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SaltLick posted:what an utterly miserable life. although the HP guy that comes in to service our printers seems oddly happy to work on them so whatever floats their boat. Its actually pretty awesome. I used to work at a company that had 90-100 HP Laserjet 4200-4350's back in 2007-2010. I'd never fixed a printer in my life before I started there and we had all the support outsourced at a hefty £250 callout + £100 an hour. I stayed with the engineers that used to come out as we couldn't leave them roaming around the building on their own, and within two months I could diagnose or fix 95% of issues myself within 0-3 minutes of being at the printer. I became "the printer guy", we cancelled the contract and I spent probably 25% of my day fixing printers. They're pretty simple devices once you get to understand them, and in an environment where paper documents are everything (Legal), the users love you for fixing them. Its great just being able to bowl up to the printer, take one look at a bad printout from it and go "yup fuser, let me pop one in now"
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Feb 6, 2015 11:32
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SaltLick posted:what an utterly miserable life. although the HP guy that comes in to service our printers seems oddly happy to work on them so whatever floats their boat. If your only job is to do printers then it's probably not so bad. The reason most IT people hate printers is because they are always breaking in stupid ways and always pulling you away from more important poo poo.
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Feb 6, 2015 13:40
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psydude posted:If your only job is to do printers then it's probably not so bad. The reason most IT people hate printers is because they are always breaking in stupid ways and always pulling you away from more important poo poo. That and dealing with the user-side of printers and loving printer drivers. It's been many, many moons since I've done desktop support, but printers are still a raw wound in my psyche. The hardware only stuff could be kind interesting with enterprise class printers. Those things were like transformers the way everything was packed in those chassis.
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Feb 6, 2015 13:54
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Rhymenoserous posted:AMI depreciates when a new version is dropped. Misogynist posted:You can search public AMIs easily using the console, but really, you should build your own image using something like Packer and rely on your internal AMI repository instead. It will make your deployments much quicker. following up on these.. if I'm using a template for an AWS Marketplace app and I keep getting that error for depracated AMI - does that mean the template is simply out of date? (This is for a hadoop project, multiple nodes, etc)
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Feb 6, 2015 14:48
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I seriously hate support contracts. What loving MBA invented this poo poo? Oh, well our software is $2,500. You want support on that poo poo? Another $1,800 a year, bitch. loving ACT!. If you log into one database, you can magically see things that belong to another database. Then refresh the browser and things to back to the way they should be. Defective loving software and they want you to shell out thousands to open a support contract. The best part is, "well you never renewed back in 2011 so you'll have to pay for the last 3 years of support to get up to date". Eat poo poo!
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Feb 6, 2015 15:50
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Che Delilas posted:Perspective: you're insane for putting up with it and you're damaging your life and the lives of the people you work with and the people who will come after you by allowing management to think this is in any way acceptable. That's what I was thinking, but this is the only grown-up job I've had, and I've been conditioned by working overtime literally every week since I can remember. The 12-hour days are "just" once every couple of weeks. The 12-day weeks are because the on-call rotation puts one of us on every weekend, and while we used to get the day off after our rotation is over, we don't anymore. So we work M-F, at least a half day each Sat and Sun, then another M-F. It's a shame, because I just became a full-time employee instead of contract, but you're right, I should probably start looking elsewhere in the time not dedicated to work or school They billed this job to me as an 8-5 when I started, too. Edit: blogpost, but as soon as I posted this I find that I'm doing my second 12-hour in a row, and once my coworker quits next week, every week will be 12 days. gently caress this noise, now the only question is if I should ask my supervisor for special permission to look at internal postings or just look elsewhere. She isn't a bad boss, it's just that we've been pretty consistently understaffed by corporate for our workload. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 16:02
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I wish all of our printers were handled by someone else. They're not even so bad to fix but we (and by we I mean Not Me) buy lovely printers that break all the time. The problem is not helped by buying lovely refurb toner. But there are 4 printers that we have a contract for and they're loving fantastic and the only time they've needed service (that in aware of at least) was about a month after I started. One of the four, one time in over a year. Instead we're adding even more personal printers so people don't have to get up and go twelve feet to the nearest large printer. And of course they're even shittier than the large ones. We've started moving away from dell printers to hp (and dell pcs to Lenovo, for that matter, although we don't have nearly as many problems with the pcs).
