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Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Our Dell rep, who refers to himself as a Hyperscale Specialist (wtf?) is taking my department out to lunch again today. Well everyone but me, I'm in my apartment after having some surgery yesterday. They give us all kinds of swag and usually bimonthly lunches at expensive joints in town.

Our novell reps occasionally send some swag. So far I've gotten a good quality novell polo shirt, a SuSE Lizard, and a novell nylon frisbee thing that blows.

Oh and I got a vmware laptop bag from our vmware rep.

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Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

H2SO4 posted:

What the hell? I presume the only reason you don't punch him square in the nose is because he buys you things.

Pretty much. He's a giant douchebag. Always talking about conspiracy theories, his truck, and survivalist rantings. Half the people in my group refuse to go to lunch with him any more.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
I need to rant a bit...

A user of mine on Thursday got her laptop so infected that it was deemed a complete loss. My coworker handled retrieving her data and giving her a new laptop which took two days since she's one of those people that meticulously archives every email, every revision of a file, everything since the dawn of time and completely loses her poo poo if one of the files goes missing. Just to give an idea how much crap she keeps around, she has one 15gb pst and another 18gb pst.


Today, I come back to work after having had some surgery last week and she sets in on me complaining about things not working. I should mention that we transitioned her from XP to 7. As usual she's being unhelpful when complaining saying that oracle doesn't work, when she really means some other program, and accusing me of giving her an attitude when I ask her to be more specific. In fairness to her I was giving her an attitude since she's wasted my time on countless occasions by being a stupid clueless idiot that doesn't want to learn. I've tried being nice and helpful but it makes no difference. She gets these malware infestations about every 3 months which causes me to lose 2 days of my time restoring all her poo poo. I've told her on many occasions to delete some of her old emails and old files but I get this look like I've asked her to murder her children.



I had some guy put in a help-desk ticket this morning whining because he can't change his homepage and everyone else can. Why are users so petty? Arrgghh.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Farking Bastage posted:

Lock her poo poo down so hard, she needs your expressed written permission to to drag desktop icons around

Tempting as this is, due to stupidity beyond my control, all users have to have full administrator rights to their local machine, even on Windows 7.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

wolrah posted:

but how the hell do thousands of business phone users not even bother to use their voicemail?

Could it be general apathy coupled with a good amount of disdain for things like voicemail in the age of text messages and emails?

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
A user today...

:v: "HELP MY NEW COMPUTER IS BROKEN FLASH HAS NO SOUND!!!"
:) *takes a look notices Internet explorer is muted in the mixer and unmutes it*
:v: "Oh yeah I did that yesterday."
:what: And then you call me over here to complain that theres no sound?
:v: "Yeah."
:mad:

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Not quite a ticket, but close enough I guess... An alert came in during a meeting.

A little back story. My company is being merged back into our corporate parents. We all run a combination of Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux. The corporate parents run Windows.

:supaburn: WHOA WEVE GOT A TROJAN ON OUR NETWORK! 10.10.10.10!
:nyd: What?
:supaburn: Yeah, a trojan...

I checked my IP address, started laughing, and...
:v: Yeah that's me...
:supaburn: What? Unplug your laptop!
:v: No, I don't have a trojan, I run Linux.
:nyd: & :supaburn: What?
:v: It's Linux. It's okay, really. Not a trojan.
:nyd: & :supaburn: Oh...

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Gunjin posted:

loving TRUTH. We us IBM's Maximo for ticketing and it is the biggest loving piece of poo poo.

I'm pretty sure every ticket system is a piece of poo poo and if one ever came out that wasn't a piece of poo poo we'd be knee deep in a biblical apocalypse.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Asmodai_00 posted:

An email came in...


2 seconds later, a phone call comes in from the same user...


:ughh:


Obviously you should have had this resolved in the two seconds it took for them to dial your extension.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Or he could install outlook 2010 which supports multiple exchange accounts.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
A ticket hasn't come in.

I'm scared :ohdear:

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Moey posted:

Want some of mine? I'll give you the one with involving the impatient lawyer. That's always a good time.

I've had my fair share of upset and impatient execs this week, month, and year...

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online


Coworker put this on our new office door today after the Director told us we were no longer responsible for helpdesk.

I just noticed he left out the "the" :downs:

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Cryptic Edge posted:

That or put a space between / and development. It's always the spacebar.

