More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

I've had one system, part of the new online/mobile rollout we're doing, change names 4 times in 2 weeks, depending entirely on which yahoo you're talking to. The Integration Web Server is either IWS (integrated Web Services), FGS (gateway server), SFX (gently caress me running I have no idea) or Integration. But integration includes the ESB (enterprise service bus) service as well, and part of THAT includes ESM (enterprise service management) and then you've got the actual online and app components of the actual product and *those* have different names and I swear to god it sounds like I'm making this up but i'm not and :negative:

# ¿ Oct 16, 2013 05:35

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 23:26

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

DrAlexanderTobacco posted:

One of the hotels we support uses PMS software from a tiny company in New Zealand. We're in the UK.

One o the banking systems we were considering switching to is based in New Zealand. I'm in Edmonton, AB. The PoC we did involved way too much International Date Line, I'm really glad we didn't go with that product.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 18:58

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Booze chat:
America. Drop the embargo on Cuba. Trust me on this. White sand beaches, gorgeous women, excellent food and the Rum and Cigars. Ahhhhh the rum and cigars.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2013 06:34

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

I work at a Credit Union. Our dress code is 'business casual' for the most part, especially in IS. Most days it's khakis/dress pants and a button up shirt, ties are pretty rare except among the management types and the try-hards.

I've been freaking everyone out by wearing a tie every day so far this week.

I got ties for Christmas, and I like looking good. No I don't have a job interview.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2014 22:25

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

I have never hated anything as much as I hate ALM 11.5

# ¿ Jan 17, 2014 17:11

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Giant, game changing roll-out of new online banking system tomorrow 1900-0900.

Two new products, online and mobile banking, including new security features and an alert system that emails you for events.

"Gold" code was a month ago, they've been working on this release for 14 months.

Guess who just got a couple panic emails about a "new version" of the code that needs to go in.

Oh and alerts are broken for a whole subset of accounts that should have been tested but our QA department is staffed and run by morons.

Tomorrow is going to be a blast.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2014 06:21

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

It must be bitchy boss monday, mine was being an utter asswipe today too. He sent an email at 3:20am last night about the membership of the domain admins group, then sent another email at 8:30 this morning berating the whole team for 'reacting' to his email and removing accounts. Now half our team can't do anything because we use domain admin to, oh I dunno, log into domain controllers and do AD poo poo. (Separate Admin and user level accounts)
Fun part is the last edit on the domain admins group was last night at 3:22am. So strong evidence points to my boss having a fugue state and dicking with production systems at gently caress off o'clock in the morning, then trying to duck the blame.

We then got a super pissy passive aggressive email about 1pm today about "Following Process" and "Thinking before Acting", that was CC'd to the VP and Director. I'm looking forward to the team meeting tomorrow.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2014 08:18

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

I just got an email past midnight on a Sunday night in which someone had some, admittedly quite legitimate, questions. These were all addressed to other people. The entirety of the email which addressed me was "Stripe - stand by please"

Guys what am I even supposed to do, what is standing by? Can I go to bed? This is kinda important, please respond.

I got a similar one recently - on call phone rings, they ask me to log in, get on VPN and contact one of the DBAs.
So I do, and he says on Lync 'Hey, I might need your help in a minute, wanted you close by'
So I sat there for 20 minutes, DBA saying nothing, then he goes offline. I waited another 10 minutes and said gently caress It, logged off, charged my minimum 2 hour on call amount and buggered off back downstairs to watch Castle.

Never heard another thing about it.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2014 06:42

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

UFOTofuTacoCat posted:

The best April fools prank I've seen at work was someone putting notes on copiers saying they are now voice activated and to place your paper on the copier and tell it how many copies you want. Several people fell for it.

This worked on precisely 3 people in 2 departments this year: Marketing and Project Management. Exactly as expected.

# ¿ May 1, 2014 17:19

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

loving DFS. Not even really DFS itself, but user file management. I'm in charge of moving all the user and shared data from 34 geographically distant (province wide) branches into one central file solution. Problem is the old branch servers are on a different domain, and the fastest pipe we have between branches is 10/1. Then I have users with gigs and gigs of personal pictures and documents, one lady even had 1.2GB of PIANO MUSIC PDFs. This is without mentioning 3-5GB PST files scattered about. And the complete lack or organization makes it impossible to keep track of who owns what - if you've been given a 'JSmith' folder mapped to your O:, why the gently caress did you feel the need to make "JohnSmith" and "John's Docs" and "John's Work Files" on the root of the shared drive. Why the gently caress did you have permissions to do that anyways? And why the gently caress were you able to remove every single other ACL from a folder? Who told you how/why/what ARGH!

