Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Lum
Aug 13, 2003

Distribution lists are pissing me off today. They've been broken for the last 3 days and it has been glorious.

Context, we have two that are relevent for this post.

(SiteName) Everyone - This is every employee who reports to a manager at SiteName, this is pretty much the entire company, including me.
(SiteName) Staff - This is people who actually work at SiteName. This does not include me as I'm 5 hours drive away

Most folk understand this, but one person does not understand the difference. He's also the office do-gooder, self-appointed parking attendant and self-appointed enforcer of a few other things.

Lum fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Nov 29, 2013

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

evol262 posted:

Yeah, like powershell's "select-string -pattern", which comes by default on every modern version of Windows

Some of us are running iMail on Windows 2000 and don't get fancy modern stuff like that :(

Smoke
Mar 12, 2005

I am NOT a red Bumblebee for god's sake!

Lum posted:

Distribution lists are pissing me off today. They've been broken for the last 3 days and it has been glorious.

Context, we have two that are relevent for this post.

(SiteName) Everyone - This is every employee who reports to a manager at SiteName, this is pretty much the entire company, including me.
(SiteName) Staff - This is people who actually work at SiteName. This does not include me as I'm 5 hours drive away

Most folk understand this, but one person does not understand the difference. He's also the office do-gooder, self-appointed parking attendant and self-appointed enforcer of a few other things.



I have various filters to weed out this kind of stuff at work. We have a few people who think it's relevant to send all kinds of stuff to the entire project rather than the right groups of people(such as probable outages or administrative issues) or just general bitching. A lot of them also don't seem to know the difference between Reply and Reply All.

It has also resulted in people applying for a function sending their resume and everything to the entire project, despite the correct e-mail address being mentioned in the original e-mail itself.

Fil5000
Jun 23, 2003

HOLD ON GUYS I'M POSTING ABOUT INTERNET ROBOTS
We had someone reply all to an email to an entire department (around 3000 people) with "please remove me from this list", which was in turn greeted by many, many people reply all telling him not to reply all, and it looked like it would all stop when the head of said department sent a reply telling everyone to knock it off.

Then some guy sent an Anchorman "that escalated quickly" meme. And immediately tried to recall it.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
It never ceases to amaze me how many people still leave there cisco routers with cisco/cisco logins.

Better yet the fact telnet is enabled facing publicly.

Security is for nerds

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

Fil5000 posted:

We had someone reply all to an email to an entire department (around 3000 people) with "please remove me from this list", which was in turn greeted by many, many people reply all telling him not to reply all, and it looked like it would all stop when the head of said department sent a reply telling everyone to knock it off.

Then some guy sent an Anchorman "that escalated quickly" meme. And immediately tried to recall it.

Someone add a tumblr email-submission address to that distribution list.

underlig
Sep 13, 2007

Lum posted:

Most folk understand this, but one person does not understand the difference. He's also the office do-gooder, self-appointed parking attendant and self-appointed enforcer of a few other things.
I like how the masking is actually in the shape of. ..

At oldjob i put a filter like that in the exchange-server, for emails from our ticket database that started with "boss has", as i would get tons of emails telling me that boss either assigned a new ticket to me or updated an existing. While he sat three meters away, completely silent.

** edit
Might aswell add this, i'm getting more and more frustrated about people calling my boss, talking to him about an issue / something that needs to be done, and then he creates a ticket with either just barely enough information for me to know what needs to be done, or just not enough information at all.
Boss / slave yes, but there are tickets you can actually do yourself, right away, instead of forcing me to come ask you what you mean by it and then try to do it.

"X Y and Z in (shortened / misspelled / term i've never heard before) needs to be xx yy zz:ed"
It's like every second ticket is a loving mystery i have to solve before i can even start actually do what needs to be done.

The ticket database we have is also _filled_ with spelling errors or tickets where the resolution is just "did it", which means i can't search the database for previous jobs nor can i find what "it" actually is.

underlig fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Nov 29, 2013

spog
Aug 7, 2004

It's your own bloody fault.

underlig posted:

I like how the masking is actually in the shape of. ..

At oldjob i put a filter like that in the exchange-server, for emails from our ticket database that started with "boss has", as i would get tons of emails telling me that boss either assigned a new ticket to me or updated an existing. While he sat three meters away, completely silent.

If only there were a way of filtering based on font.

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

underlig posted:

I like how the masking is actually in the shape of. ..

Oh good, someone noticed.

quote:

At oldjob i put a filter like that in the exchange-server, for emails from our ticket database that started with "boss has", as i would get tons of emails telling me that boss either assigned a new ticket to me or updated an existing. While he sat three meters away, completely silent.

Our helpdesk emails everyone every time anyone updates any ticket. Those get deleted server-side.