Don't most distros these days force you to add --no-preserve-root if you try to rm -fr /?

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
My favorite situation is one that just happened yesterday. HR got lazy and didn't update around 30 employee's termination dates. The automated security system ran and 30 people's accounts were automatically disabled. That combined with the fact that we're in the middle of a rather messy and painful merger instigated a mass panic.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

lilcasino posted:

Has anyone used Symantec's PGP whole disk software? CFO wants it installed on all laptops.

Avoid Avoid Avoid Avoid.

We started testing the software and spent about a month figuring out several kinks. The project got delayed due to some other massive projects going on and when we got back around to testing again, I ran into some major bugs. Bugs so horrible that if we had put PGP into production, it likely would have resulted in catastrophic data loss. I consider myself lucky that the project got delayed for this very reason. The bugs might be fixed now, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth that when Symantec called us and wanted us to renew I told them in no uncertain terms to get hosed.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Bonzo posted:

They also charge per ticket and we ended up getting charged for spam messages that made it into our inbox because their filter was not setup correctly.

That's pretty lovely. However, I can see some good coming out of this. When users put in really dumb tickets let their managers know they're wasting company resources. Should put a big dent in the "how do i clik mouz?" stuff.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

modeski posted:

It just seems incredibly backwards to have people tied to a particular physical machine in this day and age.

BUT BUT THIS ONE HAS GERMS.



As an aside, I had a coworker that shed. Literally shed. When he quit, I picked up his old keyboard, turned it over, and it started snowing skin flakes with just a little shake. I didn't even try to clean that thing up, I just threw it away. His mouse and laptop did not fare much better.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

couldcareless posted:

Production server just restarted on its own. My head is throbbing. Can anything go right today?

I feel your pain. Our production servers reboot themselves all the time. It's caused by our production app loving up the machine so royally the only thing it can do is reboot, and not gracefully. It takes 10 minutes or so to check the RAM and finish POSTing and another 5 minutes fsck'ing all the file systems on the drive because some how said app that doesn't even write to the disk manages to gently caress up the file system. It's glorious. And when we reported this to dev, they said "Oh we know about that. It's okay." :psypop:

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

OatmealRocks posted:

Seriously WTF. Douche bags. I'm happy for your rates now. Might be on the low side.

It's actually pretty common for universities and colleges to not want to hire or promote someone without said person having a degree. In many cases, it doesn't matter what degree you have so long as you have one. It's kind of stupid and in some cases gimps them when it comes to candidates, though.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
YOTJ... for my coworker. He got an offer Friday for a much nicer full time position with another company. He's basically the only person I'm friends with and actually like on my team. This leaves me as the sole linux administrator for close to 300 servers, sole administrator for VMWare, and sole administrator for a doomed domain.

How can I play this to my advantage? I really want more money and a different title. Somehow I've ended up responsible for all that crap and my title is still more or less helpdesk dude.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Bob Morales posted:

You're also now the guy that nobody likes.

You're stuck. You'll have to get a job (is your friends new place hiring?) somewhere else or hope another guy leaves and you can somehow get his job+pay.

Well that sucks.

His place may be hiring, they are expanding quite a bit and might need some more admins. He's going to keep an eye out for me. I'm trying to get into the National Guard so if that ever goes through I'll be away for like a year or two. I'm a bit hesitant to swap jobs before I know how the Guard thing is going to go.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Offtopicish YOTJ stuff:

So my buddy that's leaving as well as some posts here convinced me to stick my resume on Dice. I freshened it up and posted it yesterday. This morning starting at 8:15 I started getting calls from recruiters. I got 3 calls in 30 minutes. I got two more calls around lunch time. The ones I've spoken to are talking about jobs that would end up with me working less and making 10-20k more than I'm making now. :stare:

I've never really worked with recruiters so does anyone have any tips on dealing with them?

On Topic:

An IM pops up:

Helpdesk: A user is reporting she can't print this morning.
Me: Tell her to reboot.
Helpdesk: She says she already has.
Me: Did you check when was the system last booted?
Helpdesk: No.
Helpdesk: 9/15/2011, 9:25:41 AM
Me: :ughh:

Helpdesk proceeds to reboot the computer. A few minutes later this pops up in my inbox.