All of this would be manageable if I had time and the power to fix things. But I don't - I've been told in no uncertain terms that I am not to impact the user experience in any way. Drive letters cannot change. Information access cannot change. (Relative) file locations cannot change. The users should ideally not even realize that anything is different. I don't even know.

# ¿ May 13, 2014 22:11

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

poo poo that doesn't piss me off? PVS on fusionIO cards with a 10Gb backplane.

poo poo that does piss me off? Citrix.... Man I miss view.

We're in the middle of a switch from Citrix WinXP to View Win7, and man is it sweet. Dynamic window resizing! No terrible farm management! Remote connections! Clipboard use!

# ¿ May 15, 2014 17:14

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

ZeitGeits posted:

There is a .NET api for WSUS you can call from powershell. It's been a few years since I administrated a windows environment, so I can't help you beyond directing you to the msdn pages for it.

I use PoshWSUS for all my powershell WSUS needs. The code below is what we use to decline Itanium and ia64 updates since we have none of those in our organization, but I'm sure you can tweak it to decline superseded updates etc.

code:

Import-Module PoshWSUS 
Connect-poshWSUSServer -wsusserver $serverFQDN -port 80

# Get All the updates that are not already declined and have ia64 OR itanium (case insensitive Regular Expression) in the title, decline them

$Decline = Get-poshWSUSUpdate | where { -not $_.Isdeclined -and $_.Title -match �ia64|itanium�} | Deny-poshWSUSUpdate

# Prepare the e-mail Body, with some prefix text, a declined updates table and a footer text, as HTML

$Body = $decline | ConvertTo-Html -PreContent �$($Decline.count) updates has been declined on $($Wsus.Name)<hr>� -PostContent �<hr>Disk space will be freed only at next Cleanup� | out-string

# Then send an e-mail using Powershell 2.0 native cmdlet

Send-MailMessage -To $whoever -From $WSUSServer -Subject �WSUS declined updates� -BodyAsHtml -Body $Body -SmtpServer $SMTPserverFQDN -Priority Low

# ¿ Jun 9, 2014 22:47

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

totalnewbie posted:

Our web filter is god awful.

We had to get a special exception for http://www.msexchange.org/ but then again, I can see how mSexChange.org might get caught up in the filters.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 21:55

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

I've gotten to the point where I drink straight from the growler. If I'm feeling fancy I take it out of the paper bag first.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 07:45

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

spog posted:

I am guessing that in your country, 'growler' means a bottle of some kind?

Cause in mine, it means 'a lady's bits' and I am all confused and want to come to your parties.

Half gallon glass jugs of delicious tap fresh draft. There's a number of places here in town (Edmonton, AB) that fill them for around $11-$20 depending on the beer. Mostly I just get mine filled with the local lager, Yellowhead, because I am a simpleton that appreciates a simple beer.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 18:20

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

EV certs are the scammiest scam that ever scammed

...said the risk analyst at a financial institution

# ¿ Aug 11, 2014 21:51

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Manslaughter posted:

But by implementing agile framework we can enhance consumer satisfaction and synergize support team and front-end experiences. Butt.

Cloud to Butt just keeps on giving.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 20:30

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Sirotan posted:

Solo admining day 3 trip report:

The EVP bought me lunch (expensive sashimi) to say she appreciated how 'professionally' I've handled the week so far. Also, the CEO came into my office and not only said my name, but also told me "thank you". It freaked me out a little. I think they're terrified I'm going to quit.

47 open tickets when I left at the end of the day. An all time high since instituting the ticketing system.

I started a new position at the same company 2 months ago. When I left my old team, there were 4 people and 8 unassigned tickets. There's now 3 people and *140* unassigned tickets. Another guy is leaving at the end of the month.

My new manager told me that under no circumstances, whatsoever, at all, was I to entertain any offers to return to that team. No matter what.

I like my new manager.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 04:20

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:

I just got an email invite with less than two hours notice, where every other attendee (there are about 15 others) is an assistant director or higher-level manager, with the subject of "Demo" and no text in it.

