Pow! BAM! Kerr-ACK!

Hooray! We're not just on airplanes and bicycles, we're now in a film!

Dusting this one off -- I started writing it some time ago and saved it during a reboot but it's still relevant.

IMPORTANT NEWS TO ALL EMPLOYEES: $MegaCorp has limited permission to use select trademarks, images, and characters. WE MAY NOT repurpose these assets in any way or create separate materials using said trademarks, images, or characters. © 2010 ABCDEFG. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TM & © 1942-2010. We will sue your ass.

That's right, $MegaCorp has spent millions of dollars to ensure that our fucking logo appears for at least 1½ seconds somewhere in a fucking superhero film. And not just any superhero film but a fucking sequel which is already expected to go straight to DVD. Because the super-influential PFYs who might watch this steaming pile of crap could just possibly notice our logo during its two-second appearance and therefore feel compelled to ensure their companies spend $80M/year on our products.

It could haaaaaaaaaappen.

Or the entire fucking rest of us could maybe have a goddamned COLA raise. We're not even looking for something like the board gave themselves (about three billion-with-a-B), just enough to be able to cover the fucking cost of this year's rent and fuel increases.

We sponsor the shittiest plane in the world. It has our logo on it. The cost of our logo (which is smaller than even the most timid tagger would make) could give every employee a $10K raise. The plane is so shit that it makes a crashed Tupolev look like a fucking museum piece P-51 Mustang. The pilot flies better when he's drunk (although so do I but don't tell the FAA because I'd hate to lose my ticket).

We sponsor some fucking bicycle-rider. Never mind that this isn't a sport so much as a commuter activity for most of $MegaCorp's employees, those In The Know feel it necessary to pay for a finger-sized logo on some twat's two-wheeler. A twat who'd never survive working for just one hour as a courier in NYC or San Fran. A cuntnuzzle who has quite publicly fallen over while competing, an action our wares really shouldn't be associated with.

We also sponsor some car. In exchange for sporting our logo over the right fender on a sticker so small a single square of toilet paper could cover it and most of the candy bar logo which rides above it, $MegaCorp spends more on this than a $20K/employee raise would cost.

Like the airplane, the car hasn't won a single fucking race ever. Which is why we need to spend more money this year to sponsor it. Because the seven people in the world who give a shit about watching useless hippies driving weird cars in circles around abandoned tracks for 32 hours at a stretch might get a glimpse of our logo and feel compelled to spend $200 million of their company's money on our products.

Instead of paying their own employees enough to pay their own fucking bills. Just like $MegaCorp.

Norms

"Joe, that is one butt-ugly car you got!"
"It's an Audi!"
"Joe, it's an orange-yellow Audi."
"Yeah, well... what are you gonna do?"
"Your wife made you get that colour?"
"Aw, hells no! She's still pissed off at me because she wanted metallic charcoal. Truth be told, so did I."
"But you got it in orange-yellow because... why?"

"There are five charcoal-coloured cars on this street already!"
"And that's a reason to get that butt-ugly colour because...?"
"Well, we need a normal distribution."
Hummina-hummina-hummina
"There are a lot more red, black and blue cars than will fit to a standard bell curve here in our neighbourhood. We have some green and purple and white cars but no one has yellow or orange and so I had to get that in order to at least get closer to normalising the colour distribution."

   - -

Is it possible there is anything more uninformed, miseducated and unrealistic than an MBA? A bell curve is a description not a target. Demanding that 12.5% of my tickets (not 10% and not 15%) be turned into Knowledge Base Items is nonsensical. The number comes from a six-month window when there were half as many of us here and we had just completely changed the entire software architecture. We were therefore publishing a lot. About 12.5% of all new tickets as it turns out.

But if I publish 12.5% and each and every one of my cow-orkers also publishes 12.5% of our tickets $PeterPrincipleManager will have numbers matching a 7-year-old cherry-picked and completely meaningless curve no matter how fine-grained his sample might be.

Five seconds ago I remembered the only reason I'm still willing to put up with this shit: I looked over at the Puppy. She's currently trying to eat her toenails and doesn't understand why the foam letter floor tiles don't melt in her mouth the way that the cream of broccoli pasta does. I'd be even happier about this but she's making a particular noise which lets me know I have even more shit to deal with.