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Feb 6, 2015 17:00
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gently caress personal printers. The last place I was at did that. 20 different printers (depending on when they bought them), 20 different toners, they wouldn't let anyone but IT change toners (regular users are too stupid to do it). They had to have had 100 printers in that company for 250 people. loving nightmare. And they used refurb toners that are absolute poo poo because they are cheap fucks and maybe the guy who owns the toner refill company blows the IT manager. Who knows... They buy the printers from the toner place as well. Talk about getting hosed in the rear end. I swear 20% of helpdesk was printer or toner related. Oh, and about half of the personal printers were the HP's that you couldn't shut the wifi off on so our AP's were always freaking out. Ugh. New place I'm at has like 4 printer/copiers that are networked and that's the only thing people print to. Very nice.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:03
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nevermind I'm an idiot and shouldn't post before coffee
MF_James fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 17:04
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Bob Morales posted:gently caress personal printers. The last place I was at did that. 20 different printers (depending on when they bought them), 20 different toners, they wouldn't let anyone but IT change toners (regular users are too stupid to do it). They had to have had 100 printers in that company for 250 people. loving nightmare. And they used refurb toners that are absolute poo poo because they are cheap fucks and maybe the guy who owns the toner refill company blows the IT manager. Who knows... They buy the printers from the toner place as well. Talk about getting hosed in the rear end. Half of my calls are for printers, and half of those are for fusers. I swear, it is a rarity for a Lexmark fuser to hit its projected lifespan.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:09
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22 Eargesplitten posted:That's what I was thinking, but this is the only grown-up job I've had, and I've been conditioned by working overtime literally every week since I can remember. The 12-hour days are "just" once every couple of weeks. The 12-day weeks are because the on-call rotation puts one of us on every weekend, and while we used to get the day off after our rotation is over, we don't anymore. So we work M-F, at least a half day each Sat and Sun, then another M-F. Are you getting overtime for hours past 40? If you aren't making a ton of money then you need a new job.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:29
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Finally got full admin access and some unusual buttons popped up in our cloud app: Did you know clouds come in flavors? 
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Feb 6, 2015 17:38
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Bhodi posted:Did you know clouds come in flavors? Do not like the implications of the cloud-to-butt plugin here 
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Feb 6, 2015 17:39
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I do get OT, but with the increased work load I'll be seeing once our fourth guy leaves, I'll be looking at 80 hours combined work and school at least. I'm going to request some days off in the next few weeks and dedicate them to job hunting.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:39
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psydude posted:If your only job is to do printers then it's probably not so bad. The reason most IT people hate printers is because they are always breaking in stupid ways and always pulling you away from more important poo poo. The biggest ball-ache is that that they're complex machines with individual parts that have an expected life before wearing out. "Ah yes, I can see the 2nd BTR Roller assembly is breaking down, let me just get one out the cupboard and swap it out then we'll be fixed in a jiffy" SAID NO ONE EVER
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Feb 6, 2015 21:09
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Super Slash posted:"Ah yes, I can see the 2nd BTR Roller assembly is breaking down, let me just get one out the cupboard and swap it out then we'll be fixed in a jiffy" SAID NO ONE EVER
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Feb 6, 2015 21:30
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22 Eargesplitten posted:That's what I was thinking, but this is the only grown-up job I've had, and I've been conditioned by working overtime literally every week since I can remember. The 12-hour days are "just" once every couple of weeks. The 12-day weeks are because the on-call rotation puts one of us on every weekend, and while we used to get the day off after our rotation is over, we don't anymore. So we work M-F, at least a half day each Sat and Sun, then another M-F. In CA working for more than 8 hours in a day is overtime. If you are working this much overtime the business needs to hire more people for multiple reasons. Do you have the option to not work any overtime and just tell people you will help them on the next business day?
