Uncertainty

HAAALLLLLPP!! SYSTEM DOWN!!!! 14,000 CLIENTS NO ONE WORKING!!!!

I don't have to look at the account field. I know this one's Mookman. I'm also pretty sure it's going to be all sorts of stupid, it being a Prio-1. I'm guessing they pulled the engine and prop off a Cessna and don't understand why it won't fly anymore.

And... I'm right.

We are hit by critical Issue, $YourBigApp is down. We are unable to startup application even after recycle services.

The Login page itself does not appear. We use Siteminder for systems Authentication.

Mmm-hmm... and what did you change between it all working last night and it not working this morning, Mookman? I know I shouldn't ask this because I know that the answer I'm going to get is exactly what I should expect from MildlyNaughtyPuppy in a few years hence when I notice my computer has been "fixed" while I was in the kitchen pouring out bowls of chow for the pack. I can handle getting this response from a toddler, not so much so from an "administrator". But I have to ask. It's part of The Method.

Exactly which "nothing" was changed overnight?

We just did a release and infer this issue is occuring after this, but need to confirm. THe components for the release are only PrimeComponent and CentralCommunicationsSystem

You need to confirm that the system which was working perfectly last night only stopped working after you changed out the exact things that would stop it working now and that the problem hasn't perhaps been caused by fairies or my bad attitude? Put the system back the way it was and fer chrissakes start debugging your fucking changes before rolling out to production!

We dont want to return to older version and must confirm this is not a new defect on $YourBigApp

Confirmed.
Customer Error.
Resolution: Patch back to prior version.
Close: Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit.

Go Bother Ballmer

You have a car. The engine is knocking. It gets shitty mileage. It takes 40 seconds to get up to speed after stopping at a red light. All of a sudden you hear a bang and see a hole punched through the hood, the piston having been thrown. Do you then call Michelin to bitch about your problems? You do if you work for $PrivateFinanceAdvisors, with the logic that the tire company ought to be able to fix the problem that's causing the tires to turn too slowly.

SQL Server: Insufficient Memory Error

Insufficient Memory Error BPool: no remappable address found
Problem usaully resolves itself. When this error happens $YourBigApp users experience slow perf problem Sometimes SQL server fails over (this didn't happen today) This issue has been occuring for a while and it's random behavior.

One thing that it definitely isn't is "random", Sparky. The problem will completely disappear the instant you add the minimum spec'ed memory to the machine and move $OurBigApp off the fucking underpowered database server and onto a dual-proc box with more than 500MB of memory just the way we told you to eight fucking months ago.

I don't believe that memory is our problem we face. We need a solution to this error! $YourBigApp is too slow and databse failing over!

File a ticket with Microsoft and tell them they need to make SQL Server run your 380GB production database in under 100MB of memory. With what appears to be a 486 DX/66 processor.

I just dumped a fucking laptop last week which has more power than their rack-mount which is groaning under the strain of a SQL Server and a dozen enterprise apps. That DB server memory problem is clearly being caused by our software.

You know how this one's being closed: Seh. Venn. TEEN.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

"Yo, Dawg!"

It's Freddo. This can't be good. It never is.

"You gotta help me, mate!"

I gotta?? I never saw any clause in my contract which read "Der Arbeitnehmer ist verpflichtet, Freddo zu helfen wenn er dringend bittet oder den Begriff 'mate' verwendet".

"You're not doing anything this weekend, are you?"

I dunno... relaxing, cleaning, catching up on My Name is Earl, downloading kitty pr0n... I have 18Mb broadband; the possibilities are almost endless.

And when I write "endless" I mean it. The entire Speedy Gonzalez collection, Dexter, even every episode of 1970s George Peppard in Banacek! And while file-sharing may not be completely legal over here, at 16 Traci Lords was. But I digress.

There are a lot of things I can do on a weekend. I live near three museums and there's a huge farmer's market nearby. But my second-most favouritest thing to do on a weekend is Not Work, running a close competition with doggie-stylin' with Lassie, my SuperSnarkyBitch, if only because I can do the latter on most normal weekdays as well.

There was a problem with this past weekend's availability plans, that problem being that no one was actually available. Three out sick, two normal weekend stand-bys on vacation, Freddo was desperate. I mulled it over. The deal was shit from the get-go. No munniez for working Saturday: work it like a normal day in exchange for a future weekday off. No prob, my ticket list is quiet. Sunday sucks though. A whole fifty for staying home all day in case something comes in, plus some hourly compensation for actual emergency work done.

Lassie was out of town until 8pm or so, I'd only work as secondary from 9-2 and then primary from 2-5, then hand over whatever shit sandwich I was chewing to the poor Weekend Alliance fuckers in the US, giving me time to shower and shave before picking Lassie up from the train station.

And Sunday? Fuck. No one does shit on Sunday unless there's an unresolved problem from Saturday which should be able to be ping-ponged. At the very least there's all sorts of busy-work to hand 'em until Monday rolls around. I'd planned to spend the day at home with Lassie anyway.

And lo, it came to pass that this mutt accepted the piss-poor deal.

And there was great rejoicing as Saturday remained as dull as a corporate quarterly meeting while requiring even less attention. And the Canine who is Really Evil was gladdened by the knowledge that Sunday would consist of no suckage and much glad-you're-back-home doggie-stylings with Lassie.

And upon awakening and well and truly knowing his bitch the Canine did log in and lo!, $ScoreCo did find themselves truly hated in the eyes of the Really Evil. For $ScoreCo had done Something Wrong and were demanding assistance. There was much gnashing of teeth and dumping of cores and no one working the weekend shift who knew diddly-squat about Solaris.