Wish me luck!

I once got a 10 minute notice "EMERGENCY MEETING" where I was the only one on the list that wasn't a Senior VP or higher. Turns out the new Chief HR guy had the same First name and first 3 of the Last name as me, and in the panic to discuss our CEO putting in his notice they just tab selected me into the meeting invite.

I didn't show but I *did* have some juicy gossip to share for a couple hours.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2015 23:04

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

ConfusedUs posted:

I know, right?

She was old and kind of confused and wouldn't get off the line, so my supervisor at the time actually looked up the emergency number for her location and called them himself.

0118 999 881 999 119 725 ........ 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ

# ¿ Feb 2, 2015 20:59

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

captkirk posted:

Wait. Is being taken to the gun range a bad thing? I'd love to get taken to the gun range, then I'd know if there was a decent gun range within reasonable driving distance.

This depends entirely upon which end of the gun range you'll be asked to stand at.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2015 16:18

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Spam Chat

We set up a new relay last year for sending emails to customers. Infrastructure thought Network was securing it. Network thought Infrastructure was securing it. The relay went live.
A year later, after multiple "Bad performance" tickets, someone finally looks at the relay. Unsecured. On the internet. Sending 250k emails a day on average. Network blames infrastructure. Infrastructure blames Network. Risk (me) fixes it.

...

2 days later we get Spamhaus blacklisted. No external email, full stop.

It's been a fun week for email.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2015 17:36

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

good lord
I just got the outgoing Director's Surface Pro back to scrub it and give it to him as a 'parting gift'.
So he gives me this bag with the surface in it, and says "I have all my passwords written down on a sheet of paper in the pocket" and he gives me a loving *WINK*.
And he means all of his passwords. Surface, email, facebook, banking, amazon, ebay, it goes on and on.

Like dude. If you ever lost this bag you would be proper hosed. Proper. hosed.

gently caress. why.

Antioch fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Mar 25, 2015

# ¿ Mar 25, 2015 21:02

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

I bought a french press, a burr grinder, and a kitchen scale *specifically* for work. The drip "coffee" that we have comes from the office supply store, and asking people to drink it can be considered a god damned war crime.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2015 22:43

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Inspector_666 posted:

I want to get a burr grinder but they're all so drat expensive.

I bought a manual one. I only make 2-3 cups a day, so it's not too bad.

Kind of like this:
http://www.amazon.ca/Hario-Coffee-Hand-Grinder-Skerton/dp/B001802PIQ

# ¿ Mar 30, 2015 22:57

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:

Devs: Oh, well we didn't do anything except totally change that file, how could that do it?

The scariest emails I have ever received start with the phrase "So we were poking around..."

# ¿ Mar 31, 2015 22:16

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

GOOCHY posted:

I (briefly) worked for a company that called their employees "members".

Mmmmmmm, cult-y.

Credit Union? All our customers are members, and since all the staff have accounts that makes us all members too, so we have Member Service.

The 12 year old in me giggles at 'Servicing the Members' every time.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 02:14

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

flosofl posted:

I used to work in a very large bank doing Info Sec, and that version of OS/2 was a hardened as gently caress version of a rock solid OS. From an OS perspective, we never had much to worry about OS/2 being much of an attack vector. HOWEVER, it was slowly phased out for business reasons as it couldn't do fancy graphics (like ad-space) or touch-screen. I expect Windows XP to be around for awhile, since banks are extremely conservative regarding change and the validation for ATM OS can take years. I imagine it's similar for Windows XP based POS systems.

I work at an FI, and we are just now looking into upgrading our ATM software to Windows 7 from XP. Its a 2 year process, minimum, and we only have ~150 ATMs.
That being said, we have a robust firewall system solely for the ATMs, with port monitoring/lockdown and ACLs.

The only reason the upgrade is being pushed is because Marketing wants to be able to change the branding and advertising for our campaigns. :smith:

# ¿ Apr 6, 2015 02:17

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Ynglaur posted:

Sure thing. While we're busy doing jobs that aren't our own, here are my car keys. Please have my car pulled around at 5:00pm sharp.

I'm sure I've told this story before.