What I think sucks most of all is that I still have 14 more tickets to deal with today and any noise BadPuppy makes will be about 183 times as sensible as whatever the fuckwits want from me now. "We have a new guy in the server room and he wants to know why Apple ][ Aliens won't run on the 64-way Xeon cluster."

ATTENTION $MEGACORP VP INFIDEL

Sending Dilbert mail's around is something the secretary's and new hire's do, not vice president's of multi-billion's dollar's corporation's.

1) Dilbert make's fun of you and you're ilk
2) Thi's particular cartoon 'specifically make's fun of you and three level's of you're underling's
3) You even added the 'signature with you're fucking title "DR. Soupa Phuchuitte"
4) An apostrophe doe's not mean, "LOOK OUT! HERE COMES AN ESS!"

You fuckwit.

How many teaspoons in an ocean?

It's been more than four years since I started this blog. I thought I'd at least be over 500 posts, preferably over a thousand. No biggie, but so far it's been a general bitchfest; I've never actually asked for help before. This time I have no idea.

Any of you SQL Server genii know how $StupidChineseCo goes about creating a replication/duplication database for SQL Server 2005 WITHOUT a fucking primary key? While the DB is live? Because that's what this jackass customer is demanding.

If they were using a real database like Oracle I'd have an answer for him, but they insist on using FoxBase Pro MSSQL.

This just in: $TinCanCarCorp, to whom I explained last month that if our "silent install" was to work would require changing a line in the INSTALL.INI file from silentInstall = FALSE to the totally unexpected and unintuitive silentInstall = TRUE. They're back with a new ticket this morning: "ini file for silent installation always the same" [verbatim].

And before I manage to post this, another ticket just showed up from $ScammyInsuranceCo who didn't like the answer I gave them yesterday about what the minimum JavaBean version for their environment is and so posted the same question again today. I'd complain but I'm too happy about filling my queue with easy shit I don't actually have to think about, giving me more time to consider what I'm cooking the family for dinner tonight. It's looking like chicken legs with veg in a marsala sauce over tagliatelle.

You had your chance

Yes, dude, if you try to push through me to get onto the fucking train as I and a dozen others are still trying to get off the damned thing, you are going to land on your ass. I don't care that you're bigger than me, I'll be damned if I'm staying on past my stop because you're just that stupid. And no, I won't excuse myself; you're the one who owes me an apology.

This can only be an omen of things to come...

HAAALLLP! While installing $YourBigApp client the installation process gets hanged. Coudl you please let us know the reason behind it?

Elves? Fairies? Madonna's plastic surgeon is bored? Really, throw me a bone here. Give me something to start with here. Logs? Screenshot? A description of the system you're working on? A version number? A description of the tea leaves or chicken entrails? Something?!

While you answer the questions in my generic WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM template I'll be busy playing Steambirds.

Hi,

There is no error thrown while installing on our machines. However while installing the software i.e install.exe,the installation process starts.Also the status bar shows the progress in %s but the moment it achieves 100% process gets hang.Ideally we would expect the process to get complete and close by itself but intead we had to explicitly kill the installation process as it gets hanged.

Also we observed that some of the drivers(mainly drivers connecting to db) went missing from the machine hence we had to format our machine again since we were not sure whether $YourBigApp was installed properly.

Lessee now, you somehow deleted a load of drivers from the client machine, then wondered why it didn't work, and out software wouldn't install, so you "refreshed" the machine (with a scented bath and aligned chakra stones, perhaps?). You didn't say whether or not our software wouldn't install after a full OS re-install (including full updates which, for XP, now takes about 45 minutes even with 18Mb downstream). And you didn't send logs. Please do the needful and ess-plain yourself.

Could you please let me know what type of logs are you looking for in your below response?

Also it would be helpful if you could also mention the path where we could find the logs requested by you?

"It would be helpful" if I "mentioned the path" where you might find the logs? Because you're too much of a fucking ninny to look in our directory structure and guess C:\OurBigApp\Logs much less bring up Windows Event Viewer or possibly search for *.log?