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Feb 6, 2015 22:28
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I do get OT, but with the increased work load I'll be seeing once our fourth guy leaves, I'll be looking at 80 hours combined work and school at least. Jesus christ you're going to school on top of this? The job is not necessarily a wash, but you need to make a change right now. Have you gone to your boss and explained how your workload is way too much and not sustainable? If not, you should. Don't make it an ultimatum. As in, don't say, "If I don't get a lighter schedule I'm going to quit." It's too threatening. But do use language like you have used here: "brutal," "nervous breakdown," "being crushed," stuff like that. If she's not a complete moron she'll know what that really means without you needing to resort to threats. It's good that they're paying you overtime but you shouldn't let them use that as an excuse to appropriate your entire life. People need breaks.
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Feb 6, 2015 22:45
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lampey posted:In CA working for more than 8 hours in a day is overtime. If you are working this much overtime the business needs to hire more people for multiple reasons. Do you have the option to not work any overtime and just tell people you will help them on the next business day? Not really, it was a miracle my boss didn't make me take two more tickets after my 13 hour day yesterday. We've always been understaffed. I think it's because the people doing bean-counting see our call volume and think it's fine, but they don't realize that our calls are frequently an hour + drive apart. I regularly make a 3 hour drive each way for two of my sites. It's funny, we lost our biggest contract because the parts weren't available and we had too many tickets for our number of employees nationwide, but they really haven't learned anything. I'll make sure to use words like crushed and nervous breakdown when I ask for access to the internal job postings. Should be even more effective since I'm actually being seen and medicated for an anxiety disorder.
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Feb 6, 2015 22:56
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Not really, it was a miracle my boss didn't make me take two more tickets after my 13 hour day yesterday. We've always been understaffed. I think it's because the people doing bean-counting see our call volume and think it's fine, but they don't realize that our calls are frequently an hour + drive apart. I regularly make a 3 hour drive each way for two of my sites. It's funny, we lost our biggest contract because the parts weren't available and we had too many tickets for our number of employees nationwide, but they really haven't learned anything. Are you salary, or just getting absurd amounts of overtime?
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Feb 6, 2015 23:06
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Usually 5-10 hours of overtime, but I see that going up when we go from 4 people in my region to 3. Although hopefully not for long. I already found three jobs to apply for today. Mostly Denver, which I would prefer not to work in, but I'll take it over staying with this position.
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Feb 7, 2015 00:02
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Update to that friends mom's laptop being violated by the "microsoft" guy- Ran 3 virus scans and nothing. Malwarebytes found 10-15 Adware entries but that's not too unusual. Found a file on the desktop with some info - phone # 888-514-1650 and they are from Esupport-live. I wonder if it is a real tech with just some questionable sales tactics as they seem to have installed malwarebytes and CCCleaner the last time they were on. edit: in the run history there is also 'MRT', prefetch, %temp%, and msconfig 
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Feb 7, 2015 00:20
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Yes Rockwell, just go ahead and have your installer overwrite environment variables instead of appending to them. It's not like Windows needs the Path variable for anything else. 
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Feb 7, 2015 00:32
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lampey posted:In CA working for more than 8 hours in a day is overtime. If you are working this much overtime the business needs to hire more people for multiple reasons. Do you have the option to not work any overtime and just tell people you will help them on the next business day? Hear, hear. I'm working as an outsourced agent in a bank and gently caress me if management gives a gently caress about being shorthanded. It's been a year and I don't see any effort in securing more personnel. They've just managed to replace the losses from their lovely salaries + brutal oncall schedules (and I'm talking oncalls where people can expect to sleep maybe 3 hours a night). Management knows it needs about double the staff they have at the moment but are not actively hiring new people. I'm not worried that much because I can request to be transferred to another project/client but this place is a train wreck in motion. At the moment we have like 7 people. 4 DBAs (who each oversee differents databases, like Sybase, SQL, Oracle and DB2), 1 Specialist overseeing WAS stuff, 1 guy from my company overseeing ConnectDirect (that he wasn't a specialist in) and little ole me handling all productive incidents and sundries. Those DBAs also have to spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings in addition to their duties in implementation and providing second level support for incidents. Cut and run man, I've repeatedly told the client/supervisor that I'm overwhelmed only for him to tell me that he needs me to pick up additional tasks from the DBAs like learning about MQ, backups and documentation. I hate this guy.
