Kindergarten.

Since no current monkey wants to get near Citrix problems and our few Citrix-knowledgeable monkeys have all moved on, if "Citrix" appears in the ticket, "REC" appears in the ownership field. Since most Citrix tickets are related to the massive Citrix problem I sorted in May, I'm getting quite a few sweeties. I know the entire problem inside and out and wrote the resolution, and I have a handy-dandy copy of it in my boilerplate collection to send to those customers who're too lazy or stupid to bother looking at the Knowledge Base.

Then there are the fuckwits.

Hi. Thank you for the informative answer. We're experiencing this problem though and think that maybe it has to do with the operating system since we only have this problem when Citrix is installed on Windows 2003?

The reason it worked on Windows 2000 is that you were using Presentation Server 3, not 4, dumbass.

The mail exchange continued:

Cust.: Do you think this problem would happen on Windows 2000 and Presentation 4

REC: Yes. It will not happen with PS3 on any OS. It will happen with PS4 on every OS. Patch our software to X.4.6c and it won't happen anymore. The patch is simple, takes 20 minutes and has no down-time or database mods.

Cust.: We tried patching but it failed.

REC: Send me the logs.

Logs arrive.

REC: You can't install the patch over Citrix or Terminal Services. Everything has to be local at the server because of how Windows' security -cough- acts.

Cust.: But we can run everything over Citrix.

REC: Apparently not.

Cust.: We've decided we're going to try installing Presentation Server 4 on Windows 2000. That should work. Please close the ticket.

REC: It won't work but I'm happy to close the ticket.

He'll be back next week and I'll be stuck with him again.

I swear it feels like I'm teaching kindergarten:

No Billy, you may not use the Exact-O knife. No, do not touch it. You'll hurt yourself just like last time. Yes, you will. Class, the art knife is only for teachers Billypayattention and no one, this goes for you too, Billy, no one is to touch it. If you take it and hurt yourself you'll bleed just like Billy lookatmewhenI'mtalkingtoyouBilly!. No one is to touch it, not when it's on my desk, not if it's sitting precariously on the shelf of the art closet, and... Billy, are you paying attention?, especially not if a mysterious wind blows the doors of the art closet open and it lands on the floor next to your desk. The Exact-O knife is only for teachers.

OK, now that that's clear, everybody who's allowed to use the Exact-O knife, raise your han--Put Your Hand DOWN NOW, Billy!

It would be a lot cooler if I could watch some of the customers get into rock fights on the playground with each other.

In the smoking room someone had left our copy of the German IT rag Computerwoche open to the story of the week: "Google will be the Internet's cash register/check-out". Duh! I called that two years ago, not that anyone remembers. So I'm going to make another prediction, recorded on HuSi where I can't edit the story once it's been archived. Call me ReallyEvilCringely:

Within the next three years Google will finally present a solution that so many companies have been seeking since 1996: micropayments. First to use them will be newspapers and porn sites, especially the gallery sites which depend on banners which no one clicks and most people block and the occasional click-through registration fees.

This will be bad for finding information on the Intarweb. News content beyond the first three or four lines of copy; papers will charge 5-50 cents to see the rest.

Google will cash in like nobody's business. They have most of the infrastructure already in place: accounts, tracking toolbars, mail and payments. You'll tie your AdSense to your gPayment account (which also ties to your bank account or a deposit sent to Google). And even though they could make bajillions of dollars on a 1/10% fee, they could also get away with 5-20% based on customer size. Nobody else can offer the service. Worried about image, however, they may well settle on a maximum of 5%, not much higher than normal credit card transaction fees.

Elaboration based on a comment from HuSi:

I'd never heard of Denmark's limited Valus system (which is, as I predicted, most popular with news, porn and map sites). I'm referring to world-wide service. I'm referring to integrated-into-your-browser service. Microsoft will try to compete, maybe with an ePay/PayBully partnership for the banking side, but Google has the full infrastructure to do this already (GMail, AdSense, Google Toolbar, Analytics, not to mention their massive server infrastructure) and the ability to continue fast expansion.

I'm also talking about a mass brown-out of information. I can read any story that Jyllands-Posten has up on-line just as I can the Washington Post or New York Times. While I wouldn't mind so much if they switched their archives to micropayments (rather than the large payments or subscriptions required now), I'm expecting them to only show the first paragraph of damned near every article with a clickable micropayment button to continue reading the rest of the story.

Some papers will try pay-for-a-day and charge $1 or maybe their normal street cover price for a full day's access, others will charge X cents per article. Maps will probably have tiered pricing for printing, locking the displayed map into an embedded WMV window so that you can't just hit PrintScreen.

Newspapers have been dreaming of this and I've been dreading it, but it's coming soon. You read it here first.

We just had an urgent escalation come in: Haaaaalp! Stuff's not working and 1400 users can't do anything!

We are having issues in our production environment. We deployed a release 2 weeks ago however since we deployed this release we have been experiencing restarts within $YourBigApp

So you're only just calling us now for a problem that's been there for two weeks? And now it's so totally SuperExtraUrgent?

There's more. You knew there would be.

Because we were behind schedule we didn't have time to test this before rolling out to production. Please tell us what the problem is.

You. Utter. Fuckwit.
_SeventeenSeventeenSeventeenSeventeen!!
Give me my seventeen and put down that fucking Exact-O knife RIGHT THIS MINUTE Billy!
x-posted from HuSi.