Then did the Canine remember the Golden Rule of Solaris: Truss Don't Lie. Thus he spake the magic words: "Send me a truss." And $ScoreCo did dutifully send a truss of a truly gargantuan size and proportion such as has never been seen before by any $MegaCorp monkey. And he did setteth his head in the ReallyEvilCanine's-head-shaped-dent in front of his keyboard as he realised $ScoreCo had trussed the entire system and not just the crashing process.

And it came to pass that the Canine did begin to relax as he realised it would be only another quarter of an hour before his relief in the US would be on-line, and lo, he did tell $ScoreCo to truss only the crashing processes.

And as his IM window opened, the Canine did see who in the US was taking over, and he allow a truly wicked grin to come over his face, for his replacement that day was none other than the monkey well-known throughout $MegaCorp for his regular Registry and Event Viewer log requests of customers running UNIX.

Thus did our hero log out and get back to his bitch, and the world became a slightly more tolerable place, if only for the 13 hours he would have before having to return to the Cube Desk of Hate at the Panopticon high above Munich.

Geography

When your company is one of many that divides the world up into three regions -- Americas, EMEA and APAC -- which region should be responsible for the nimrods in an outsourced Bangalore sweatshop of a server room? Go on, guess.

The Scandinavia-based $CompanyCo really, really needs to add Chinese and Japanese support to $OurBigApp. It's an emergency now, SO OMG IT NEEDS TO BE DONE YESTARDAY LOLOL despite the fact it would've been working when they first installed $OurBigApp had they done what I told them to a couple of years ago. They didn't like the two extra clicks and one line SQL*Plus session it would've taken.

So here we are now at an impasse. Instead of two clicks and an ALTER DATABASE command they're going to be paying thousands which is fine by me; anything that brings cash into $MegaCorp ensures my continued ability to support the SuperSnarkyBitch and MildlyNaughtyWhelp.

Since India straddles EMEA and APAC I sent a note to the $$$Custom$$$Programming$$$ department of each region and closed the ticket. That was a month ago. There was a re-open request yesterday. It seems that no one had contacted $CompanyCo so I sent off another contact mail and escalated it to management which got the mail flying all over the place, most of it reading "FW: FW: FW: FW: $CompanyCo ticket 123-ADF29 -- It's not my region. How about you $SomeOtherName?".

And then finally someone had an epiphany which required chiding me in an answer. I am Teh STOOPITD. How the hell could I have not thought to ask $$$Custom$$$Programming$$$--Americas to handle this? Truly I am a fuckwit.

Lock & Load

A new sign from some department here in the zoo has been hung everywhere: in the break rooms, kitchens, coffee corners, wherever monkeys may gather.

LOCK it

Before

You Leave IT

Followed by detailed instructions on how to give the three-key salute and which selection to make afterwards. Fucknuzzles.

The rest of the sign is devoted to bullet points about why this is important.

"Don't give others the chance to..." it begins.

• Steal confidential / personal data
• your ID and send e-mails
• surf the web to inappropriate sites
  

Oh NOES! Surfing teh webs to inappropriate sites?? My fucking home page is ogrish. The first fucking button on my tab bar is stileproject. I pay for a newsfeed not for access to binaries groups but so that I have a decent feed for alt.tasteless. I'm the guy who trolled the entire floor into watching 2 girls 1 cup! How the fuck is anyone here going to find something more inappropriate than me?

And to which "others" are they referring anyway? Are we actually hiring shiftless fucktards who would actually do these things on their cow-orkers' machines? Fer realz??

A memo reminding us to brush and floss daily can't be far away.

In happier news, the creature inside Lassie's belly happily does interpretive dance for the camera, all 10cm of it merrily kicking away. Or spasming. We're not positive about this. Five digits on each paw so I'm a bit disappointed; I was hoping for 8 to make hexadecimal math easier. When the doc switched to 3D mode I told Lassie when she goes to whelp that SlightlyNaughtyPuppy must be male. The face looks just like my father's.

Cow-Orkers XVIII: Shrek

There are few actually cool people working for us. Back in the days of $BigCorp I constantly thought, "What a group of social fuck-ups," but then I realised I was also one of the group and was most likely similarly odd. Despite certain historically cool factor things about me, I was one of the dysfunctional. I hung out with a few other miscreants until they, one by one, left. Only a couple of tolerable people remained.

Then $MegaCorp bought us and I found out how truly fucked up software programmers, engineers and support people could be. Ripa seemed tame by comparison. No wonder I'd spent so many years avoiding corporate life. Small wonder I'm trying to figure out how the hell to get out of it again.

I shouldn't call this cow-orker "Shrek" really. With a "c" before the "k" the name becomes the German word for "scary". He's also not green although he certainly isn't anorexic. But Shrek he'll be for the purposes of my stories. Shrek is one of those guys you just have to like. He can do no wrong. He's fun to be around.

He can talk about the details of some stripper's tits in mixed company and no one bats an eyelash. Not even the woman who took great offense a minute later when, as she made some reference to her own tits being unable to produce creamer for the coffee, I responded with, "That's easy enough to fix." I didn't mean me, honey.

Shrek's wife lets him run off with the boys on Saturday night to various Czech strip clubs while she stays home with their young daughters. Wifey gets to go out, too, and Shrek'll stay home with the girls. It's a bit of a lopsided deal. I ran into her on one such outing at a local live music bar with a drop-dead gorgeous friend in tow. This friend really liked Americans but, of course, was already married to one.

He goes to strip clubs, she goes to a local watering hole with passable live music. He ogles tits, she sucks down piña coladas. He gets lap dances, she tries to scream above the music to her hot friend. It's a nice job if you can get it.

And goddamn Shrek is good at what he does which is what got him his department transfer. It's political however, and he's still with us physically despite being one of many who are tired of Joey's yelling on the phone (Shrek plays along in Bingo). He's almost always in a good mood and is always willing to help us out on problems, reading through 100MB dumps, pinpointing the problem inside an hour, and saving us days of testing and ping-pong.