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Feb 7, 2015 00:57
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22 Eargesplitten posted:The 12-hour days are "just" once every couple of weeks. The 12-day weeks are because the on-call rotation puts one of us on every weekend, and while we used to get the day off after our rotation is over, we don't anymore. So we work M-F, at least a half day each Sat and Sun, then another M-F.
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Feb 7, 2015 01:03
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Danith posted:I wonder if it is a real tech with just some questionable sales tactics as they seem to have installed malwarebytes and CCCleaner the last time they were on. A simple google search on the name brings up nothing but scam reports. They charged her money to clean up "viruses" that weren't there. Tell your mom that when someone calls her up or sends her some kind of message out of the blue saying that she's in trouble somehow, and they want money to fix it, it's a scam. If they want a bank account or a social security number, it's a scam. Tell her to never give money or personal information to anyone that contacts her first. Tell her she is INCREDIBLY LUCKY that she's only out the few hundred dollars that this scammer took, instead of having her identity stolen and her bank accounts completely drained, because that's what some scammers do. If she's worried about her bank account or credit card or something, tell her to hang up on the person who supposedly warned her of the problem, and call her bank. Use the number of the back of her credit card, not the number the person who calls gives her. For gently caress's sake.
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Feb 7, 2015 01:08
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Che Delilas posted:A simple google search on the name brings up nothing but scam reports. They charged her money to clean up "viruses" that weren't there. Sadly, I recently posted something similar to this on FB because multiple people on the C-level exec team ended up with infections from email poo poo. The CFO has a bunch of files that look like they may be cryptolocker related. Even lovely McAfee found over 1600 infected files. I scanned it with Nod32 afterward and still found infected files. She won't give up her drat laptop. My boss is already aware and has spoken to her, so if anything happens, it's on her. Still though, the amount of people that fall for this poo poo is just staggering.
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Feb 7, 2015 01:18
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TWBalls posted:Still though, the amount of people that fall for this poo poo is just staggering. The worst part is that they always try to justify their naivete with, "Well I should do what they say just in case." Makes me want to choke them.
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Feb 7, 2015 01:21
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Che Delilas posted:The worst part is that they always try to justify their naivete with, "Well I should do what they say just in case." Makes me want to choke them. I had a woman at a job I was working at announce to the room (while I was in the next cube over fixing a computer) that she received an email from QVC saying that she'd been charged for something, along with instructions to dispute the charge. I told her it was a phishing attempt, and even pointed out that the URL was clearly designed to be deceptive. She said she wanted to click on it, "Just in case!" I told her that she should call her bank directly to verify, or to go to the QVC website directly, but she said that she would feel better hearing it straight from the source. So of course she got her credit card information stolen. Some people in this world are too stupid to be helped.
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Feb 7, 2015 02:52
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TWBalls posted:Sadly, I recently posted something similar to this on FB because multiple people on the C-level exec team ended up with infections from email poo poo. The CFO has a bunch of files that look like they may be cryptolocker related. Even lovely McAfee found over 1600 infected files. I scanned it with Nod32 afterward and still found infected files. She won't give up her drat laptop. My boss is already aware and has spoken to her, so if anything happens, it's on her. It'd be a real shame if her laptop lost its connection to the domain, or her VPN account got locked out in such a way that you needed her laptop to troubleshoot it for a couple hours. Yep. A cryin' shame.
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Feb 7, 2015 03:31
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:following up on these.. if I'm using a template for an AWS Marketplace app and I keep getting that error for depracated AMI - does that mean the template is simply out of date? (This is for a hadoop project, multiple nodes, etc) Get the AMI ID they are using and try to find it. Keep in mind AMIs are also region specific, so if they made it in a different region or something it might not work. I've never used the marketplace stuff, but I am dealing with AMIs for Cloud Formation right now. Not really a windows guy but I have been tasked with automating an app that uses IIS and secondary servers that do autoscaling for handle data processing. Gonna be awesome when it works but overwhelming right now.