I just wish mark-as-read didn't make it a client side rule. Why can't this be done on the server?

Trastion
Jul 24, 2003
The one and only.

Caged posted:

Is your internet connection something that cares about the MAC address of the kit it's plugged in to? Might need to reboot some ISP kit or get them to clear out any reservations.

I think I fixed it. Going to swap it back in after lunch because the boss wants to do it during production just before the weekend instead of waiting. At least there are very few people here today. Oh well if it breaks I will mysteriously be busy and make him come in to fix it.

I think it was something even more stupid than MAC address filtering. Since I was connected via PuTTy to the Console port I didn't notice that it put all the Ethernet ports in Shutdown state. So a simple "no shutdown" on each interface and it is working on the bench.

underlig
Sep 13, 2007

Trastion posted:

Going to swap it back in after lunch because the boss wants to do it during production just before the weekend instead of waiting.
Seems like the most logical time to do it, because it needs to be done before the weekend because of .. .well.. reasons

???

QuiteEasilyDone
Jul 2, 2010

Won't you play with me?
The boss runs his media streaming on company servers during the weekends, duh.

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

underlig posted:

I like how the masking is actually in the shape of. ..

At oldjob i put a filter like that in the exchange-server, for emails from our ticket database that started with "boss has", as i would get tons of emails telling me that boss either assigned a new ticket to me or updated an existing. While he sat three meters away, completely silent.

** edit
Might aswell add this, i'm getting more and more frustrated about people calling my boss, talking to him about an issue / something that needs to be done, and then he creates a ticket with either just barely enough information for me to know what needs to be done, or just not enough information at all.
Boss / slave yes, but there are tickets you can actually do yourself, right away, instead of forcing me to come ask you what you mean by it and then try to do it.

"X Y and Z in (shortened / misspelled / term i've never heard before) needs to be xx yy zz:ed"
It's like every second ticket is a loving mystery i have to solve before i can even start actually do what needs to be done.

The ticket database we have is also _filled_ with spelling errors or tickets where the resolution is just "did it", which means i can't search the database for previous jobs nor can i find what "it" actually is.

I thought you quit, is your new job the same as the old job?

Malkar
Aug 19, 2010

Taste the cloud

Bob Morales posted:

Or install something like Cygwin or some other way to run 'grep' inside of WIndows.

http://www.wingrep.com/

Trastion
Jul 24, 2003
The one and only.

underlig posted:

Seems like the most logical time to do it, because it needs to be done before the weekend because of .. .well.. reasons

???

I told him that the owner is on via Citrix. He decided we could wait until first thing monday.

Ynglaur
Oct 9, 2013

The Malta Conference, anyone?

Bob Morales posted:

Or install something like Cygwin or some other way to run 'grep' inside of WIndows.

grep is great, but having almost 1GB of CygwinX files just for grep is just painful.

Wiggly Wayne DDS
Sep 11, 2010



Ynglaur posted:

grep is great, but having almost 1GB of CygwinX files just for grep is just painful.
code:
-rwx------+ 1 Administrators None   104K Jun 16 05:23 cyggcc_s-1.dll
-rwx------+ 1 Administrators None   986K Oct 16  2011 cygiconv-2.dll
-rwx------+ 1 Administrators None    35K Oct 16  2011 cygintl-8.dll
-rwx------+ 1 Administrators None   270K Aug  4 23:33 cygpcre-1.dll
-rwx------+ 1 Administrators None   3.0M Aug 31 19:40 cygwin1.dll
-rwx------+ 1 Administrators None   206K Oct 11 21:09 grep.exe
:confused:

mewse
May 2, 2006

This grep is half a meg

e: and the dependencies are 0.9MB :ughh:

Ynglaur
Oct 9, 2013

The Malta Conference, anyone?
Pissing me off: calling attention to the fact that I probably should have read more before assuming I couldn't take smaller parts from CygwinX. :crow:

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Obviously the correct response to making a configuration change at 1PM that visibly and immediately fucks things up is to put off rolling it back until 4:30 and then decide it's time to go home and leave it until Monday.

I mean, that's definitely the most logical way to deal with a problem like that. There are no alternatives.

Simpleboo
Oct 19, 2013

bitterandtwisted posted:

The company's been expanding a lot faster than the IT budget this year, so I'm spending more and more time guddling about in the Ancient Pile of Broken Crap trying to put together working laptops.
God I know how this feels. While our company isn't expanding faster than the IT budget I have a bunch of old desktops that are organ donors for systems that need parts.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

Simpleboo posted:

God I know how this feels. While our company isn't expanding faster than the IT budget I have a bunch of old desktops that are organ donors for systems that need parts.

When you harvest one of them, do you call it "sending it to The Island"?

Why not?