He's got a loving wife, two great daughters, freedom to run around with the boys, a nice house, talent out the wazoo, a sense of humour that doesn't scare people, and a way about him that you just can't get enough of. And I wouldn't trade places with him for the world. There's something else Shrek has: heart trouble. Serious heart trouble. Drunk off her ass at that live music bar, his wife confided in me her fears that she could soon be a widow. He's OK now having put everyone through a scare a couple of months ago, but I fear we'll lose him way too early. And I'll be left with Ripa and Tony. And fuckwit customers.

Reading is Fundamental

My day started out shit by not getting out of bed at 7:30 like a good little monkey. It got a lot shittier when I actually did get out of bed because my hot, redheaded bitch was still under the covers, nekkid. The shit continued as I walked to work in the rain, then had to stand outside the door in that rain for a few minutes as a crane worked on moving the pile of carpet rolls blocking the entrance to the Panopticon. Only once I walked into the office and logged in did I find out the true meaning of a shit day (excluding those days Lassie isn't around), and not just because nobody had bothered to make any coffay.

I can deal with the shit &/or nono-existent coffay, the overnight updates, the conf calls, the cow-orkers demanding immediate assistance, the ever-changing Process Documentation, even most of the tickets which come across my desk (>50%) But these guys?

Hi. We're looking for a procedure to set up an extra server to deal with a different language. See attachments.

A procedure? Let's take a look at that attachment...

A couple screenshot clips of $OurBigApp's admin screens, a crudely-drawn circle and arrow with the words "SEE HERE" drawn using a mouse and pointing to text which reads, "We were thinking we need to create a SysCom component and then write a new URL for other language which would be something like http://wearefucked.com/sys/yourbigapp/JPN. Maybe copy the 'Sales SysComp ENU' to Sales SysComp JPN"

We were thinking? ...would be something like?? Are you a fucking 14-year-old girl considering which dress she wants to wear to the junior prom?

Update:
there was no place for this in the contact info section. my twitter id is fuzzywumpkins79 if you could maybe contact me as soon as it can be.

Oh.
I see.
You are a fucking 14-year-old girl trying to decide which dress she wants to wear to the junior prom.

After about 15 minutes I'd figured out what she was trying to do: give her a 1-step solution to do something that requires 80 steps over a couple of hours after reading around 75 pages of information and instructions.

Dear Fluffywumpkins,

All of the information you need to do this is in the Going Global Guide. If you have a specific question about a specific step or you encounter an error I can help you with that.

Love,
REC

And that should've been the end of it. But it never is. An hour later came the response:

Hi,

Thanks for the details, it really very helpfull.

Can you please advise all the necessary end to end steps to install/add second language on current running server?

She doesn't want to read the damned manual. Tough titties. Now all I have to do is get her to admit to not reading the docs and I can close it out but this is often harder than it seems. Without a clear admission I have to keep putting up with this shit.

Dear Fluffywumpkins,

The full procedure is explained in the Going Global Guide. It's impossible for me to distill the 75 pages of documentation any further and I couldn't fit it into even 50 updates. Please follow the steps as outlined beginning with Chapter 3.

Love,
REC

Say it! Say it You fucking numpty! Say, "We don't have time to read" or "We're not interested" or "It's too complicated" but for fuck's sake not "We just want a brief explanation" because we'll have to play another round of ping-pong.

Hi again,

We are only looking for a brief explanation of the process and only the mandatory steps required to install another language. Please help us with this.

I see another fucking escalation coming if I don't close this one quickly.

Dear Fluffywumpkins,

There is no "brief explanation". You are looking at a full installation of the server and additional configuration, all of which is mandatory. You must read the Going Global Guide and follow the directions precisely. I strongly suggest you take the time to print out the worksheets so you don't miss anything.

You will not be able to install any additional languages if you don't follow the steps in the Guide precisely.

Love,
REC

And... send, with prejudice. Ten minutes later I get that familiar spidey-sense tingle. I know she's read the update. Fluffywumpkins is not happy with my answer. I can feel her typing. Four minutes after that I get an auto-notify that she's updated her ticket.

Mr REC,

We don't have time for implementing the complicated method you wrote about in the Going Global Guide. We need you to provide u with a working solution so that we can have the new language running today.

Bingo!

Dear Fluffywumpkins,

As I wrote before, there is no "brief explanation". None. You are asking me to tell you how to do the impossible. I can't. I have provided you with the only solution available. This ticket is closed.

Love,
REC

Status: Closed
Substatus: Resolved -- Solution given
Root Cause: 17- Fuckwit6.5- Customer Research

Smugly I start to relax knowing my day will begin to unfuck itself in only another three hours. Until the PM from Lassie pops up as I'm editing this entry telling me she's starting to feel ill again.

Meh. There's always single-malt.

Exceptional

I just got a Superior Service Selection notification. Some customer filled out the damned survey and offered high praise. He even wrote a glowing comment. I looked up the ticket number and saw it was something I not only didn't spend five minutes on, the guy found the problem himself (though using my guidance). It was a simple thing, easy to overlook.

So why am I pissed off about this?

I'm mad as hell because I'm getting Customer Dissatisfaction notices left and right from fuckwits who are unhappy that I didn't magically resolve their problems inside 12 minutes. On the 1-5 scale of customer satisfaction surveys I was given straight 1s by one goat-blower because it took four months to fix the problem.

Never mind that every time he updated the ticket I responded within two hours. Never mind that every time I responded he took three weeks to answer. Never mind that half the time he he finally responded he hadn't actually done the tests or provided the information I'd asked for. Never mind the three full environments I'd had to build, the painful VOIP teleconferences with spotty connections I suffered through, the refusals to provide me with information, even the fact that I fixed something deemed by others as unfixable.

