo my high school had going, and then later posted that I got punished for it. The next year, based off of what I did, the network administrator let me into the Cisco class that he taught personally. I'd be surprised if any of us don't have a story or two about when we cared more about exploring computer poo poo than the ethics of doing so. It's not that anyone deserved to be spied on, but it's interesting. ErIog fucked around with this message at Sep 26, 2009 around 04:56 |
| # ¿ Sep 26, 2009 04:48 |
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Sister Miyagi posted:It was supposed to be a resume site type of thing, in which case they probably also should've mentioned that spelling counts and no one likes 18 point purple comic sans on a busy white background. But if you're going to assign a project like that, shouldn't you explain how to do it correctly? Schools are the worst for this stuff. My sister is a teacher, and they're forcing her to create a website like this for the parents to know a little bit about her before the school starts. The package they had her working in was ridiculous, and then none of them know gently caress all about web design. It looked like geocities circa 10 years ago. It was also extremely disheartening how few of her colleagues could actually write with proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling on something that was supposed to be representing them and the school. At least in the days before the web, you never had proof straight away the teacher was a little incompetent before sending your child to them.
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| # ¿ Sep 30, 2009 15:21 |
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Casao posted:Because we read left to right top to down. Now look at the slashes again. / goes right to left (backwards) and \ goes left to right (forwards). The way we read would make some sense except you're drawing a really weird conclusion from it. If we didn't want people to get confused then we could talk about whether they go up or down when we read them from left to right. \ goes down, / goes up. Or we can do what they do in French: grave slash = \ aigu slash = / It's also not that people are really getting them confused, but that nobody knows which to use when it comes to the internet. Compounding this problem is the fact that some browsers cope with backslashes very gracefully. Both IE converts \ to / in URL's. Safari doesn't and neither does Firefox, though. But, for most people, they might never know they're actually making a mistake. The ad agencies might never know either because telling people backslash instead of forward slash will work in a lot of cases. ErIog fucked around with this message at Oct 6, 2009 around 18:50 |
| # ¿ Oct 6, 2009 18:45 |
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Smoke posted:I've gone through quite a few servers and fixed stuff that had been nonfunctional or just set up wrong for years, with my boss claiming to the client that it was impossible or would take a lot of work to fix, all by googling with appropriate terms. I want the people who pull this kind of thing to have their hands cut off. I've had the same experience where I'm the new IT. They've never had IT before except for a 15hr/month consultant. So some of the stuff is a mess. I've been at this a month now. I'm still getting tickets from users about stuff that was supposed to work for them, but never did.
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| # ¿ Oct 7, 2009 13:05 |
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Tequila25 posted:Got a call today from the receptionist, who was reporting that some kind of strange barcode was appearing on her computer, and wondered if we were running some new system. I got a similar question from a user. His job is to fact check stuff using Google.
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| # ¿ Oct 7, 2009 20:16 |
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Spermy Smurf posted:Edit: Monkeybounce, how many users do you have? I cant see a ticket system (unless you just came in to a really hosed up business) for less than 200 users. I do 140ish and do it just fine. I have enough free time to upgrade servers and other projects without dropping the ball for a user. Am I way off base here? Edit: I dont have anyone to help. I do all PCs/phones/servers/copiers/faxes/printers by myself. It depends on the management. I have 30 users, and I'm being pressured to implement a ticketing system for auditing purposes. Anyone have any good suggestions? I'd like something dead simple for users, and hopefully free.