Fucking chimps. Real administrators are unemployed while useless dime-an-hour chimps are put in charge of systems which daren't fall over but do. Which somehow becomes our fault.

Fuckwits.

Moving forward

Am I a really dick or just realistic?

If you do a TL;DR of everything I've blogged about under this nick for the past few years you end up with little more than a frustrating collection of days spent dealing with people who return time and time again to the same technological cesspits of their own making, who request help and upon receipt reject it out of hand, complaining bitterly that they need something else (not that they can explain what this "else" might be), and I put up with this every day only because all I really want to do is put small spoonfuls of mushy noms into my Puppy's eager and demanding gob. While it seems a fucking treadmill for me, life is only starting for the BadPuppy, and everything from toenail gunge to barely-within-reach cables just begging to be pulled out of the computer is a fucking source of wonder to her.

Me, I just want to stab the world with the slimy remains of rice cakes the Puppy insists on letting gravity take care of. Or better yet, shards of the glass puppy chow jars covered in glue that can't be removed with a 1200° flame.

And yet, there are signs that things may get better. And by "better" I mean a whole new slew of shit to whinge and complain about, probably with a bigger paycheck and fewer levels of management shitting on me while begging me for help (there are seven degrees of separation between me and the CEO in the orifice heirarchy but only three in real life via two completely different paths). But I'd never again have to deal with Mookman nor others of his ilk. Not directly, anyway.

The Magic 8-Ball says: "Outlook Good," which shows what a piece of shit the Magic 8-Ball is since even Eudora 0.6 was a more stable fucking mail client, even for quadraplegics.

Yep, things are looking up a bit. They'll be even better once the Puppy's paper-trained.

Enjoy some really good Icelandic music. In fact, have a second Bubbi song on me. And maybe one from my friend Steini as well. Yep, things are looking up a bit.

Myself Wants to Help You

"I" is a subject pronoun.
     I went to the store.
     Joe and I work in the same building.
     Signing documents is something I hate to do.
     I am called ReallyEvilCanine.

"Me" is an object pronoun.
     The person who went to the store was me.
     Julie asked Joe and me the same question.
     She gave me the documents to Sign.
     The person using the nickname "ReallyEvilCanine" is really me.

"Myself" is a reflexive pronoun. That means it reflects back to a previously used or implied pronoun in the same sentence. It does not and cannot stand alone in English. "Myself" can only appear in a sentence where the subject/object pronoun has already been used:
     I went to the store myself. (because someone else I'd asked to do so didn't)
     I myself don't care for black pudding.
        OR
     I don't care for black pudding myself.

"Myself" is not a subject:
     Myself went to the store.

"Myself" is not an object:
     She gave myself the documents to sign.


Stop it already! You sound like a pretentious twat when you say or write "myself" instead of "I" or "me". Like in that mail I just got which opens with "Hi Glynda and REC, $BigManager has asked REC and myself to hold $AreaSpecialty conference calls with yourself.

Abusing the reflexive form like this makes you look like a fuckwit trying to impress people with your incredible literacy skills when you are, in fact, demonstrating just how fucking incompetent you are when it comes to basic language usage in the muvver tongue. You display your desperation for the esteem you think you'll earn by using more profligate oratory, you cuntnuzzle.

In other news, I am proud to announce that no matter which major site you use, a search for "fuckwit" and "cuntnuzzle" returns only my blog, but I'm also gutted that I no longer own the phrase "Citrix sucks" (although you can find me with "citrix sucks ass").

Surfers, timed bukkakke, depression and fuckwits:

They all come in waves.

♫ It's just another Fuckwit Friday
An 'Eat Shit and Die" day,
My 'gonna make you cry' day,
It's just another Fuckwit Friday ♬


1) $GiantTelco
We need the checklist & precautions to take before running FilesysChecker
You need what? The entire procedure is documented from start to finish in steps so simple your neighbour's smelly dog could follow them.

Yes we are read the documentations but we want ALL the precautions to take.
Because we hide shit and only give you the complete answer if you annoy us enough?

Closed: Seventeen.


2) $BigBank
We are upgrading to SQL Server 2005 but your version 4.c says it doesn't support it. It has to support SQL Server 2005.
We don't support it for version 4.c. Upgrade to our version 4.g or higher.