Nope, it took four months so I got slammed.

Customer I didn't do shit for: "I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you!!1!1shiftone"
Customer I busted my balls for: "Fuck you!"

Clearly I need to put a lot less effort into my job.

I'd tell every last fucking one of those fuckwits to go DIAF but I have rent to pay and a penchant for expensive whisk(e)y. Edradour port-finished is €70 for a little half-litre bottle; Strathisla 40-year just a wee bit more than that. Of course, I might not need to drink so much of these if I wasn't having to deal with these mooks all day. Chicken & egg.

The Stupid Hurts

I've been gone for a while. It started with being sick, then going to a course, then vacation, then getting sick again and by that time moving to a happy place. I've been in such a very happy place that I haven't been able to muster the anger necessary to write about this shit. Until today...

I hit the lottery and then some. This dog's got a new bitch. The downside is that as bad as shit is here at $MegaCorp, I'm doing the Obama brush-it-off-my-shoulder routine because she makes me that happy. Lassie's not here today, though; she's gone all week at a conference. Even that I can handle but yesterday I got stuck with a ticket from $CountryCo and the chinks in my new, non-unhappy MildlyAnnoyedPuppy armour appeared.

Need help for Disaster Recover(DR) installation?
Is it possible to install $YourBigApp with out accessing the database server?
What type of parameters we need to set in DR setup?
Please do the needful by reply today.

What the fuck? It's bad enough that he doesn't know the difference between DR and HA (high-availability) but this pigfucker wants to install what's more or less a giant fucking front end for a database without actually having a database.

Dear Pigfucker,

You write that you've installed $OurBigApp successfully before and you must therefore know that access to the database is required for this. What would you do with a database front-end application which can't connect to the database?

[explanation of HA and methods of implementation]

Love,
REC

And that should've been the end of it. I went home and ReallyBadDoggie-styled Lassie one more time before she left for her conference and the world was again good.

Until today.

I'd already woken up in a foul mood with a hangover from drinking Kölsch beer last night and no hot bitch asleep on my shoulder meaning no morning festivities before I left for the Panopticon. I arrived to find a response from Pigfucker.

As we have told you we have installed $YourBigApp in all environment with database access.Now we need to have the DR environment wherein we need installation of $YourBigApp .But we are told that we won't have database connectivity.According to our understanding,while installing $YourBigApp ,it asks for database connectivity.So we are not sure as to how we can go forward with the installation without the database connectivity.
Secondly we are told that we need to have a clone of Production environment.We have checked in knowledge base and have not found any document regarding this.So, can you pls inform about the process of cloning an existing $YourBigApp environment.

Lassie is fond of saying, "Stupid should be painful," and she's right. Unfortunately it's usually their stupid and my pain. I hadn't missed its comforting shape but I returned my noggin to the my-head-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard.

You cannot "go forward". You can't go backwards. Without a database to connect a database front end to you cannot move. You cannot install $OurBigApp without database connectivity. You cannot use $OurBigApp without database connectivity. Without a database containing data $OurBigApp can't do anything.

That you were told by your management you need $OurBigApp to be cloned in no way requires us to design a method to do so. $OurBigApp has no method for cloning environments. By its very nature it cannot be cloned.

This ticket is closed.

Our internal application was "upgraded" over the weekend and I searched desperately for my Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit but this important change, like so many others, didn't make the cut.

I'm back.

Falco

Revolutionary or a populist guy?
The people love Chavez and I understand why
Stabilised the economy but messed around with their clocks
And that one knocked off of my socks:
Come on and rock me Venezuela.
Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela.
Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela.
Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela.
Oh oh oh Venezuela.


Chavez decided to change the country's time zone to GMT -4:30. Only one other time zone which sits on a half-hour offset exists in the Western Hemisphere: Newfoundland, and not even the Western half of the province uses it. It also happens to be UTC-3:30 and so won't help Venezuela.

Venezuela has moved to a new time zone. Unable to add new timezone.

Yeah, we know. Please see Knowledge Base Notice 12-A44, "March 2007 Changes to Daylight Saving Time". It explains how to make changes to time zones and is applicable to this situation with the new Venezuela change. Enjoy. Love, REC.

And that should've been the end of it, but noooooooooooooooo. It never is.

Pls provide the patch. As I understand data import patch is available with $YourBigApp for the same.

Your understanding is as poor about a patch as it is about the language you're trying to employ. There ain't no patch. We have to do this the hard way:

Dear Rama,

To which patch are you referring? As I've already written, Notice 12-A44 explains how to change start and end times and offsets within the application under Data Admin: > Internationalization > Time Zone Admin. It is impossible to add additional time zones in $OurBigApp. You will therefore either have to change all non-Venezuelan time zones to something other than "Caracas/La Paz" ("Santiago", perhaps) or re-purpose a different time zone such as "Manaus" or "Atlantic (Canada)".

Love,
REC

Done, or so I thought.

U must provide the patch! The same patch for US time can be be modified to use existing patch with different data.

Uhh... no, Beavis. It cannot be modified. It won't work. There is no fix other than the one I told you about.

A little voice tells me this problem seems a bit more familiar than I realise.

Uh-huh. Rama. who asked this same shit 19 months ago when the US time zones changed. I bet yep, and also a couple years ago for the Australian changes. It's not someone using Rama's account; her unique writing style guarantees this.

The next day I received a flurry of mail from the TAR begging me for some help. The TAR doesn't know squat and Rama is persistent, asking one stupid question after another which the TAR can't answer, so I reluctantly agreed to join a conf call and put this issue to rest. With prejudice.