At the old company before our merger, the Chief um... Governance Officer I think (we called him the Chief Executive of catering and Bus tours) came by Helpdesk on a sunny Thursday afternoon. He wanders in and finds Ken, one of the meekest, nicest people I have ever met. Puts $20 on the table along with his car keys and says, I poo poo you not, "I need you to wash my car and get it filled up, I'm leaving for the day in an hour" and walks away.

Ken, being meek and nice, just...goes and does it. No questions asked. I like to think if it had been me, I would have re-enacted the parking attendant scene from Ferris Bueller.

Anyway, a happy ending - The exec got his rear end chewed out by our CEO over it when found out.

A less than happy final scene though - the exec quit later that year, and is now serving on our board of directors and making a run for MLA in Alberta.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2015 17:45

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Fuckin' bitlocker on the surfaces. Man. I had to set up 12 of those fuckers for our Board, with bitlocker. I had to fight management to get them encrypted, then fight the machines themselves to actually implement the encryption. And then in the end it doesn't loving matter because our 84 year old board chair just writes down all his loving passwords on a piece of paper that he stores in the same bag as the Surface.

Decent machines though. I'd use one.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 06:19

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

lampey posted:

We just started using some domain joined surfaces with a cellular modem. It works great. The bitlocker key
gets stored in AD and they are more easily integrated with our environment

Ha ha ha ha ha, AD joining. No, if I joined these to the domain then the board would have to abide by our password policy and that means Password15 or Sprinkles (it's my cat's name!) wouldn't work as passwords and THAT, well, that's not something we're willing to do because if your Board isn't happy then nobody is happy.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 17:55

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Scaramouche posted:

Unrelated, and out of the blue, but I've been enjoying sitting around doing nothing (got the new-to-me Brandon Sanderson book, it's like a million pages),

If it's the Stormlight books, I envy you getting to read them for the first time. That's good readin'.

Congratulations on your (f)unemployment. Enjoy it while it lasts.

# ¿ May 2, 2015 23:35

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

4 months ago, we started putting together a new rule set for our transaction monitoring software. This required an update from RSA, which we got after working with them. All very pleasant, no issues.
We get the new ruleset and software update into our Dev environment with no problems. I send in a ticket to get the software listed in our environment management. That never ends up happening, but whatever. We'll come back to that later.
We get to testing in a new environment, and someone has taken away all my permissions to access the test environment, so I can't install this new ruleset or software upgrade. After much politicking and bullshit, my permissions get re-instated and I get everything running. Agreements are made that our team should have access to these testing environments for upgrades and management of the software.
Then we get to the next round of testing, new environment and *hey look* permissions got taken away from that one too. Second verse, same as the first, politicking, bullshittery, and I can finally do my god damned job, only a week behind. More agreements are reached, promises made, "you guy own the software, you should have access to install it". Alright cool.

It's been 3 months now. We've scheduled a final round of testing in pre-production. The day before doing the install to pre-prod, another team comes out of the woodwork "We are the only ones allowed to install anything in pre-prod or prod"
...no.
"You can shadow one of our team members as they do the work"
...No.
"You'll be working on our schedule, since you didn't give us ample time to plan this"
...loving NO.

Talked it over with my boss (A Director) and he pulled rank on this team's boss (a manager). And I still got a lovely email berating me for "Going outside the process" and "Not giving [other team] enough time to perform their duties".

A.) It's not your loving duties.
B.) 4 months ago, I asked you to add something to the catalog. In that request, I asked you guys if you wanted to learn how this was done. I got nothing, not even the catalog entry I loving asked for.
and
C.) Don't snooty email me you son of a bitch.

On top of all this, the other team is the group I used to work on. They never replaced my position, and lost another guy around the same time who has also not been replaced. So they're down staff, unprepared, hundreds of tickets unassigned in their queue, and *taking on more work* to ... prove a point? I don't even loving know at this point.

tl:dr I did the damned work anyway. My last review I was told my work is good, but I need to be more assertive. Assertiveness achieved.

# ¿ May 19, 2015 18:25

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

Maniaman posted:

Today a 5 second power outage took down our datacenter for over an hour. Functioning UPS? What's that?

Do we work together? 2 power outages in 2 weeks, neither of them more than 30 seconds, and the whole DC goes down and comes up (at least semi-gracefully, so that's nice).

