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They are pushing BYOD phones at work really hard, if we use our own phone, then we save a whopping 30 bucks a month on our phone bill. I'm holding on to my BB Curve right now as I like have a separate phone from my personal one, as I can turn off the work phone if I'm on vacation. I'm not sure what they'll do when this thing finally dies, maybe they just won't give me another phone.
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Oct 24, 2013 06:28
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nitrogen posted:Nothing kills that warm feeling for your employer like being asked to work over a weekend so that a client can get an environment that it absolutely must have on Tuesday... How can overtime be retroactively denied? You worked it, you should get paid.
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Oct 27, 2013 07:18
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anthonypants posted:The lead sysadmin's response is that "it's e-mail, not instant messaging." Used to have a person who would treat the instant in IM as that means the other person would instantly reply back. I was working on an issue once that was kinda important and an IM showed up from a coworker in another building. I looked at it, went back to what I was doing. Another IM. Couple of minutes later, another. Then an email showed up with the IM text pasted in. I went to type in the IM window that I'm busy when my phone rang on its second line. Ignored that, set IM to DND. Then a coworker came over and asked if I was busy because this person asked them to tell me they needed to talk to me. I told them I was busy and I'll get to it later. 20 minutes later my boss comes by and says he got a call from that person saying I was ignoring them, and that the complain to him was CC'd to every manager in IT.
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Oct 30, 2013 06:07
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I'm starting to think my boss is losing his mind. He mentioned on Monday that I was joining a bunch of other IT people as we convert a new location to our network next week. This is apparently an all weekend thing, and unlike everyone else, I have to drive the 8 hours to get there, while they fly. I'm not really upset about driving, its just the notice is really short for working over the weekend. Also I have a PS4 arriving on Friday.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:00
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I'm paid hourly while driving, we use rental cars and company pays for everything. It is one of the few things they get right, as they are fair with traveling. Also its all interstate driving, so I'll just put in audiobooks and stare at the majesty of eastern Wyoming as it flies by at 75. Good time to bring along my new camera I guess. Now it kinda makes sense why he asked a week or so if I had any major plans in the next few weeks.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:32
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I'm on a conference call and one of the guys keeps saying the word Cloud, and I'm mentally replacing it with the the word Butt.
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Nov 7, 2013 22:57
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I managed to drain the batteries on my headset twice today from conference calls I didn't need to be on.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:34
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psydude posted:The notion that computers are only for nerds only applies to people over the age of 35. Millenials actually think geeky/nerdy poo poo is cool, From what I've seen, not really. People are going to use Twitter/Facebook/etc, but not a lot of people are going to transition their ability to post dozens of times on Facebook in a day to learning how websites work. This isn't any specific to Millenials, its just how people use computers. More people use them, but probably not many of them understand the computers more then the bare minimum. I've got coworkers who spends hundreds on a new smartphone, hundreds more a year on a plan, and never use it beyond texting, calling, listening to music, and occasionally looking up something online.
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Nov 10, 2013 08:35
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Powdered Toast Man posted:Well, I have now seen a Harris SS7 switching system I'm pretty sure was older than me and is still in production. We currently have a pair of rotary dial telephones hooked up to our Avaya phone system. Each of those phones is older then a significant percentage of the employees in the building.
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Nov 17, 2013 07:25
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Volmarias posted:Why would a modern phone system that isn't "the phone company" still support pulse dialing? There isn't anything really special about it, Avaya makes adapters for analog phones. They were originally pulled out of storage to mess with people during phone demos. When people arrived to get a demo for the new phone system and see what we were replacing a 12+ year old NEC system with and we revealed the new phones as a 30 year old rotary phone.
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Nov 18, 2013 05:43
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I wish I knew when planning went out the door at work. We are rushing through a project so fast that we barely have time to arrange the trip before we have to leave. I'm surprised it hasn't blown up in our faces yet. I've got a 4 day trip next week that I found out I was part of on Thursday. Thankfully the cold will subside during the week so I don't have to travel when its below zero.
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Dec 8, 2013 07:51
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So work is trying to encourage people to jump on the BYOD plan for cell phones, with them paying a portion of the bill. I've been avoiding doing this since I like having a divide between work and home, but since they've started this push, they've stopped upgrading company phones. I've got an ancient BB Curve 8830 that seems to be on its last legs, but they don't want to replace it. Which seems kinda silly that I'm expected to have a tool for work, but they don't want to pay for it. Anyone else going through something like this?