I got in this morning to see a conference invitation from the TAR and an answer from Rama:

Venezuela Time Zone Discussion
Sent: 27. August 2008

Proposed By: A. Beng
When: Thursday, August 28, 2008

##

From: Rama
Sent: 27. August 2008


I am out of office on Tuesday, can u pls move it to someother date ?

Sums it up, really. A feeling not entirely unlike "calm" washes over me because it will be Beng talking to that fuckwit Rama and not me.

A Hot Market

The Panopticon -- designed like a giant greenhouse -- is well over 30° today. I have a massive backlog, more than a dozen callbacks and two full repros I have to build, and fuckwitted baby-talking cow-orkers. No fucking air conditioning. Still, this isn't the worst place in Germany to be working. This is, an office around 300km northwest of here. I could almost feel sorry for Sven Düsterhaus.

I really don't give a rat's ass about Oracle vs. SAP and CEO pissing contests, but I grew up with the law, worked in it briefly, and on occasion have found comic relief in file courtroom documents. Scientology slapdowns aside, there's some good stuff out in the dockets, whether it's that defense of a student's use of the word "fuck" (anyone have a link to that?) to the entire SCO fiasco, I occasionally take a few hours to read some long document and cross-check it over at LexisNexis.

A buddy told me this morning that I had to check out Oracle's amended complaint. Holy massive collusion, Batman! The scope and scale is un-fucking-imaginable. The aforementioned Sven is SAP's chief counsel and he's fucked. The company knew, all the way to the top. Their documents prove it. The contracts show that customer were participatory in what they had to know was illegal.

When I first heard of Tomorrow Now from a friend who'd left Siebel to join up I asked him how the fuck they could possibly have more information on the software than Siebel itself. He was kinda vague but insistent that they'd succeed and chided me for refusing their offer. TN, he told me, was even going to be offering patches. Umm... how?

Reading through the complaint I found out exactly how: they'd load up their copies of older version, download patches (which they weren't authorised to take), apply it, run a diff on the machine, then collect the mods and rebrand it all.

Question for any Oracle people out there: how the fuck did Tomorrow Now manage to download five terabytes of software before you noticed something fishy? And that using a bank of 20 servers scraping your entire site and catalog from just one IP address?!

The filing reads almost like a Grisham novel without the guns and hotshot attorneys. I'm going to give away the ending: the last page is a demand for a jury trial. Not even the Chewbacca Defense can save SAP. Their only hope may be Steve Martin's old schtick. I'm positively giddy.

Contractually obligating customers to illegally download thousands of gigs of software from the supplier they're leaving? Fuckwits. Only a German like Henning Kagermann could actually think that Oracle wouldn't sue because then they'd have to sue their own customers, too, utterly failing to realise that Oracle could just grant the customers retroactive licenses in return for, um, returning to Oracle. And paying the back maintenance fees, natch.

Density

The day the we figure out how to run cars on stupidity is the day the derricks go up in Paris. I simply can't comprehend how so much dumb can be crammed into one head.

If you're unable to do telephone banking because there's no fucking dial tone, the French thing to do would be to blame the bank. It must be the bank's fault and couldn't possibly have anything to do with the months of unpaid phone bills.

We are currently using $LoadBalancer we note the same behavior for following We can not perform action expected, and we get the error message "Error contacting license server".

Uh, Sparky? We don't have a fucking license server. You've been using our software for 10 years and should know this by now. $LoadBalancer also has no fucking license server. In fact, the only software which comes to mind that does have a license server is... Citrix. And we don't support it. You can't admin $LoadBalancer because you're using Citrix to get to it and Citrix is broken. Go bother them.

And that should've been the end of it. But it wasn't; it never is.

PLease note today we receive several error message today:
SACLB1RR_14451 (saclb1rr) : ERROR: [saclb1rr]: $LoadBalancer administrator password is not defined yet. Please use menu.

What is the issue?

It's a good thing stupid is massless or there'd be a fucking black hole centered in the 7th Arrondissement. Root Cause: 17.

Petty Office(r)s

I have three days to catch up on all my tickets which no one looked at during my entire week of training. Customers are pissed. I've been officially pulled out of The System. Nevertheless, there's a Ticket Assignment Notification which just showed up in my mailbox. The System knows best.

Not only have I been assigned yet another Solaris problem I have no idea about, Steve has been assigned a problem requiring the ability to see the difference between Japanese characters. We agree to trade, unofficially and doing our best to hide the transactions which management will inspect to make sure we're being good little bitches.

A note last night from a US manager asks me if I can take over Yet Another Citrix Problem which was assigned to Someone Other Than Me, and in taking the reassignment it won't count toward my number of assigned tickets as far as The System is concerned; it only counts toward last Tuesday's assignment quota. I agree anyway.

An hour later comes another mail from some unknown name. Someone in HR. She's seen my profile pic, a particularly funny line drawing animation which has been my profile pic ever since $MegaCorp took over $BigCorp. I've received dozens of mails and IMs in favour of it. I have a link to a site of mine in my profile and dozens of people have clicked on that as well, so I know that they, too, have seen the pic. I know because I have the referrer logs of the site, all coming from xxxxx.$megacorp.com/yyyyy/zzzzz?=$REC_empno. But she's offended. I explained this in an E-Mail littered with management-speak buzzwords and other shitty language abuses that she and her ilk are more comfortable with, stating at the end that should she not change her mind, I would reluctantly -- in accordance with company policy -- remove said offending picture. No word back on that.

What else is in the mail? A note from Giacomo. He'll be back in Munich teaching the DBA1 course in a couple of weeks. Hot diggity! Off to Meathead to get approval for this course as well.

"Hey Meathead. Giacomo's coming back next week to do the DBA1 course. I need approv..."
"Nope."
"WTF?"
"You've already had your five training days this quarter."
"That's the minimum requirement per quarter."
"Right. And you've received it."
"But I didn't get any fucking training last quarter. Nor the quarter before that, nor the quarter before that!"
"But you got it this quarter. You can do the DBA1 next quarter."
"..."

