Storysmith posted:

For gently caress's sake, that article whines about using `ls *` in a script with "the `ls` is not very useful. It will just waste an extra process doing absolutely nothing." We're not paying by the PID here, people.

Crowley posted:

One of the helpdesk guys popped in with this week's installment of...

GUESS WHAT HAPPENED!
The game where stupid people makes you scratch your head.

In today's installment we're looking at a laptop keyboard. Support had already dismantled it before I snapped a picture. Pretend it's still mounted to the machine and the frame is intact.


Before you answer here's how it looks underneath.


and the money shot.


This week we're going easy on you. What the user says happened seems to be true, so we're only making one guess.
Ladies and gentlemen.. WHAT HAPPENED?

Crowley posted:

Ladies and gentlemen.. WHAT HAPPENED?

Kazinsal posted:

Looks like some sort of organic solvent a la nail polish remover to me.

burns_2k posted:

Nail polish remover spill?

Crowley posted:

Kidney Stone posted:

More poo poo that pisses you off: It's like a Kobe beeftop

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

Left baking in the sun in a hot car on a sunny day?

Edit:

Or was it struck by lighting. That would be neat.

Crowley posted:

A dropped bottle of nail polish remover is indeed the correct answer.

The acetone melted the keyboard to the chassis and the supporter had to pry it off. The user will end up with a replacement keyboard and getting the same laptop back.

Kidney Stone posted:

More poo poo that pisses you off: It's like a Kobe beeftop

Che Delilas posted:

"do they think this is a library?"

Che Delilas posted:

"do they think this is a library?"

Tailored Sauce posted:

Congrats Che, you literally work with Loud Howard.

Skandranon posted:

Did they actually tell you straight up that's what happened, or did you have to show them chemical swabs turning blue to force them to fess up?

Che Delilas posted:

My last job I worked for Loud Howard + PHB + Catbert mashed up into one person. At least this guy isn't my direct superior or responsible for my paychecks.

Dick Trauma posted:

One place I was stuck between the guy that would whistle off-key and out of tune all goddamn day and the other guy who would constantly argue over the phone with his wife, punctuating the discussion by repeatedly banging the desk with his fist.

Ynglaur posted:

Pissing me off:

• Certain legislation applies to a handful of employees, and requires training on certain topics.
  
• Don't bother identifying those employees; mandate that all employees take training.
  
• Penalty for failing to take training on time is immediate removal of network access.
  
• (Including access to the training system.)
  
• Have policy stating that 30 days notice will be given for this training.
  
• Actually give 4 days notice.
  
• (Assess no penalty for late notice to the group mandating the training.)
  
• Proceed to ask questions on quizzes that are not covered in any training material. Have employees make guesses as to the legal interpretation of certain terms.
  

I saw a cool idea a few years ago that IT security gets an annual budget. Any time they want to do something to take employee's time, that time gets charged to their budget. They can use the budget for anything IT security-related they want: software, hardware, armed guards in the data center, whatever. But taking people's time counts too.

Che Delilas posted:

Pissing me off: noise, and managerial responses to concerns about it.

I'm one of about a dozen developers working for a company where the software is the main product. We work in a single room that we share with everyone else (marketing, accounting, IT, support, etc). There are cubicles, or at least full-height walls made from cubicle material, that do a decent job of muffling the ambient noise level of 40 people working in an otherwise open space, at least to the point where headphones with music are enough to let us maintain our level of concentration.

At least, it was enough until they promoted the loudest, most gregarious man in the company to be the product owner of one of our products and moved him smack dab into the developer section, across from me on a diagonal. Our cubes are set up in a hallway arrangement, so developers face each other over our monitors. This guy talks at full volume to people across the hall, and over the wall to the next hall, all day. When he's not talking to someone specific, he narrates what he's doing or verbally reacts to something on his monitor.

The IT manager knows this is a problem because we've all come to him to bitch about it. When he brought it up to the project manager (a guy who works remotely, I might add), the project manager's reaction was, "do they think this is a library?"



The executives are apparently talking about getting rid of the cubicles and desks entirely in favor of a completely open space with long tables that we'd all share. The IT manager is going to fight it but I doubt he's going to win against this loving idiocy.

quote:

You obsessively protect both your nerd’s time and space. Until you’ve experienced the solving of a seemingly impossible problem, it’s hard to understand how far a nerd will go to protect his problem solving focus and you can help. The road to either High is a mental state traditionally called the Zone. There are three things to know about the Zone:

The almost-constant quest of the nerd is managing all the crap that is preventing us from entering the Zone as we search for the Highs. Meetings, casual useless fly-bys, biological nuisances, that mysterious knock-knock-knocking that comes from the ceiling tiles whenever the AC kicks in — what the nerd is doing in the first 15 minutes of getting in the Zone is building focus, and it’s a Jenga-like construction that small distractions can topple.
Every single second you allow a nerd to remain in the Zone is a second where something loving miraculous can occur.
As I’ve explained before, your nerd has built himself a Cave. It might not actually look like a cave, or maybe it does. The goal around its construction is simple: protect the Zone so we can chase the Highs. Stand up right now and walk to each of your nerds’ offices and spelunk the caves. Ask the question: “How are they protecting their focus?” Back to the door? Headphones? Massive screen real estate? You don’t have to ask a single question to begin to understand what your nerd does to protect his Cave. You need to ask…

What is your nerd’s hoodie? I write better when I’m wearing a hoodie. There’s something warm and cave-like about having my head surrounded — it gives me permission to ignore the world. Over time, those around me know that interrupting hoodie-writing is a capital offense. They know when I reach to pull the hoodie over my head that I’ve successfully discarded all distractions on the Planet Earth and am currently communing with the pure essence of whatever I’m working on.

It’s irrational and it’s delicious.

Your nerd has a hoodie. It’s a visual cue to stay away as they chase their Highs and your job is both identification and enforcement. I don’t know your nerds, so I don’t know what you’ll discover, but I am confident that these hoodie-like obsessions will often make no sense to you – even if you ask. Yes, there will always Mountain Dew nearby. Of course, we will never be without square pink Post-its.

Don’t sweat it. Support it. Also, understand the interesting potentially negative by-products of all this nerdery, such as…

mewse posted:

This guy sounds like he's never experienced programming flow and how disruptive distractions are.

mewse posted:

The guy who replaced me at my last job had my old workstation die on him, and he couldn't fix it, and he quit inside of a week

SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:

I got a call from a trader once that his phone was broken. It was an Aastra 57i, it has a 4" LCD screen on it. I came onsite with a replacement phone, and the LCD was smashed in and the speaker side of the receiver was shattered. I asked him what happened, and he said "Nothing. The phone was not broken before, and the phone is broken now." Then he just turned away from me and didn't speak about it any more.

wolrah posted:

What is it with people in the financial industry? I have a few mortgage companies as customers and between them I can point to about a half dozen users who have gone through multiple phones this year in basically the same way. I honestly don't know how they do it, I put some dents in my desk with a Polycom handset but these guys sometimes manage to crack them in half.

Swink posted:

The first thing I'm doing on your good internet is tricking people into sending me money.


Forgive the sales talk, but does anyone have a recommendation for some scanning 'workflow' software? We're going to be doing a non-trivial amount of scanning in our org and we need software that can take the scanned image from our MFDs, convert it to OCR'd PDF and deliver it to \\server\\share\%username%.

We run Papercut so ideally it would play nicely with that.

We have four sites so we'd want to processing to happen locally rather than having to travel over the WAN to get processed and then delivered back.


Does a product like this exist?