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Dec 23, 2013 06:42
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:It should be a crime to not say how much a job pays. One of our good managers left a month ago. Apparently things go well up until the pay part comes up. They've had to beg most of them to come back for the 2nd interview. Apparently having someone be a technical manager for 3 departments, with 3 submanagers and somewhere around 20 people, 50k isn't cutting it. Which means when they find some poor sap to take this position, its going to be really loving hilarious. At least for people who don't have to work for them.
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Dec 24, 2013 06:03
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Thats good to know about those RS-232 adapters. The new laptops we are likely to get don't have serial ports. Its not like we should order laptops to fit different needs of a group, one laptop works for everyone, right?
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Feb 16, 2014 02:47
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Sickening posted:Texas (DFW area) From talking to boat owners, go to Europe.
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Mar 18, 2014 16:48
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Alright let's assume this twitter talk isn't a prank. Who I should be following? Search on twitter for things or people you think are interesting. Adjust from there.
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Apr 10, 2014 17:31
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The last couple of weeks at work have been strange and just depressing. A long time coworker and previously my direct supervisor turned in notice and has moved to what sounds like an incredible job. He's been with this company for 15 years, knows a ton and more importantly, was a good person to work with. The people who know what is going on (everyone but management) are pretty worried, as no one else has his skillset and ability to use common loving sense to deal with problems. When he left our department, a coworker took over and he's one of more difficult people I've ever worked with. It was bad enough when I worked with him, working for is beyond frustrating. He is the 2nd high level IT guy to leave in 6 months, both of them left because of upper management being pants on head and not seeing a fix for it. So now morale is in the shitter since we can all see things aren't going to improve in regards to wages/staffing. So far, the only response from up top is to bring in a consultant to examine departments and make recommendations which will likely be ignored. A coworker is currently out with appendicitis and I'm envious of him.
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Apr 16, 2014 04:33
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SubjectVerbObject posted:I think people want to be managers due to the prestige and pay, but don't know how or don't want to manage people. So they do the next best(worst) thing, which is manage data. Rather than leading their folks to increase customer satisfaction, they say "your rating on customer satisfaction surveys must be 4.5/5 or higher, or you will be disciplined" and then the responsibility is completely on the employee to get the number above 4.5. It doesn't matter how that happens, or if the number reflects reality. All that matters is them being able to tell their boss that the numbers targets were hit. That has pretty much been the death of our competent help desk many years ago. When I started there, there wasn't really a good metric for calls, just a grade of service that we had to keep above a certain easy to obtain percentage. People could actually handle the call, fix things, or at least help people along until it could be escalated. At one point, a lot of people (myself included) moved to new positions, and people left faster then could be hired, so the HD ended up losing a lot of knowledge that took awhile to be replaced. That could be fixed, but during this time, we had more complaints then usual about the help desk. The IT manager decided it was time to really go apeshit with metrics and unfortunately, people were rated by # of calls, not by actually fixing things. We used to use HD people on trips as an extra pair of hands, and also for training as having people see how users work and talking to them directly is something I feel is important. Both sides get a reminder that the other is human, and you can solve a ton of issues by just being there. However, keeping up call stats is apparently far more important the fixing things so those calls don't happen. I think at just about every level in IT, actually meeting users is pretty important thing, even if you aren't actually there to fix things. We have people trying to write policy for software they've never ran, can't understand and haven't even seen running in the wild. Also, Macallan 12 year is goddamn fantastic and well worth the 70 bucks. CitizenKain fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 06:11
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I think my direct supervisor is going insane. Last week, he asked me to get someone to take a picture of an network cabinet that wasn't closed all the way. He told me to get someone on premise to do it, but I figured since our other IT department is literally across the street, I'd get one of them to do it, that way they might even be able to fix it. So I arrange that, then I have to hit to road for another project. This morning, he complains about what happened, and why I didn't get the picture and I said I asked someone in IT to get it, but they must have gotten busy and I'd ask again, so he storms off saying thats why I shouldn't have called them. I find out later that he'd gotten the picture of the cabinet on Friday, and no one has yet figured out why he was upset. Or if he was upset. All of us were confused. This is after sending me to a site to install a fan in a network cabinet, having never done this, I asked if I needed any extra tools, he said only a screwdriver was necessary, as the knockouts on top only take a little work to open. As it turns out, you likely need a rubber mallet and a long rigid screwdriver, plus some pliers to work on the knockouts, or maybe a dremel to buzz down the metal holding the knockouts in. I mention this to him and he says "Yea, you should have had better tools, they can be hard to get out." Apparently as a network administrator I'm expect to carry a full set of tools with me at all times.