Minima = maxima only when it's shit I want; I do far fucking more than the minimum number of tickets and still get pushed to "do more".

Fuming, I return to my desk. There's a mail from Mini-Me with an attachment. A screenshot of $OurBigInternalApp with a ticket, and in the owner field, Mini-Me's name. There was a second screenshot of another ticket, also assigned to him. In his note to our manager he wrote, "I'm kinda busy right now but I'll try to look at them later today."

Mini-Me left the company ten weeks ago but The System knows best.

Training III: An Open Letter to Oracle

Dear Oracle,

Classroom training's cool. The free lunch isn't too bad either (for fans of MSG anyway). A week away from my normal hell is also pretty fucking sweet. So please don't take this the wrong way...

When I (or more precicely, the $MegaCorp division I work in) is shelling out for my DBA training which is supposed to include all that horrible PL/SQL shit and RAC and SQL tuning, and I've worked with databases for the past eight fucking years (yours, DB2 and FoxBasePro SQL Server {$year}), I should get a pass on the intro shit. I should not have to sit through hours of fucking explanations to n00bz about tables, foreign keys and the fucking SELECT statement. I may not be a Mastah DBA but I know how to grab the shit I want out of your tables. I can even do it in your shitty, still-not-Unicode-compliant command line SQL*Plus program which will never, EVAR be as good as Toad. EVAR.

That Enterprise Manager copy of Microsoft's point-and-shoot GUI ain't the best in the world either. Would you guys even consider writing something in a language more efficient than Java? PASCAL perhaps? SNOBOL? Fuck, even a DSKY machine might be faster.

No, your browser-based "iSQL" client just doesn't impress me. It's just another "Do X... on the Web". Meh. Accidentally backspace and all your work and history are gone. Would it be that difficult to have the browser write the history commands to a local text file? Yes, I know it's possible to write my SQL in a local editor and then paste it into the browser but then what's the fucking point of having the browser-based client to begin with?

Also -- and this is pretty important -- please refrain from putting really attractive wimmens in my classroom as they tend to distract. I'm not against wimmens in the field; IT tends to attract the lunatics of both sexes so things are never boring. I just think that segregated classrooms might be something you guys could maybe try out. I'm pretty sure that's a wedding ring on her finger and although 30-45% of German women admit to affairs depending on which survey you read, I'm in a classroom and I'm supposed to be able to focus my attention on what the instructor is saying.

That's all I can think of for now. Thanks for the cookies and air conditioning but that horrible excuse for coffay you've got would embarrass Americans and even Turkish resorts. Powdered premix? Have you no shame??

Love,
REC

Training II: LOL Nazis

So I'm sitting through another day of Stuff I Already Know and the teacher, a nice enough Genoan guy who mangles both German and English without prejudice is going over the new syntax and abilities in 11g. We're dropping tables but wait! There's a foreign key! What to do?

My response didn't go over so well.

The blonde is killing me, constantly looking over at me and smiling, looking longer than is normal. She's not drop-dead gorgeous but there's something about her I can't get over. I'm sitting uncomfortably through classes with a constant reduced cranial bloodflow that I haven't experienced since puberty. Chances to talk, however, aren't taken and she quickly kills my attempts at conversation. I even ate with her in the shit canteen (and paid the price for it later) in order to give it a go. No dice.

Anyway, when discussing databases in German you don't talk about "parent" and "child" but rather "mother" and "daughter" tables. It's less awkward than trying to translate the English constructs directly since "parent" is rarely used here in the singular and no matter how you combine "child" and "table", the result sounds bad. So Muttertabelle and Tochtertabelle it is.

And Giacomo went on talking about altering tables as I tried to stay awake. Then he got to the "ON DELETE CASCADE" construct which when invoked, he explained, will not only remove¹ the 'mother' table but take all the 'daughters' with it as well.

I didn't actually think about it, it just came out: "Ah, the Magda Goebbels method."

The temperature in the room dropped quickly. She's definitely not sleeping with me now.

¹ It helps to know that the German word for "remove/delete" wrt to DB tables is extremely close to the one which means "extinguishing life"

I CAN HAZ TRANEING

"Dog, your training has been approved."
"Citrix? Finally??"
"No, Oracle. DBA path.
"Umm... "

We have a dozen DBAs in the office. While acquiring this skill wouldn't hurt my chances for advancement (because they're already hovering slightly below zero) and would even give me m4d sk1llz to go elsewhere, I'd really prefer the Citrix training because no one else fucking does it here! I'm already stuck with every Citrix problem there is and it would be nice to have a fucking clue about what it is I'm doing.

More importantly an increasing number of our customers want to use Citrix. We have an ever-growing number of contracts which are dependent on getting $OurBigApp to work on Citrix. Fucking hell, Citrix is now doing Xen which, like, you know, we're doing too!

"Why can't I have the Citrix training?"
"Because it's unsupported," Meathead replied.
"It's unsupported because no one knows how to do it or has any contacts there."
"I understand."
"And if you send me to that training, we'll will have someone -- me -- who can work with it and help out Eng and PM so that we can support it."
"But it's not supported now and so we can't send you."
"The fucking Oracle training is twice the fucking price of Citrix'! We have dozens of Oracle DBAs worldwide!"
"We also have a deal with Oracle training so it's not the list price."
"But we don't need more DBAs."
"So you don't want the training?"

I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid.

"Of course I want the fucking training! Beggars can't be choosers. So is it PL/SQL or DB tuning?"
"Professional Introduction to the Oracle 10g Database"
"NO WAI!"
"Yep."
"Why? I've been working with databases for the past 8 years! I know how to fucking SELECT a goddamned row!"
"Oracle's path requires the course. You can't take the next ones without the certificate from this one."
"Son of a bitch."