User: I rebooted my laptop, it works! I guess this can be closed!... :)

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
A ticket didn't come in. My boss is having marital problems and has been "working" from home the past few weeks. Consequently he hasn't been assigning work to anyone on my team. I've run out of stuff to do. I can't get approval to work on any new projects. This sucks. My coworkers are equally frustrated and my boss' boss doesn't seem to give a rats rear end.

I've been looking for other jobs but I'm starting to get a bit desperate. I feel like I'm dying here.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
I got fired for insubordination. The company I was working for wanted me to put a managed router on my home network, between all my personal stuff and my DSL modem. I told them it could either sit behind my router and I'd give it a static IP or they could pay for an internet connection for their device to sit on. Neither was acceptable for them so they called me insubordinate and let me go, loving me out of unemployment in the process.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Dartanion posted:

That sounds questionably legal, even if you were a work at home employee.

It was several years ago so there's likely no way I could challenge it.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Kuros posted:

They wanted to monitor your home connection?

What the gently caress?

Kind of.

They were justifying it as fixing some problems with remote employees logging into the domain. They said they wouldn't tunnel any personal traffic over the VPN the router would maintain but I didn't trust them as they also said we wouldn't be allowed to log in to it.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
A ticket won't come in...

For the next two weeks. I'm on vacation and only have to work two more weeks this year. :hellyeah:

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
An instant message came in...

Boss: are you working at the office or at home?
Me: did you really just ask that?
Me: This has gone waaaaaaaaay past comical
Boss: oh, you're out all week
Boss: I forgot

My boss can't seem to remember for more than 5 minutes that I'm on vacation until the 5th of December. Yesterday he called me twice to ask if I was at the office within 3 hours. :negative:

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

serewit posted:

You know what's fun? Being the only department that doesn't get to go home early.

Which makes no sense because there are no users in the office to support.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Migishu posted:

In other news, enjoying my vacation, chillin with some cheap hooch and some video games. Regretting that I have to be back at work next week :(

I've been working on vacation. The tickets will never stop coming in. :(

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Our old ticketing system used to let users assign priority levels to tickets. Anytime someone had problems with email we'd inevitably get a level 1 ticket. Level 1 means "oh poo poo the company is going to go out of business if this doesn't get fixed now, the server room is literally on fire, my hair is literally on fire. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhhhh."

With the new ticketing system we turned that poo poo off.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Uhh... sales ALWAYS creates the fires. Project Management are the people that discover it and try to fix it, usually in a futile attempt.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Ensign Expendable posted:

I think he was implying that sales is primitive enough to have to discover fire. And then promise to have a fire big enough to burn down a continent that will be ready tomorrow, our IT can easily do that with no budget.

IT Fire V2.0! Now with smoke signalling!

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

TenjouUtena posted:

This won't be too hard. Most people with Apples just want to surf the web and do Office type things, normal stuff.

Though getting an ultimatum from your parents for free support seems... lovely?

Your parents don't do the whole "I raised you and you want to make me pay you to fix this? You ungrateful child! I expect something for nothing!" guilt trip?

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

GWBBQ posted:

Stick it in the freezer overnight.

Make sure to put it in some kind of sealable static resistant bag.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

spankmeister posted:

this

its not very robust. at all.

Why don't you put in a helpdesk ticket then?

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > A toilet wasn't flushed...

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

fluppet posted:

A wild YOTJ appeared.

Just had a recruiter cold call me about a legit vacancy that I've seen advertised elsewhere. It matches my skills and has an acceptable increase in salary.
:wtc:

I got a cold call yesterday about 3 legit vacancies, two of which I turned down, one based on a friend saying "don't work there" and another based on the fact that it was 100% work from home. The third one sounded interesting enough and is an increase in salary.

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Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

SubjectVerbObject posted:

I would be interested in hearing more about why you would turn down a job because it was 100% work from home. Just curious because I recently started a new job where I am 100% VO. I'm enjoying it, but I am going a little stir crazy. Any experiences/advice?

Oh don't get me wrong. It's great at first. You can clean your house, do laundry, dishes, and what not while you're on conference calls or doing other things. But then you realize you're expected to work more than your in office counterparts who get to take long lunches, leave early, participate in fun stuff at the office... The loneliness also sets in, even if you're normally the computer geek that sits in the corner never talking to anyone. Finally you realize that you never can get away from work. It's there, in the corner, or wherever your desk, is waiting to pounce on you at the worst moment.

I could do 2 days a week of working from home no problem. It's worth the savings on gas, food, and time, but 5 days a week is just too much.