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May 6, 2014 03:11
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Collateral Damage posted:It's probably because the hardware in their Blackberries is two years old and has thus bricked itself like pretty much every Blackberry we've used has done within 1 to 12 months after its warranty expires. I have a Curve 8330 that will likely outlive me at this point. Company is pushing everyone into using their personal device and MobileIron, I feel as though if a cellphone is required for my job, they should loving buy it.
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May 8, 2014 03:42
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skipdogg posted:I agree with you, as long as your OK getting the crappiest free phone with 2 year contract we can order. We moved to Buy Your Own Device about 3 years ago as people stopped wanting the company provided Blackberry and expected us to start buying and paying for their high end iPhone and Android devices. Now our policy is we pay the bill, you buy the hardware. You don't want to pay for hardware you can get whatever phone is free with contract. There is usually a 2 gen old iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry refurb to choose from in the free tier. If you want that new iPhone 5S 64GB that will be 399 plus tax and I'll need you to stop by my desk with your credit card. I certainly wouldn't expect the top end phone, just like I don't expect to get the fanciest laptop. Really, if they came in and said "Here is an iPhone 5c 16g", that would be perfect. I don't need the top end phone to do this job, but if they expect me to read my email and stay in touch on the road, then the tool they hand me should be capable of it. wintermuteCF posted:So CitizenKain, I'd be interested to know if you work for a company whose name is three letters and does engineering and was famous for doing logistics for the Army in Iraq, because my dad's company just killed off their BES (I think the deadline is tomorrow) and is giving employees an allowance for buying a new smartphone so they can use ActiveSync via MobileIron. Nope, large regional bank in the US.
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May 8, 2014 18:42
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sanchez posted:Do you really want to carry two phones though? An BYOD allowance that covers some/most of your personal plan seems like a better option. Yea, I'm fine with carrying two phones. The big advantage to having a work phone is if I'm on vacation I leave it behind and that's it. The work/life balance thing at work isn't getting better, and everything I can do to keep a wall between the two I'll do. Ynglaur posted:At least in the United States, if they make it a condition of your employment, they must provide it. Or so I recall being told by a lawyer about 20 years ago. Its not required from what I can tell, its just I have to travel at times, and its helpful to be able to call people and answer emails. Technically, they have provided me a phone anyway, so I'll just keep using it until it dies completely or the BES does, then I'll let people not make a decision about it for months.
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May 9, 2014 02:39
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So I'm onsite this weekend to help bring up the network at a recent acquisition. Initially I was supposed to patch in network cables, but the group deploying the computers that would use those cables arrived 4 days before I did, so they put them in. So now I'm supposed to clean up the cablesand make them look pretty, but we will have to come back in a few months to remove old equipment, so any cleanup I do now will be moot when we come back. So now I'm to setup some video equipment, and then just visit locations and help out. But I am not familiar with what the setup process is because no one figured I need to know it. On the other hand, we are staying in a resort town on a lake and the room I'm in is almost as large as my apartment. Almost makes me wish I was still able to travel for fun, but traveling constantly has ruined that.
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May 17, 2014 05:21
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mewse posted:Re-doing the patch panel with velcro and correct cabling shouldn't be made moot by old equipment being removed soon, should it? I finally got back and can catch up on this, but essentially the existing racks are a nightmare, so we have some long runs from the patch panels to our existing equipment. What doesn't help, and isn't surprising, is that not enough cables were ordered, so the first crew ran out of 3 and 5 foot cables early, so a few locations are rocking 7 and 14's. I'll have to see if I have a good example picture that doesn't ID the building. However, enough poo poo exploded over the weekend so I didn't spend time cleaning up cables, and was busy on other things, so at least it wasn't boring. Also, the hotel/resort we were staying at has free BBQ grills for guests, so we would head to a grocery store, fill a cart with steaks and beer, and grill outside. That part was nice.