Considering the rate that training is approved around here, I'll get certified to "Oracle Master" some time before the turn of the century. They really better hurry up with this anti-aging shit.

SELECT standard_complaint FROM blog WHERE (INSTR('17') > 0);

Dear Japan,

Your clocks are running seven hours too fast. PLZFIXKTHXBYE!

I like my Japanese cow-orkers. I really do. Of course, I've never had any "face-time" with them which might explain this lack of animosity. But when I need to work with them I either have to be up at 3am (and sober enough to function) or I might as well send snail mail. One round-trip communication takes three days.

I needed a database in Shift-JIS, the most common Japanese encoding. It's crap compared to Unicode... hell, it's crap compared to anycode, it being a freaky Microsoft hack to enforce their idea of codepages and still work with previous Japanese standards like JIS X 0201 and 0208. Wacky stuff if you're one of the couple dozen codepage supergeeks. I know I'm lame. Haz a cat. In fact, take two; they're small.

So what the hell do I want with a Shift-JIS DB when its suckage quotient is so high? It seems we have a bug, one that I not only pointed out about eight fucking years ago but which also should've been dealt with by the time $OurBigApp supported Unicode.

ATTENTION AMERICAN DATABASE-PROGRAMMING INFIDELS: There is a huge fucking difference between "character" and "byte". Not for you normally, but for most of the rest of the fucking world. One byte per character works fine for English. ASCII is also sufficient for Latin, Swahili and Hawaiian. It is rumoured that there are other languages, many of which have more characters than can be addressed with a single byte.

It turns out a field length of 5,000 characters isn't actually 5,000 characters but 5,000 bytes. For the Japanese this means that they can only squeeze in around 2,200 characters, not quite enough for what this field is designed to contain. But only in UTF-8. In Shift-JIS and UTF-16 with their fucking surrogate pairs the number becomes even more grim -- around 1600 characters.

So why didn't I just install a fucking Shift-JIS database on my own if I'm such a Mr Smarty-Pants? Setting up the DB is easy but our installer which adds and shapes the schema sucks. It's overly complicated (more than 90 screens of text and clicky goodness). That alone isn't a problem. I don't speak or read Chinese and I can still not only install but administer Windows in Chinese, both Traditional and Standard. Microsoft sucks but at least their suckage is uniform across languages. Same dialogs, same layout, same buttons, same icons. Not so $OurBigApp. The Japanese installer is nothing like the English which is nothing like the German, so I can't even run a side-by-side installation and select the correct radio buttons or fill in the proper fields.

I can read some Japanese but with so little chance to use the language I've lost much of it over the past 12 years. A few smrt peepul might think, "Duh! Just select the dialog text, copy and then paste it into Teh Ghugel Translator!" Yeah, I thought of that. Our programmers had different ideas:

window.properties.AllowSelectText=0.

Fuckwits.

Cow-Orkers XVII: Dr. Seuss

People often ask me, "REC? Why do you drink so much? Are you trying to become an alcoholic?"

Become? Hah! Walk a mile in my moccasins, muthafuckers. Or just sit in this room and listen.

I aten't dead yet!

Joe, my neighbour at work for those who've forgotten, just asked about the expression his toddler has been taught by an "English teacher" who claims to have lived in England.

"Vat iss means Pring out ze rroof tiles?"
WTF?
I can't bring myself to relive any more of this than I have to so I'll skip the dialog. I finally figured out what he was trying to ask me, the meaning of "bring out the roof tiles". This is an expression his toddler has been taught and now actively uses. The teacher insists this phrase signifies the need to take a dump. This guy once lived in London, most likely the way I lived in Stockholm: an overnight hotel stay.

I screamed to Jules to have a listen; everyone else stopped what they were doing as well. I then loudly repeated the idiom I'd heard and its supposed meaning. Jules was laughing so hard that it was hard to hear anything else. Tears were streaming out of his eyes. The rest of the Krauts were laughing. Only Joe didn't get it.

And that should've been the end of it. But it wasn't. It never is. I had to ask.

"I'm going to hate myself for this, but what does he call peeing?"
"Ach!," said Joe with a triumphant smile, "Zet iss calt Make a pruller"! He beamed proudly. The office once again erupted into laughter. My noggin rushed for the safety and comfort of the my-head-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard.

When everything died down, I told him to tell the teacher that I, REC, said he's an incompetent fuckwit and if he wants to take it up with me he knows where to find me.

But no, that's not the whole story. Because not five minutes later he mentioned finally understanding the word which was pronounced somewhere between "hoass" and "hawz".

"A hose?"
"Ja, a hwawzs! I am finally learn ziss meaning"
Deer in the headlamps time...
"A 'hoawz' like what?"
Joe hesitated and then said, "Like, you know..." and whinnied.
"A horse?!"
"Ja! I am not knowing for sure?"
"That's a 'hORse', not 'hose'."
"Zet iss vat I am said!" he replied as he kept mispronouncing both words.
"Ja, a 'hoawz' iss a Pferd and not a Gartenschlauch vhich iss a 'hoawz'."

I want to beat him with a rubber pony. Instead I packed up and left.

"Bring out ze rroof tiles" has, of course, now become the latest in office slang around here. Fortunately "make a pruller" doesn't seem to have passed muster.

This along with being newly single isn't giving me much motivation to put down the bottle.

We Don't Say 'No'

That didn't go over so well.

--

OK, I think I have a solution to this problem. It's going to take a bit of ess-plaining though.

And as I'm doing this LookOut pops up one of its sporadic update notices to inform me that some of the mail which was sent to me over the past four days has finally been passed on by the central server.