WhoNeedsAName
Nov 30, 2013

Pissed me off: Getting chewed out by a director because our office internet connection stopped working which "must be an IT issue, there's no other reason for it" only for the accounts department to admit they'd forgotten to pay the invoice and our ISP had cut us off.

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


bitterandtwisted posted:

The company's been expanding a lot faster than the IT budget this year, so I'm spending more and more time guddling about in the Ancient Pile of Broken Crap trying to put together working laptops. I actually quite enjoy it. It's kind of relaxing, like playing with lego.
The one annoyance is keyboard keys. You'd think a single model of laptop would all have identical keyboards, but our Latitudes have no fewer than eight types of clip fastening the keys to the board. Why so many? Each type is equally fiddly to fix and no better than the others at stopping the keys from pinging off when users jam them in docking stations like big drunk apes. I'm running out of donor boards with the keys I need. The best one I found just now:


Two different clips on one board. :psyduck:

It has been posted before and really helped me out:

http://www.laptopkey.com/

Simpleboo
Oct 19, 2013

Che Delilas posted:

When you harvest one of them, do you call it "sending it to The Island"?

Why not?

I tell the other desktops that that one won the lottery.

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




WhoNeedsAName posted:

Pissed me off: Getting chewed out by a director because our office internet connection stopped working which "must be an IT issue, there's no other reason for it" only for the accounts department to admit they'd forgotten to pay the invoice and our ISP had cut us off.

I'm pretty sure I got my first promotion to management on the basis of some very accomplished lying to users about why the power just went out. Hint: we had been doing some fancy footwork with the bill and got too fancy. That was the second time someplace I worked had the power company send someone out with a No poo poo Final Bill and a set of tools. I technically missed the first one by a couple of months, but a major advertising agency with over a thousand employees just in the US forgetting to pay an electric bill for long enough to get a disconnect order is a story worth repeating. Especially since the shutdown was averted by a project manager, her checkbook, and a written promise to wire her five thousand dollars Right loving Now.

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Standard procedure at many companies seems to be to not pay bills when they're due and to wait for a 2nd/3rd/final demand instead. Then pay it and repeat next time.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
It goes back to the lovely "short-term over all else, nothing matters but this quarter's numbers" management that infects nearly all large organisations now.

If you delay paying the bill til the next quarter then your numbers for the current one look better and your shareholders praise the awesome financial innovation of the board. Of course, once you've started down this road then you're hosed for two reasons:
- You can never catch up because that would mean paying two bills in the same quarter and the shareholders would want your head on a spike
- Because you can never catch up, if there is even the smallest delay for any reason at all then you miss final payments and lawyers and/or shutoffs happen; of course, this is not your fault and is the shameful behavior of mercenary suppliers penalizing a hard-working business in a struggling economy... or something.


Basically, modern executive practice is to not give two shits about the health of the company you're running.

Daylen Drazzi
Mar 10, 2007

Why do I root for Notre Dame? Because I like pain, and disappointment, and anguish. Notre Dame Football has destroyed more dreams than the Irish Potato Famine, and that is the kind of suffering I can get behind.

rolleyes posted:

Basically, modern executive practice is to not give two shits about the health of the company you're running ruining.

FTFY

I blame the rise of the modern MBA, which emphasized the quarterly bottom line at the expense of everything else. Long term outlook? gently caress that noise! I need my quarterly bonus now Now NOW!!!

I have a feeling that if companies took the long-term view then things would dramatically improve in the short term as well. Of course, that would require executives to not be complete assholes, so it'll probably never happen.

WhoNeedsAName
Nov 30, 2013

mllaneza posted:

I'm pretty sure I got my first promotion to management on the basis of some very accomplished lying to users about why the power just went out. Hint: we had been doing some fancy footwork with the bill and got too fancy. That was the second time someplace I worked had the power company send someone out with a No poo poo Final Bill and a set of tools. I technically missed the first one by a couple of months, but a major advertising agency with over a thousand employees just in the US forgetting to pay an electric bill for long enough to get a disconnect order is a story worth repeating. Especially since the shutdown was averted by a project manager, her checkbook, and a written promise to wire her five thousand dollars Right loving Now.

I get the feeling that they were using some of that fancy footwork too but some of the accounts department have two clubbed left feet! I'm going to see if I can get a new front firewall out of it as the NetGear one we have at the moment seems to have been in the building since the stone age and only has half of its ethernet ports working.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

Daylen Drazzi posted:

FTFY

I blame the rise of the modern MBA, which emphasized the quarterly bottom line at the expense of everything else. Long term outlook? gently caress that noise! I need my quarterly bonus now Now NOW!!!

I have a feeling that if companies took the long-term view then things would dramatically improve in the short term as well. Of course, that would require executives to not be complete assholes, so it'll probably never happen.