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May 22, 2014 01:45
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sfwarlock posted:Pissing me off today: having to watch an awesome person walk because there was no room for advancement. That's been us recently. Couple of IT people, even our admin/secretary person left because they kept adding responsibilities for accounting, but didn't want to pay beyond someone to answer the phone and watch a door. When they asked for more money, they were told that the position didn't have room for advancement because no one thought about it before, and told the person to wait until they do the end of year review. Zamujasa posted:I've been considering doing this for a long time because my current workplace is a mismanaged mess and there's been no real progression in my work for over a year, but I'm not sure where to go or what to do next, so I've mostly just been stagnating and getting burned out. If my department wasn't me and 2 other people, I'd think we work for the same place.   CitizenKain fucked around with this message at 21:10 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 21:04
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I always enjoy our constant cycle of senior management asking why we don't have spare equipment on hand at major locations that we would could quickly configure to replace failed hardware. Then handing them a quote saying they would need to buy more equipment. They say its too much, then drop the idea. Next time something breaks, cycle starts anew.
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May 29, 2014 04:37
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baquerd posted:You know your day is going well when you spend an hour talking to sales and marketing about what you can do about getting around limitations of the speed of light and whether radio waves really travel at that exact speed. I would love to have a call like that.
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Jun 3, 2014 21:19
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Why is communication so loving difficult for my boss. He seems to carry on conversations in his head with us where he goes over what he wants, gives us some vague hint at what he wants and then wanders away. When things don't happen like he expects, he gets pissy and explains that he told us what he wants and we just didn't listen. So, couple of weeks ago, he has me mock up a thing in Visio from a drawing he has on his desk. I throw it together really quick and then hit the road to work on a project. Today he comes by and asks why I didn't finish the drawing, as he asked me to not only do the drawing, but trace the cables to where they end up. I head in, trace a bunch, add them to a diagram and hand it back. He asks why I didn't follow the connections to the network taps and trace them from there. I'm sure in his head, he explained what he wanted to me, but goddamn I wish he'd relay that to the real me. However, nowhere near as bad as Rogue at least.
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Jun 12, 2014 05:49
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Company finally made a decision about what they are doing with company provided cell phones and BYOD, and its even better then I imagined. Currently, many of us are handed ancient blackberries because we either travel, have to work remotely, are on call, or want to feel like special snowflakes. A BYOD thing has been in testing for a couple of months, where you get MobileIron installed, and get a sandboxed mail client in there, in return we get to reimburse up to $50 a month. I never got around to this as I like the disconnect between work and home, and honestly the Blackberry is good enough. So today, the news comes out for how the company is handling this, you either put MobileIron on your phone and take the $50 reimbursement, or you go to StraightTalk and pick up something and get reimbursed for that amount. They didn't mention if they would pay for the phone, but I'm going with no. I said if that was the case, I wasn't going to get a work cell phone, and my boss got quiet. He said that I would need a phone, and I told him I agree with that, so they should pay for one. I ask if we would later on be asked to help chip in and pay for the electricity bills at work. He says that isn't similar at all and walks off. I feel that if work requires me to have a cell phone, then they should pay for it. After all, they want me to do computer things, but I don't have to buy my own laptop (yet). Company is worth billions, we are having strong profits every quarter, yet lets cheap out on this.
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Jun 13, 2014 01:45
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Rawrbomb posted:They should buy you your phone, if they refuse go find a WP 521 off ebay, etc for 50~ dollars and put it on the cheapest T-Mobile pre-paid plan, it'll be 50 dollars almost on the dot. Maybe 56 after taxes. T-Mobile service up here is really bad, Verizon is pretty much it if you want your phone to work more then in town. I've found some StraightTalk plans for cheap, I'm sure a Android 2.3 phone would be perfect for this.
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Jun 13, 2014 02:19
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Stanos posted:If that's all you're getting and expected to actually pick it up, I'd find a cheap android phone and go with straight talk. Actually, I'd probably complain more first since it's a super lovely deal. My plan is to do nothing about this at all until they shutdown the BES server. Then I'm going to continue doing nothing until I'm forced to. If I need to pick up a phone, I do have an old rear end Motorola Android laying around, plus I'm not sure MobileIron will even run on a 2.3 device, so win/win.
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Jun 13, 2014 04:29
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myron cope posted:So is the idea of a cheap T-mobile "work phone" just that you can turn it off? Reimbursing $50 means they only get to call you at certain hours? I'm just missing the point (not saying there isn't one). I already have a cell phone. If the company I work for then starts paying $50...they expect me to answer 24/7? Where does getting a cheap phone with a separate number make a difference in their expectations? If I have it off, I'm sure the next conversation is "we need you available to answer emails/calls when we email/call you". Is that just the point where you tell them to pound sand? The thing that is most confusing about this is the powers that be is they don't know what they want either. They want people on call, but only a few groups have enough people to have an effective on-call rotation, but anything that really goes pear shaped will involve the groups that aren't on call. So many the phones are an attempt to get more people on call. We are pretty much running into a case where we are actually big grown up company, but the C levels like pretending we are actually a smaller company because it looks better on advertisements. This mainly shows in IT stuff, we have no troubles buying the equipment we need, but getting the people to run it is a problem, as asking for manpower is rejected because having lots of people looks bad apparently.