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Feb 7, 2015 03:55
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Ahdinko posted:Its actually pretty awesome. I used to work at a company that had 90-100 HP Laserjet 4200-4350's back in 2007-2010. I'd never fixed a printer in my life before I started there and we had all the support outsourced at a hefty £250 callout + £100 an hour. I stayed with the engineers that used to come out as we couldn't leave them roaming around the building on their own, and within two months I could diagnose or fix 95% of issues myself within 0-3 minutes of being at the printer. I became "the printer guy", we cancelled the contract and I spent probably 25% of my day fixing printers. I've been doing that too. The printer guys themselves don't really give a poo poo since they are paid hourly and not piece-wise. I try to only call when I need a part or when they thing needs to be completely stripped.
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Feb 7, 2015 05:07
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Che Delilas posted:A simple google search on the name brings up nothing but scam reports. They charged her money to clean up "viruses" that weren't there. I generally tell people (verbatim) "Microsoft doesn't care about you, and they certainly don't care enough to call you about your computer."
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Feb 7, 2015 07:45
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Inspector_666 posted:I generally tell people (verbatim) "Microsoft doesn't care about you, and they certainly don't care enough to call you about your computer." They care enough to run a lottery that you don't even have to enter to win.
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Feb 7, 2015 15:32
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Inspector_666 posted:I generally tell people (verbatim) "Microsoft doesn't care about you, and they certainly don't care enough to call you about your computer." I love trying to explain this to people in general "office 365 lynx is having an outage" "WELL CALL THEM AND TELL THEM HAVE 15 MINUTES TO FIX IT" poo poo like that happens once a week it's hilarious
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Feb 7, 2015 16:11
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socialsecurity posted:I love trying to explain this to people in general "office 365 lynx is having an outage" "WELL CALL THEM AND TELL THEM HAVE 15 MINUTES TO FIX IT" poo poo like that happens once a week it's hilarious It's fun watching VPs suddenly melt into a puddle of tantrums when bigger companies tell them to gently caress off. We were getting a circuit installed from a large, blue telco. They dropped the ball and postponed the circuit install by four months. The circuit was the primary link for the remote site being built. VP: "Tell them that their incompetence is costing us our launch date and we'll have to pursue litigation." Me: "Telco just said that because we threatened litigation, all project work is halted indefinitely." VP gets on the phone with telco and tries the "Yell until someone helps" tactic. Gets hung up on twice, the third time he's hung up on as soon as he said "This is VP from..." VP: "SOMEONE IS GETTING FIRED FOR THIS. I SWEAR TO GOD." He then proceeded to get into his car and blasts out of the parking lot. :edit: Before anyone says anything, yeah we have a backup telco line there. But "THAT'S NOT THE POINT, IT'S THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING AAAAAAGH".
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Feb 7, 2015 16:20
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I love it when VPs and C levels get put into place by large entrenched monopolies. Constant Gentle Pressure is whats needed. Never yell the equivalent of legal hammertime at them.
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Feb 7, 2015 16:37
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I figure this is the most appropriate thread for my question. I've been following the sh/sc ... stress relief threads for years. And have started studying for rhcsa so that I can work into a system admin role sometime this year. The unreasonable requests from project managers and various other stakeholders I can deal with, that's been part of my current job for years. End users, i'm sure some will be aggravating, my current job has me working with some demanding clients already. However the main thing that makes me wary of this career move, is the concern with keeping up on current IT issues and how they might affect a system I would be sole administrator of. It seems like to be a halfway decent IT person you need to be closer to Dilbert as gently caress/CF than a person who works 40-50 hours a week, maybe catches on news/does some lab stuff at home for a few hours per week, and learns a lot on the job. Is this a pretty accurate viewpoint?
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Feb 7, 2015 18:19
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madpanda posted:It seems like to be a halfway decent IT person you need to be closer to Dilbert as gently caress/CF than a person who works 40-50 hours a week, maybe catches on news/does some lab stuff at home for a few hours per week, and learns a lot on the job.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:28
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madpanda posted:However the main thing that makes me wary of this career move, is the concern with keeping up on current IT issues and how they might affect a system I would be sole administrator of. IT is what you make of it. Some people want to grab their CCIE and be the CTO for a VAR, because they really like learning and pitching technology. Others enjoy working low-stress internal infrastructure support and doing a normal 8-5 workday where they maintain their windows boxes and then go home to dedicate their time to their hobbies. The thing that makes you good at either one of those divergent paths is giving a poo poo about your responsibilities.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:37
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