From: Some Guy [mailto:some.guy@$Megacorp.com]
Sent: 10. June 2008 14:45
To: really.evil.canine@$Megacorp.com
Subject: Callback request for Ticket # AJ-10-E14

Hi

The customer from ticket AJ-10-E14 did call in and asked to be called back. Can you give him a call ?

Regards,
Some Guy
$MegaCorp Core Care

Oh, go blow it out your ass.

From: Really Evil Canine [mailto:really.evil.canine@$Megacorp.com]
Sent: 10. June 2008 16:12
To: Some Guy
Subject: RE: Callback request for Ticket # AJ-10-E14

Hi

No. I'm too busy actually working on his ticket. And by not calling him I've managed to find the problem for which I'm in the middle of writing a solution, said solution to be posted inside the next half hour.

Regards,
REC

Fifteen minutes later Meathead was on the phone. While I wasn't expecting him to tell me that my request for the big, fuck-off 45" monitor was finally going to be approved (denied, again), neither did I think I was in trouble. It was probably another discussion about the latest developments with $BigPrinterCo to determine if there's any chance of unfucking the system they set their worst and dullest upon.

"What the fuck, REC?"
"Huh?"
"I just got my ass chewed out by $DriedUpBitchManager. What the fuck?"
"Huh?"
"That mail you sent."

I tried to think. It's been four years since the "E-Mail Incident" which managed to escalate it's way up to the fucking $BigCorp boardroom inside 36 hours. Had to lay low for a few months as well as outperform third line support worldwide to get that one to blow over. I haven't sent anything like it since. Did someone get upset about the Helpful Hints mail I try to send out every month with various suggestions and methods to ease work?

"Don't ever tell Core Care 'No.'"

Oh.

"When they tell you a customer wants a call-back, agree."
"But I told the mook that I was in the middle of writing the solution."
"Don't ever tell Core Care 'No.'"
"Uhh... OK. So I now have to call the fuckwits?"
"No, but don't ever tell Core Care that."
"Didn't plan to. So we're cool?"
"No we're definitely not cool. When you buy me a Maß of beer, that's when we'll be cool" Six euros to get out of the doghouse? Deal.

And just as I finish typing this there's a new mail which has come in. Core Care, natch'.

Shifty

I have a German keyboard and I like it a lot (though it'd be better if it was a clicky Type-M "buckling spring" board). I have a Type-M but it's US-American and is missing the key between the left shift and the Y (that's a Z to you QWERTY people). Ever since I first sat in front of a German keyboard all those years ago, I have preferred the layout for everything except when I need curly braces and square brackets. Thankfully I code very little. I've also since added many more characters with the Keyboard Layout Creator.

That key down on the left is a "less-than" in its normal state, a "greater-than" when shifted, and a "pipe" when combined with the AltGr (right-alt). It's great for HTML, but occasionally it's possible to enter the angle bracket in the wrong direction. This isn't usually a problem. Not usually.

We had recently a "nice" issue on live environnement : instead of purging old orders, they have purged all orders after 1st january 2008... (ok you can laugh, but was not me...)

Instead of recovering from the database backup the customer decided to reimport them from SAP using the usual $BatchLoader. So all orders were recreated with a different $InternalKey.

Now, there are orders in $YourBigAppand and Orders in $OtherBigApp, they are the same but the $KeyNum referenced in $OtherBigApp is no longer the one of $YourBigApp. This is not yet an issue as there is no control on this field. However, there will be in the future a control on this field.

So the question is : can the $KeyNum that have been deleted be reused in the futur for a different record ? We want to be 100% sure that the deleted $KeyNum will never be reused by the system. (I know putting the right $KeyNum in $OtherBigApp would be eayser...already explained this to the customer)

The ticket's from France. I know that France, like Belgium, uses the completely wacked-out AZERTY layout. I have tried to use these keyboards before and found it quite painful. The key just to the right of the left shift is the same, though, and I knew immediately what had happened:

Some genius decided to drop to a command line, connect directly to the DB, and do a massive global drop without first SELECTing the full dataset just in case someone might notice the DBA-typing-master-supergenius showing some sort of weakness in the form of self-doubt. So instead of issuing a command something along the lines of:
SELECT * WHERE Master.Table.Data = (SELECT * FROM Master.Table.Data WHERE DATE > 20080101)

He let rip with:
DROP * WHERE Master.Table.Data = (SELECT * FROM Master.Table.Data WHERE DATE > 20080101)

And he didn't notice that his finger had also contacted the shift key as he pressed the greater-than, slightly changing the intended query and command. Fuckwit.

Marie,

I have to say that you have a very... unique... definition of "nice". Rest assured I'm not laughing; just as on your AZERTY keyboard, it's quite easy to accidentally type a ">" instead of a "<" on my German QWERTZ keybaord. Our $KeyNums are NEVER reused. In fact, a great deal are never used at all due to certain internal generation methods. For more detailed information, see my document, "Healthy Respect for Healthy $KeyNums Gives You Healthy Data". Inserting the new $KeyNum into the $OtherBigApp record is indeed the best solution and fully supported. You should be able to batch the job but mind the shift key. Regards, REC

And that should've been it. And lo and behold, it was... almost.

Thanks a lot for confirming !!! I just told it 3 times to the customers but they did not beleave in it. I think it is the biggest bullet I saw in my career.

I would never understand how they could realize it only one day later...

Thanks for giving my the reference. I searched for it but was not able to find it. I really dislike this new µù%$£! support web site (µù%$£! stands for some word that a polite woman is not suppose to use!)

kind regards

Marie

A fucking human! I was actually, truly, unmistakably communicating with a human being! A competent and friendly one, at that! That's my 2008 quota used up.

Root Cause: 6-Customer Error. If it'd been the fucking bozo who actually did the drop then yes, there'd be five internal notes appended demanding my Root Cause: 17.