We can't upgrade your software too. You must support SQL Server 2005 since you support SQL Server 2000.
You want to "upgrade" Foxbase Pro SQL Server to a previous and soon-to-be-unsupported version 2005 but are unwilling to upgrade our software as well? And you think we are somehow required to rewrite our EOL'd version which we wrote eight years ago because you're that laszy or incompetent?

Closed: Seventeen.


3) $CarCo
$YourBigApp is fail to connect to server in our system
Could you be any less specific? Describe the problem, how I reproduce it, and send me logs.

No logs excepting in Active Directory which fails. So you can't reach $YourBigApp. We need a fix as we need to go live today!
Wha-wha-wha-what? You have a problem with Active Directory? Our app is AD-compliant. Just punch in the damned machine names, admin users and their passwords and Robert is one of your parents' siblings.

We can't get the Active Directory account to work and our administrator is not here. You need to tell us how to fix this! We are to go live already!
You expect me to remotely and blindly act like your network and system admin?

Closed: Seventeen.


5) $ComputerCorp
Does $YourBigApp version 6.b support Unicode? The Reference Guide says yes but we're not sure.
You're "not sure"? About the contents of the one document to which we are most legally beholden? The one which we <click clickety-click> regularly tell you to look at because it answers all of your questions?

Closed: Seventeen.


5) $DevelopingNationTelco
File system: we use windwos and are concerning that there are many attachments in attachments directory to more then 1 millions. how do we make more directorys because this is surely to much
It's not too much. A Windows directory can hold about 4.3 billion-with-a-B files. It can hold more than half that before there's any noticeable change in performance. Don't worry.

But surely one millions files is too much to look through for one directory. how can we fix this
This is a machine-only directory. YOU aren'tsupposed to look through it. YOU are supposed to leave it the fuck alone.

This is too many files for us to look at administrating the files. Please what can we do to make less?
Stop attaching so many damned files?

Closed: Seventeen.


5) $FinanceInc
Is there a downside of having the $FunctionServer database set to GMT using the Universal Time Coordinate?
Only if you see "being able to display and correlate all the timestamps with the rest of the system you converted to UTC last year" as being a "downside".

Closed: Seventeen.


These were all tickets from just this week.

Suit yourself

Dear $MistarManager, I told you this would happen. The entire method is wrong. Since you think you know better than me what I can resolve and demand I resolve whatever steaming pile of shit you dump into my queue, my resolution times have drastically increased. And that little "give back" that we coupldn't be given more than two of these steaming piles of shit per day has really come back to bite you in the ass, hasn't it?

So much so that $MistarManager has been reduced to sending the same kind of "please take an extra ticket or two" begging mail that he used to send before the Harmonization, except now -- by $MegaCorp's own rules -- he can no longer "strongly request" or outright demand any of us actually take another one, and now instead of 2-10 stinkers sitting in the queue there are more than 50! The fucking 'tard.

Just to prove my point I'm going to take three seven of them again. And all three will be resolved before fucking lunch despite all the additional, stupid, unnecessary, bureacratic proccess-driven TPS report covers that have to be numbered and stapled onto each ticket these days.

Right... Citrix, mine. Daylight Savings Time, mine. File System b0rked, min... WTF? Who the fuck grabbed that? I'm the fucker who wrote the book on this problem after weeks of testing and discovery and work with engineering on source code. No one knows this better than I do. There's a 90% chance that my first answer will be the final answer with no follow-up beyond "thanking yourself for the quickening services offered to ourselves thank you for this are you sure it does the needful and working is always the cases?"

Clickety-click-click cut open window paste click Hmm... J.J.? Who the fuck is this J.J. character? Clickety-click click click Oh, US Special Customer Services, and he's on-line. Ping him through IM:

REC> J.J., that ticket 4c55-5255q1e?
REC> Have you worked with this issue before? This is a matter of unreported Production data loss which doesn't leave a trace or throw an error.
REC> You grabbed the SR just before I could take it.
REC> I'm the guy who did the testing and resolution for the issue and we have all the lab machines set up in case the initial fixes don't work.

No answer. Cut and paste into an email and thirty mintues later, around 2:45pm...