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| # ¿ Oct 12, 2009 21:07 |
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Spermy Smurf posted:I'd suggest creating a second email box, give your account full access to it. Yaos posted:The one we have was made in house, it uses SQL and a simple Windows page with some dialog boxes in it. Our end is web based now, it looks like it was based on a forum layout. It even let's us respond to tickets because they are emailed to us, we can't claim or close tickets through email though. We're a private company. While that means we don't have some of the headaches like come with SOX-compliance, it would have been nice at a certain level because it means they would have had to figure out an exchange archiving solution before I got here. By audits I meant by my boss. It's silly because there's no one at the company that's qualified to be my supervisor. That's why I have the title I do. If there was someone qualified to be my supervisor then I wouldn't be the IT Coordinator. Basically, I'm in the position of educating my boss about most of the things I'm doing. He's good about it, though. He never drags his feet for stupid reasons. The users have been pretty good too. They respond well to my gentle method of educating them not to do stupid things. I'll probably do the separate email account idea, and then give the COO and my supervisor the password. They'll never check it, but when the CEO asks me about accountability I can say that there's technically a workable solution in place. I already kind of have this working with my own email box where I have folders for Received Tickets, Open Tickets, and Closed Tickets. I just treat problem emails as tickets. No matter how complicated a ticketing system is on my end. I'm mostly worried about getting the word out to the users. E-mail is something they can use and understand already, and so getting them to use the ticketing box shouldn't be too difficult. Jesus, it sounds like I'm talking about my cat.
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| # ¿ Oct 12, 2009 22:49 |
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So yesterday at about 5pm, the new intern comes by to tell me that the app she's using is throwing an error. Bless her heart, it is an honest to god error. The server component of the app had crashed out on the server because there was only 4MB left on the system drive. I don't know how the professionals I work with manage to have that happen. When I start looking at what kind of stuff is taking up the most space, it's a bunch of installer .exe's and .msi's for the various components of the server. The thing I find baffling is that we have 2 drives in this server. One for the OS and one for everything else. We couldn't store that poo poo on the 750GB drive that has 200GB free instead of the 40GB drive that has the OS on it? ErIog fucked around with this message at Oct 16, 2009 around 14:55 |
| # ¿ Oct 16, 2009 14:49 |
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Sometimes, not as often as you you'd think, but sometimes I want to throttle a user. Me: We'll be upgrading your machine in the next few months because we're phasing out all PowerPC-based Macs. We'll be replacing your G5 with a Mac Mini since you already have a keyboard/mouse/monitor. Him: I don't think a Mac Mini will really be powerful enough for what I do. I mean...I use Photoshop. He's currently on a 2GHz single-core PowerPC Mac G5 with 2.5GB of RAM. It works fine for him. He does his job, and he's never complained about his computer. Somehow when we talk about what he needs to do his job, though, it balloons from a Mac Mini to an iMac for no reason. Both of them are more powerful than what he has now, and he's doing his job now.
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| # ¿ Oct 20, 2009 14:58 |
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nullscan posted:And don't get me started on the Soju we consume on Fridays to really make everything black out. It was the drink of choice for a bunch of my friends when I was studying in Japan. It was loving awful. It has the viscosity of water, but it has the taste and smell of rubbing alcohol. It's a horrible combination, and I don't see how anyone is able to actually drink it. Midelne posted:It's like the IT industry got its own country. What's a good place to order this stuff? Japanese or Korean markets and specialty liquor stores can probably get you some. Depending on your area, Japanese markets might be more common. It's called Soju in Korea, but Shochu in Japan. So if the specialty liquor store gives you a "What the gently caress?" look then maybe try using the other name. It's not that difficult to find, though. Most of your bigger liquor stores(read: not gas stations) should carry something like it. ErIog fucked around with this message at Oct 20, 2009 around 19:49 |
| # ¿ Oct 20, 2009 19:43 |
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Thankfully most of our departments use some form of client on their local machine to access something running on one of our servers. All the most important stuff gets backed up because it never touches their machine.
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| # ¿ Oct 22, 2009 16:43 |
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| # ¿ May 21, 2013 10:41 |
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SynMoo posted:All of my user's home directories are on the a properly backed-up file server. Thank God. What's it like to work in a place with a proper setup? I inherited a bunch of garbage, and am slowly working my way toward best practices. The problem is that the guy responsible for some of the garbage is still our server consultant. This guy is responsible for sanity checks on my work, unfortunately.
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| # ¿ Oct 22, 2009 16:59 |
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