# ¿ May 20, 2015 06:41

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

beepsandboops posted:

poo poo currently pissing me off: Server 2003 hits EOL next month and we have 20+ machines running them. Nobody except me cares about this, and the proposal I've given to upgrade them is being ignored. Unless I come up with a way to upgrade everything for free with zero downtime, I'm afraid that this is going to continue to be the case for the future.

Down from ~195 Server 2003 instances to >50 since this time 3 months ago. Those 50 are going to be tough though - either incompatible apps or uncooperative (and frequently incoherent) system owners.

On the plus(?) side I only have 6 NT4 servers still running! One of them is Lotus Notes from like 15 years ago. You know, in case they need to access case notes. From when I was in High School.

Two of them are domain controllers for the domain that only has lotus notes on it. :negative:

# ¿ Jun 17, 2015 19:39

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:

Pissing me off today:

So, one the developers on my project, as I mentioned before, blew up something made a servlet that takes up 100% of the threads on a RHEL server. I kill -3 the tomcat, and then kill -9 it to death. I take the stack trace to the PM and tell him what happened, and he tells me to analyze the stack trace. I'm not good at that, so I take it to my manager and the support manager, and ask them who I can escalate this to. The support manager is named Dave, and the director of my department, (both these guy's boss), is named also named Dave.

So the support manager, manager-dave, tells me that I should help with this, and they need to escalate it up the developer food chain, and it's not a system problem and how day they waste my time and try to dump work on me. I protest, and say "maybe I should help them", but they keep saying "no no no, don't help, tell them it's their job." I go back to the PM, and tell him that I tried to get more data, and I was told by Dave to take it back to you and have you get your developers to escalate it up their side of company, but I'll help however I can.

I get back to the office to an irate director-Dave, the PM called him and said I refused to help them, and I was extremely rude in telling them to deal with it themselves. He wants to know why he, director-dave, told me not to help. Director dave asks me to explain myself, and I tell him I was told by manager-dave. He understands the confusion but proceeds to yell at me for not being helpful, and try to turn it around and get him to take it up with manager-dave, since I did what I was told. He doesn't really get it, and keeps laying into me.

Ugh.

I tell my direct manager, not named Dave, and he's like "eh don't worry about it, no one really is angry, he's just upset at you." What does that even mean? Now the director, that I already have a hard enough time communicating with has an eye on me for no reason, and Manager-dave still doesn't agree that I should help the developers.

Argh. My life is Degrassi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF1chLj1fro

These are the Daves I know I know, these are the Daves I know.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2015 19:29

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

We use Exclaimer. It's not terrible, can deal with all the different departments needing different legal crap, seems easy enough to set up. We finally got standard signatures because of CASL.

code:


Name
Team, dept
Company
Phone

Legal crap that's unenforceable, promises not to misuse your info, link to tell us to gently caress off, etc

All pulled from AD. That's the worst part, making sure AD is up to date. Adaxes with a web front end and a company policy of "Your info your responsibility" mostly took care of that.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2015 00:47

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

go3 posted:

most 'upgrades' companies commit to 20 year old systems is just figuring out a way to give it a new UI

We're 6 months in to an 18 month project to do exactly this; refresh the UI on our banking system. The banking system was built in the mid 80s, the underlying code hasn't really been upgraded that much, the database still runs on SQL 2000.

But, they are giving it the green light for Server 2012, which is leaps and bounds above the previous support of NT4. So I'll give them that one, I can't imagine that was an easy thing to get through QA.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2015 20:48

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

How long do I have to listen to a room full of people struggle to present on a webex before I can just leave the conference call?

This is affecting (my) production.

Same rule I always used in school. If class/presentation/whatever hasn't started by 10 minutes after it was supposed to, I'm out. Don't try to find me, I'll be smoking by the big tree out back.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2015 20:48

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 23:26

Antioch: Apr 18, 2003

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Drove to the datacenter tonight to do things A B C and D, but forgot a single object so I couldn't do D, and no, it can't wait, so 25 minutes back to the house, 25 minutes back to the datacenter we go...

Done that. Drive to work at 2 am for deployment weekend, forget keycard. Swear, drive home, back to work. Forgot laptop. Swear louder. Back to home, back to work. Spill hot coffee all over hand. Have a little meltdown, maybe cry a bit, do deployment, go home.

... Monday morning sneak in behind someone because your keycard is still on your desk.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2015 08:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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