Hello REC,

I have taken ownership for now as $BigChain has special contractual support agreement and being SCS account, we do provide initial work for the issues.

Apparently this issue seems to be fixed in version 3.7.c.12 but as $BigChain has been delivered customizing product supported and I would need to discuss with Product Management, the feasibility of incorporting this issue in they're build.

I would be in touch with you after my discussion with product manager.

You "would be in touch" with me after talking to PM? When I'm the guy you're supposed to go through to get to PM? This'll be interesting. You can "be in touch" all you want, I'm just going to tell you to fuck off. I offered to take it. You had your chance.

But first, a prophylactic mail to management:

Dear $MistarManager

Once again you're in a hole and once again I've thrown you a rope. I took Tickets A, B, C, D, E and F for you. I also tried to take ticket 4c55-5255q1e but J.J. got it first and insisted on working it himself. I tried to explain that I'm the expert and that this issue always ends up going through me which is why it should go TO me but he insisted on holding it. I'm letting you know now that with the massive queue I already have plus these extras I took for you I will not have time to help him when he comes back with his tail between his legs begging for my assistance, especially since it wouldn't count towards my quotas even if it was transferred to me now.

Cheers,
REC

Came the reply: "Understood. Thanks, mate. I really appreciate all your effort."

Eight hours later, as I was trying to catch up to my wife's BejeweledBlitz score a mail popped up in the background. From J.J.

Hello REC,

Based on my discussion with Project lead, we would like to repro this issue in $BigChain build BC4.t.2 RT41. As this is customized build and engineering support would be available, if this issue could be reproduced in the Engineering provided custom build.

I would highly appreciate, if you can provide me exact sequence of steps to reproduce this issue.

Regards,
JJ

Go fuck yourself, J.J. You can look through the notes in 40 related tickets to find the dozen defects, two of which include the full testing protocol (only one of which is correct). You can build your own fucking repro environment. No, I can't share ours with you because we built our machines on a local network which can't route outside our office due to $MegaCorp networking rules. Ain't my quota, ain't my ticket, ain't my problem.

I was thinking of making my own version of a Tower Defense game for $MegaCorp but why bother? Even my own side are creeps who need a good blasting.

Flying Blind

Anyone can fly an airplane. I know this because over the past decade I've let my mother, a bar-owning buddy, my whack-job sister and even my seven-year-old nephew take the controls of a plane I was piloting. They were flying the aircraft; I was piloting it. There's a huge difference. Flying is what you do when things are working. Piloting is what you do when shit goes downhill.

Administering a system is akin to piloting. Day to day, a fucking trained chimp can add user accounts in Windows and reboot the system when it crashes yet again. With practice he could probably learn to open a command line window and type dir. That does not make him an administrator.

If you don't know how to use the most basic UNIX commands like cat and grep using Cygwin, you're a trained chimp. The search function in Notepad is not the way you sort through thread IDs in a 500MB log and no, your m4d Excel sk1llZ don't cut it either.

On the other hand, I find it hysterical that one of the most common tools used by people writing UNIX and Linux shell scripts is Windows Notepad. Not emacs, not vi, not even pico (my favourite because I'm just that ghey), but Notepad. Which pretty much always writes a Unicode byte order marker. Which fucks up UNIX and Linux shell scripts.

If your job is Administrator and you're in class to prepare for the Oracle DBA II "Certified Professional" test, you should not have a problem using Oracle 11g running on any platform, not even on RedHat Oracle "Unbreakable <hah!> Linux". Your difficulties in using the better and more-refined-than-DOS bash shell should not prevent me and the others in the class from actually learning shit while you interrupt the teacher for the umpteenth fucking time asking how to change directories to list the files in /usr/bin/temp/ora-inst. You cockmonkey.

I have a little script of my own called "chimp" to run for these fucknuzzles which I usually remember to bring on a USB stick if I go to any tech classroom. It begins

#!/bin/bash
alias c:="C:"
alias dir="ls -lF"
alias del="rm -iv"
alias move="mv -iv"

It ends with echo "Ook."

And then the rest of us get to actually learn something about making the Resource Manager do what we want it to with a few different job classes. Or at least make it do what Oracle wants us to make it do during the damned test.