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Jun 17, 2014 06:04
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Daylen Drazzi posted:On Monday a nasty storm came rolling through the area and knocked my building off commercial power. No biggy - we have a metric gently caress-ton of batteries that are more than capable of handling the load for the 30 seconds it takes our generators to spin up. Go check the server farm and everything looks peachy. Go home with no worries. Can I have you call Cisco in my stead from now on? I opened a TAC case with them about a Cisco videoconference system that supposedly was losing audio during a call. I checked everything I could remotely, even had people use different equipment on the hdmi port. I opened the case expecting to get "Hey, give us the config and status files, we'll ship a new one and call it a day." Instead, I'm asked to get a goddamn packet capture, because apparently somewhere in the network stream that says to drop audio, but leave video perfect. I miss working with old company that handled Tandberg units, any problems with the units and I'd receive a new one the next day. With Cisco it takes 3 days of arguing with support for them to ship me a replacement system, then they get pissy when they haven't received the defective one in 1 day.
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Jun 27, 2014 06:51
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guppy posted:It actually annoys me that IT is the one field where all responsibility for professional development is put on the worker. Yea, what is even worse about it is a ton of training beyond entry level stuff is insanely expensive. Since I know work will never pay for a SANS course for anyone but 1-2 specific people, I'm out ever getting that. Coworker wants to take the VCP, keeps getting stonewalled. However we did manage to send some managers across country for a vendor "training" thing that somehow involves going to a NFL game.
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Jun 30, 2014 04:01
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Weatherman posted:CitizenKain, I just happened across your tales of BYOD fun and wondered what you ended up doing about your work phone. Company made a decision that we get 2 options: 1. Take calls on our personal phone for $40 a month, or calls and emails for $50. 2. Get a StraightTalk plan, get $50 a month for the service, but the company will only cover up to $20 on actually buying a phone. For a fun time, look at what phones are for sale on StraightTalk's plan for under $20 dollars. The only good news is someone up top managed to figure out a way automatically credit people's account instead of us filling out a expense reimbursement every month, and then waiting 2 weeks for the money to show up. I realized that I can't really fight this, the decision was made before it ever got to us, the biggest supporters of it are all people in my management line. Now we just have to hope the BYOD laptop thing doesn't happen.
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Jun 30, 2014 18:39
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Caged posted:There is no way that giving people no money at all to go and buy a Best Buy shitbox will result in a bunch of Windows 8 non-Pro machines appearing and being wholly unsuitable for any sort of actual work. I think it would be restricted to IT only. People seem to think Citrix is the answer for everything, so the actual machine doesn't matter.
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Jun 30, 2014 18:59
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Most of my vacation in the last handful of years has been simple weekend extensions where I drive home to help/visit my parents. I travel often for work, which has really ruined me for travel, as any trip feels like I'm going somewhere to work. I still hope to get down to Yellowstone Park in August, but I have this feeling that we'll get dumped into some projects by then.
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Jul 2, 2014 03:35
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In a sign that everything is perfect in the world and all our problems are solved, at the whim of "Fitness and Health Coordinator", IT was forced to push out a new desktop wallpaper to everyone in the company. The image is one of those word bubbles with a dozen or so different exercises shaped around someone doing a pushup. According to people on the help desk, they were barraged by calls about this morning because everyone hates the image, since its really distracting and looks terrible, and you can't remove it unless you have local admin rights. When the picture was rolled out, there was an email that said "Contact us with feedback about the image!", so a help desker did and said that lots of people were calling about it. The Fitness person got butthurt about this and went crying to management, who then dumped a ton a poo poo on the help desk person. Good reminder that when people say they want feedback, they only want things they want to hear. *corrected image to wallpaper to solve confusion CitizenKain fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 03:23
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Sickening posted:So what was their gripe? How dare you forward feedback? I'm not really sure, my friend isn't great at using tact, but I have a feeling the Fitness person took it a personal insult.
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Jul 8, 2014 03:33
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Sorry about the confusion on that, long boring day.
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Jul 8, 2014 04:35
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