I blame this on modern stockholders(or brokers). If you are a far-sighted CEO and/or Board, and you invest in a long-term project that is going to put your company in the red (or even not as far into the black) for even a single quarter, you're likely to be ousted because your share price is dropping. Stockholders don't care about a company, they care about the numbers, and when something threatens their precious numbers in the short term, they're likely to abandon ship.

I'm not usually one to defend managers, but in this case the problem is intrinsic to the system within which managers have to work. gently caress corporations, basically.

That's the reason I'm actually excited that Dell went private. They've been on a steady decline in quality of product and support for the last decade, and I'm interested to see if they can turn it around now that they answer to buisness people instead of clueless investors.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Che Delilas posted:

That's the reason I'm actually excited that Dell went private. They've been on a steady decline in quality of product and support for the last decade, and I'm interested to see if they can turn it around now that they answer to buisness people instead of clueless investors.
The investors aren't clueless, they know exactly what they're doing. The problem is that they're working for themselves and their own immediate return instead of the good of the company. Long-term returns aren't part of the game for anyone but retirees and index fund managers -- if a stock's not performing short-term, why not just sell it and buy one that is? Sitting on a dead-weight stock just means you're tying up your money and making it unable to be invested somewhere else.

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




Daylen Drazzi posted:

FTFY

I blame the rise of the modern MBA, which emphasized the quarterly bottom line at the expense of everything else. Long term outlook? gently caress that noise! I need my quarterly bonus now Now NOW!!!

I have a feeling that if companies took the long-term view then things would dramatically improve in the short term as well. Of course, that would require executives to not be complete assholes, so it'll probably never happen.

Late fees are also a ready source of credit for cash-strapped companies.

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...
This isn't strictly true. Investors (and i refer here to large investment organizations, since individual shareholders generally cannot force change) are willing to tolerate losses as long as there's a plan which incorporates those losses into a strategy which ends with growth. If "one quarter of loss = you're out" were true, RIM Blackberry would have had a parade of CEOs over the last few years.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Volmarias posted:

This isn't strictly true. Investors (and i refer here to large investment organizations, since individual shareholders generally cannot force change) are willing to tolerate losses as long as there's a plan which incorporates those losses into a strategy which ends with growth. If "one quarter of loss = you're out" were true, RIM Blackberry would have had a parade of CEOs over the last few years.
You do tend to see massive, massive stock price drops as the short-term investors leave before things start to level out, though.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

Misogynist posted:

The investors aren't clueless, they know exactly what they're doing.

Yeah, I worded that poorly. I meant clueless in terms of knowing how a company's short-term loss will result in a long term gain because they don't know enough of the plan and/or the industry and what the implications of a decision might be.

But the rest of your post underscores my point. It's the stockholders that aren't interested in the long term, thus the businesses must have the same mindset or lose investors. That's why I blame the stockholders. This is a generalization of course.

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Che Delilas posted:

Yeah, I worded that poorly. I meant clueless in terms of knowing how a company's short-term loss will result in a long term gain because they don't know enough of the plan and/or the industry and what the implications of a decision might be.

But the rest of your post underscores my point. It's the stockholders that aren't interested in the long term, thus the businesses must have the same mindset or lose investors. That's why I blame the stockholders. This is a generalization of course.

You are right that it is a generalization, as it really does depends on the investor. The most successful ones are those who pick an investment and treat it as that; an investment. Warren Buffett is probably the most famous example of this, time and time again cautioning people to make a decision and then let it be.

If your company is owned by an "investment" firm that aims to squeeze as much out of your company before dumping, there's not much that can be done.

Westie
May 30, 2013



Baboon Simulator

WhoNeedsAName posted:

Pissed me off: Getting chewed out by a director because our office internet connection stopped working which "must be an IT issue, there's no other reason for it" only for the accounts department to admit they'd forgotten to pay the invoice and our ISP had cut us off.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/16/what_happened_when_we_paid_bt_late/

Think it would have been disconnected if this happened?

WhoNeedsAName
Nov 30, 2013


I get the feeling that the company that I work for comes under the "persistent late payers" category and the ISP decided to make a point. Fair play to the ISP, we didn't pay ergo we don't get to use their service. I'd have no problem with a message like that appearing as I wouldn't be getting poo poo from both the low level monkeys and the upper echelon fucks simultaneously.

Considering some of the muppets that inhabit the office, they'd have probably thought that a message like that was malware though so I'd still have ended getting it in the neck.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Powdered Toast Man
Jan 25, 2005

TOAST-A-RIFIC!!!

Bob Morales posted:

Some of us are running iMail on Windows 2000 and don't get fancy modern stuff like that :(

AAAGH. gently caress you for reminding me of my horrific tenure in shitbox shared web hosting support in 2003!!! :mad:

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply