A Day in the Life

You CAN be too careful

2010-12-21T15:09:00.001+01:00

Sanjay wants to perform a simple operation: changing the department identity code on the database. It took him two full, single-spaced pages to ask whether it can be done. I needed 47 words to confirm this and accurately explain how to do it, including a warning.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Currently in $Telco app, department identity is getting generated with A5-. We wanted identity to start with 71- instead of A5-.

1. Can you please let us know the possible solution for this?
Currently our database is going to migrate from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g. So the approach you suggest will it be applicable for both oracle clients i.e. Oracle 9i or Oracle 10g.

2. Also we wanted to know if we start generating the department identity with 71- then do you foresee any issues while accessing orders / faults / asset data which is present in the current application.

Do let us know if you require more information.

Thanks & Regards,

"Sure thing. It's simple. To change the department identity you'll need to access the database directly and modify the DEPT_INDENT field of the YBA_IDENTIFICATION table with the value you want. Afterwards you must restart the full system. WARNING: do not change any other value on this table!

Love, REC"

And that should've been the end of it. It always should be and it never is. Ever. I'm too busy today to piss and moan about subcontinental torture of the Muvver Tongue.

Hi_ Thanks for the update.
we got following queries on the approach suggested by you.
a) The approach of changing _DEPT_IDENT_ field of the YBA_IDENTIFICATION table_ will it work in both clients i.e. Oracle 9 and Oracle 10_
b) If we do above change then will it have any impact on the inlife date i.e. orders_ faults and assets data present on production system.
c) After above _DEPT_IDENT_ field change_ do we have to do a complete enterprise restart or can this change be done online without restart the server.

I have attached the extract of YBA_IDENTIFICATION table from production environment for your reference. Do let me know if you need more information. Thanks and Regards

Da fuck? Since when does a database version affect the contents of a fucking 8-character field? I don't care what's in the table. There's one field to change and it's the only field you can touch on this table without blowing up your system.

will it work in both clients i.e. Oracle 9i & Oracle 10g?
It's not something you repeatedly change. It's changed once by the administrator.

b) If we do above change then will it have any impact on the inlife date
This is an internal reference number which is combined with SEQUENCEs to build serial and reference numbers. Noi historical data can be affected.

c) do we have to do a complete enterprise bounce
Yes.

And that should have finally been the end of it. Except that it never is.

Pleas having the manager calling to confirm because this does not seem fully correct. and we need to know before we initiate the effect.

Go fuck yourself. On the plus side, this nitwit technically asked to escalate to a manager so it's now Meathead's problem.

2010-12-20T18:38:00.000+01:00

"REC where are you?"
"Still working from home," I tell Meathead over the din of the teething puppy.
"You have to come in for the $PharmaCo conference tomorrow."
"Don't worry, I'll dial in."
"No you won't. They are coming in tomorrow."
"Coming to our office??"
"Ja. Also, bis morgen."

I slept two hours, my body aches, it's raining and snowing, and I not only have to go into the office but I'll actually have to talk to these buffoons in person.

Fur stayed.

2010-12-08T13:38:00.000+01:00

Apparently, here in Krautreich after two years I have forgotten everything I learned in the day-long first aid class I took five? six? years ago. Because then I'd forgotten everything I'd learned during my brief stint becoming an EMT with eyes toward doctorhood, a career path I dropped because I really don't like most people and I can't think of a quicker way of finding this out than working in emergency services.

It's also a tough job to do from home.

Luckily, this class was being run by a guy who not only actually worked as an EMT but had done so in a town I previously lived in. We traded a few war stories and it turns out that he had carted away "Sepp", the permadrunk who'd set up shopping cart not a 30-second walk from my old front door. I ended up helping him with some of the practical demos, being the fallen victim to be manhandled into various safety positions as well as overseeing bandages and CPR.

Every participant got the day off of normal work duty to be one of the building's Safety Officer First Responder Engineers. Everyone but me. There were a couple of special people upon whom I had to wait, one of them only because everyone -- and I mean everyone worldwide -- wanted to see what I'd do when faced with this:

Unable to move 855159 files to new folder on different machine xcopy fails to file all files and ntbackup cannot backup all files to disk destination server has to tape drive media

And this has what to do with our applications? Your fucking disk is full. Not my problem. Delete all those fucking stileproject pr0n clips, you shitcock.

Fuckwit. Seventeen. Going home.

I Do Want What I Have Not Got

2010-10-11T11:04:00.003+02:00

A couple of years ago I was visiting my brother and he seemed like a changed man. It wasn't just that he was over his latest divorce but rather, there was a genuine and deep change in him. I knew he'd been seeing a shrink since a rather spectacular (and very public) flame-out.

He's since stopped seeing the shrink. "One day he told me a story," Bro told me, "and it all just clicked. And I was fine."

A story?

One day I walked into a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop and ordered a slice of pepperoni pizza.
"We're an ice cream shop, sir, " said the guy at the counter. "We don't serve pizza here." I was angry. I wanted a piece of pizza but this guy wouldn't sell me a piece. "What do you mean you don't have pizza! You're a restaurant! You have food! I want a slice of pepperoni pizza!" I screamed.

"We only have ice cream, sir," the guy replied. I was furious and stormed out of the place screaming.

The next day I went back to the Baskin Robbins. There was the guy again. "Gimme a slice of pepperoni pizza, please," I asked him. "I'm sorry sir, but this is an ice cream parlour. We only have ice cream. We don't have pizza here."

I started screaming at him again. "What the hell are you talking about?! I don't want any ice cream. I just want a damned piece of pizza!" He just stood there shaking his head, saying, "I'm sorry sir, but I can't help you." I was fit to be tied and stormed out of the place, hungry as hell and cursing up a storm.

The next day I went back again. "How can I help you, sir?"

"Hi there," I said with a smile. "I'd like to have a slice of pepperoni pizza, please."

"Sir, I keep telling you, we're an ice cream parlour, not a pizzeria. If you want pizza there's a place around the corner that makes great pizza. But we only have ice cream here. I would love to give you some pizza but we don't have any. We just have ice cream."

I started banging my fists on the counter and screaming at the guy again. How dare he not serve me that stupid slice of pizza! I'm a paying customer! I want some pizza and this is a restaurant! I walked out furious and screaming some more.

Do you get it?

"And that's when I got it," said my brother. Yeah, I get it, too. If only such realisation could provide me the same calm it gave my brother you couldn't hide a basketball in that my-head-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard.

Buddy-boy doesn't get it, either.

We need to disable IE7 compatibility mode on the web server using custom headers

OK, fine. Do X, Y, and Z. Restart to clear all caches and Robert becomes the name of your father's brother.

Thanks for confirming disabling IE7 compatibility using {long, enumerated list of steps just in case}. Another part of my request you didn't answer was as how to confirm the results at the client side i.e. those settings are in effect i.e. how to confirm after making those changes that IE7 compatibility has been turned off. Are there any $YourBigApp logs that we can check?

A question I didn't answer perhaps because you didn't ask? No matter, the answer's simple. This is a Web server matter and as such, nothing we could log even if we wanted to. You'll know you've done it correctly if $OurBigApp works, which you've confirmed it now does. You can look in the Web server logs and contact the vendor if you need further data.

Not necessarily the answer I was looking for, I'll do some digging on my own.

You want that in a cone or a cup? Closed as a Root Cause: 6.5-No Customer Research with a side order of 17.

There's a NetApp for that

2010-10-06T14:27:00.000+02:00

PRIO-1! PRIO-0! THE SKY IS FALLING! WE'RE DOOMED!! HAAAALLLP!!!

What a way to start the day. A quick look showed Srini works for $BigInterwebs who are still in development. You can't have a Prio-1 if you're in development, and if you want 'round the clock support, $MegaCorp makes you pay extra for it. So I don't feel too bad that it was almost lunch before I even see just the tip of this iceberg.

Reading through the problem, it was going to be after lunch before I answered it. The puppy needed feeds and it's marked Prio-3 (because that's what it is).

I'm not being as much of a dick as it seems. Srini is in California; his day starts after mine is well over, and thank fuck for that because it means he's unlikely to ever get up early enough to try calling me. Copypasta continues:

$YourBigApp %datastore% param has a limit of 255 char length since we are limited with 4 filesystem folders in our Production Environment so unable to include additional folders.Please let us know below are there any available options!!

1. Reference a config file to maintain this param value or any enhancement in future.
2. Any alternative to specify a way to store more folder names

A field length of 256 characters for the directory list should be able to allow even the least creative out there to specify at least 10 sub-directory location. And since one subdirectory can safely hold around 2.1 billion (~2³¹), it's going to be a special challenge to run out of room anytime soon. And I told him so, even explaining how to map and rename in a network-neutral sort of way.

And that was Srini taken care of. If only some of these other tickets were as easy.

This morning I logged in and the IM went nuts, popping up windows from four different mooks at Central who had tried to ping me about some ticket. There were more than a dozen mails all referring to the same damned ticket number. It dawned on me that I hadn't finished building a repro yesterday and this weird international sorting problem was a big deal for $EuroTelco...

And then I saw which company had the ticket number:

Escalate!! make the priority to 2!!

We have a limitation on the filer provided NetApp storage which can accomdate 91k files per folder but our environment creates around 40K files per day since we have trasncripts,email and other attachments. This is the defect..

You have NetApp storage? Which we don't support. Which we told you {clicky-clickety-click} a whole month ago we don't support. And you went and got it anyway even though it's unnecessary, a burden on our system, causes you a performance hit, and it can't hold more than two days' worth of your files in a directory?

Had you listed to us in the first place you'd have saved time and money and aggro and you'd have a system which, based on your stated fill rate of 41K docs a day, would be able to hold no fewer than 2004 years' worth of files.

Root Cause:17 - Fuckwit.
We already told you this shit but yeah, what do we know?

Magnanimous

2010-09-01T16:06:00.000+02:00

Meathead (my manager) came up to the Desk o' Hate high atop Munich on the first floor of the Greenhouse building, smiling like he'd actually gotten a raise and holding a folder in his hand. "Congratulations!" he said, handing it to me.

What could this be? A list of trainings I can finally have? A transfer to a less shittastical office? Permanent home office approval?

"It's now ten years since you are viz ze company, " Meathead explained as I opened the folder. "You have zis now."

It was a full-colour, A4 certificate congratulating me on having held out for 10 years in this hell. Printed on an old colour inkjet (the banding was pretty bad). And signed by two people in HR I've never heard of.

"That's not all, is it?" I asked, trying hard not to show just how underwhelmed I was.

"No," Meathead replied, "Zair's more!" He was almost beaming. "You can have ze authorisation to order a 10-year anniversary pen."

"No bonus?"
"No, of course not."
"Not even five yo-yos to go get a beer?"
"No, you know zat zere is no bonus money like zat in $MegaCorp."
"A free day of extra vacation, maybe?"
"Well, I guess you can leave early today if you get all ze extra work done early."

Colour me underwhelmed.

A pen. A fucking pen and shitty "certificate". Be still my shriveled, black heart.

Patchwork

2010-07-15T15:18:00.001+02:00

What's the fucking point of a four-day weekend if every goddamned store is closed? Fucking Germans.

And in the Inbox is ticket x30109q00335 from "Karl".

We are exhausted with two things:
Really, Hoss? Me too. MegaCorp's way of doing business and the people it does business with. People like... you.

1)Microsoft incompatibilty
2)Functionalities being taken away.

Huh? There are Windows versions of the Gimp and Tux Racer.

Do you perhaps mean changes in Microsoft functionality whenever they fix something in their OS and the resulting need to patch our software to deal with that? What exactly do you want me to do about it? Do I have some special power to make Microsoft stop disabling shit? Tell them to cut it out yourself; You're the one handing them 50 grand a year, not me.

Microsoft is going to disable and remove shit whenever they damned well feel like it. DriveSpace. MSJVM. Progman. If you were an actual administrator and not a chimp you'd know how to deal with some of these problems.

We dont want to upgrade your software too
So you'll patch Windows but not the software running on Windows which won't run if you don't patch it? Huh? Look, every time Microsoft disables functions we have to re-write parts of our software. If they deprecate some more functions that they used to recommend as Best Practices, what the fuck do you think will happen? Either don't take the patch that will disable $OurBigApp or patch everything.

Now you say you are changing support for version 3.c.5 so what functionalities is $MegaCorp planning to discontinue on $YourBigApp version 3.c.5?
Which ones would you like us to discontinue? We aren't changing the functionality of the fucking software, you knob end, just how much we're willing to help you with it and how much we're charging you to hold your hand and fix your fuck-ups. That's why the Notice of Changes to Support for versions 3.c.x wasn't called Notice of Functionality Removal for versions 3.c.x.

We're not taking away any functionality. There are minor support changes. You have to patch our software if you install the drastic Windows patches.

And that should've been the end of it. But noooooo...

You say you don't take away functionality but $MuuxMarketServerProg is GONE! We need $MarketServerProg! Tell Microsoft to bring it back!

Tell Microsoft, huh? To bring back our software module. Which didn't go away but rather only had a very clearly documented name change due which can be found in every fucking tech journal and news site to some shitheel suing us for daring to use the name he used on his bugalicious sold-three-copies-in-1998 program which has since lain dead, the download Web page not having been updated for more than a decade.

Read the fucking docs. Patch your software. Follow the post-patch instructions and use the new name of $MarketServerProg (which is the totally unintuitive $MuuxAppServerMarket).

I need a cup of coffee which I'll get right after closing this ticket ~~Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit~~ . Maybe I'll get lucky and someone will walk by with some Valium. Or Haldol. Beggars can't be choosers.

Inbox: (412/13279)

2010-07-09T15:35:00.000+02:00

Internal Ticket: DE1755-FG12
From: REC
Subject: Smee again. Moar mail quota pleez
Summary: GeeMale gives me seven gigs per account but I can't use them for corporate mail. Please increase my one account here to 500MB.

Memory is a tricky thing. Misremembering is terribly common. "Didn't the same thing happen a couple of years ago?" Close, but since $Thing wasn't terribly important, time has passed, and a few details match up, the mind tries to fill in the rest, usually to my detriment. And any time some übermanager misremembers something about me I have to nip it in the bud quickly or suffer the consequences of a (not always undeserved) bad reputation, such as with my "communications skills"

-----Original Message-----
From: $MegaCorp IT
Sent: 2010.06.12 21:08
To: REC
Subject: Re: Ticket DE1755-FG12 - Smee again. Moar mail quota pleez

Your inbox contains over 14,000 mails. Your older mail should be archived. We must have a justification for this amount of mail server usage.

Justification 1: Since even the programmers come to me for Unicode help and I'm an expert in Areas $1, $2 and $3, I have to constantly send & receive large diagnostic files. Because I am often working remotely these files must remain on the server to ensure transfer.

Justification 2: We have a some lying motherfuckers here and I have to cover my ass, which means searching through three fucking years of mail using my wife's $300 netbook on a borrowed wireless connection during my vacation instead of walking my kid on the beach.

From: Sal P.
Sent: 2010.04.22 21:51
To: REC
Subject: Legit question

No problem. Sorry but we're waiting on QA for confirmation. I'll let you know as soon as I have the info.

From: Sal P.
Sent: 2010.04.23 21:36
To: REC
Subject: Re: Legit question
Body: Any update?

I told you yesterday we're waiting on QA. I also told you yesterday that I'll let you know as soon as I have the info.

From: Sal P.
Sent: 2010.05.03 21:36
To: REC
Subject: Re: Legit question
Body: ANY UPDATE YET?????????

You're pissing me off, Sal. When I get the info I'll fucking tell you.

From: Sal P.
Sent: 2010.05.11 22:15
To: REC
CC: $Clueless1, $Clueless2, Sal's_Manager
Subject: REC won't answer my question!

I don't have QA confirmation yet. Wash out your twatsilicates.

From: Sal's_Manager
Sent: 2010.05.20 00:47
To: Sal's_Manager's_Manager
CC: Sal
Subject: FW: Re: REC won't answer my question!
Body: REC should answer Sal's question.

You fucking fuck.

From: Sal's_Manager's_Manager
Sent: 2010.05.26 03:18
To: Sal's_Manager's_Manager's_Manager
CC: Sal, Sal's_Manager, Sal's_Manager's_Manager
Subject: Re: FW: RE: REC won't answer my question!
Body: REC should answer Sal's question.

No surprise.

From: Sal's_Manager's_Manager's_Manager
Sent: 2010.06.01 09:14
To: REC's_Manager
CC: Sal, Sal's_Manager, Sal's_Manager's_Manager
Subject: Re: FW: RE: REC won't answer my question!
Body: REC should answer Sal's question. Didn't we have a problem with with REC's responsiveness before? Please discuss the matter with him.

WTF?

From: REC's_Manager
Sent: 2010.06.03 09:14
To: REC
Subject: FW: Re: FW: RE: REC won't answer my question!
Body:Can you please respond to Sal's question immediately?

Surprise!!!

I'mma bury this bitch. But as my paws pound out the poison I remember that I need to look "dignified" and "professional" so I try to channel Lassie and "set him on fire" in a way that won't burn me as well.

From: REC
Sent: 2010.06.01 11:33
To: everyone in the two mail chains
Subject: Re: FW: Re: REC won't answer my question!
Attachment: $Mail1, $Mail2, $Mail3, $Mail4, $Mail5, $Mail6
Body:All,

I have already sent out an E-Mail explaining that this document has been updated. Attached please see the mails I'd previously sent directly to Sal (22 April, 23 April and again a week later on 03 May -- attachments 1-3) that QA had to confirm information about $Problem. Once I finally had the information I updated documents and included a special note. This was only just confirmed and approved by QA on 18 May.

I updated and then announced the document to my manager on 19May. He forwarded this to $REC's_Manager's_Manager to then be pushed worldwide (see attachment 4). I also sent a direct note to Sal and included a copy of that announcement mail (attachment 5), answering his question in full and adding a lot of extra information to ensure customer satisfaction with Sal's thorough answer.

I'm sorry it took so long but that was entirely out of my hands. I don't have the authority to make QA confirmations such as those concerning this or any other similar matter.

This is not the first time Sal has demonstrated a lack of patience and understanding of the business processes we follow. Two years ago Sal started escalating demands for response and action on my part as we waited for a patch simply because I was the one who filed the defect (see attachments 5 & 6). Perhaps that is what Sal's_Manager's_Manager's_Manager is thinking of because we have had no other direct contact since then.

Please note that I have been on vacation for the past 10 days and will not be back in the office until next Friday.

Love,
REC

The übermanager remembers he was bothered with some petty shit involving me. The upside is that now with this repetition and reinforcement he'll remember it's all because of his own fuckwit underling and not me.

And now it's all BadPuppy's time. She hasn't learned to be furious at these fuckwits yet but she's making it abundantly clear that she's annoyed Papa Dog wasn't paying enough attention to his whelp.

Wizard needs ninja skillz, badly.

2010-06-09T16:42:00.000+02:00

MEMO TO ALL EMPLOYEES
Please remember that Section 4c of the $MegaCorp employment contract specifically prohibits bringing weapons or objects which could be used as a weapon onto any $MegaCorp premises at any time. For further information on $MegaCorp policies concerning weapons and employee safety please click here.

Technically I'm banned from the office because I'd be happy to beat quite a few of my cow-orkers senseless with my laptop and strangle them with a USB cable.

Some cow-orker decided to ask a specific question of a general audience rather than contacting the I18N team who actually know their asses from a hole in the ground when it comes to what characters might be included in a Chinese codepage. She's new and can be forgiven for this. The super senior PM guy who doesn't know diddly about things international or language-specific is another matter.

When asked about a Chinese system needing to also display English his response was "This sounds almost impossible! You have to find a codepage that'll have both the English and Chinese character sets in." Which is every single fucking Chinese code page in existence, from MS936 & 950 to 2312 and GB18030. ALL codepages have 7-bit ASCII as the first 128 characters, even all the Unicode translatíons.

Now his ignorance of this isn't the biggest problem (even though he should have passed on the question to the person in his department who actually works with I18N). It's that he then argued when corrected by the guy his own colleague asks such questions of: me.

I might expect this to work in a Unicode deployment, but anything else I'm fairly sure would fail.

Because he's an expert in... nothing, actually. He deals mainly with Java and scripting shit and even then, despite being Senior Director, has no actual specialisation other than spreading misinformation and pissing me the fuck off.

Which goes a long way to explaining why $MegaCorp needs to have a written, continuously publicised anti-weaponry policy.

EVERY SINGLE COMPUTER CODEPAGE IN USE TODAY -- EVEN ON MAINFRAMES AND (cr)APPLES -- INCLUDES BASIC ASCII.

Pow! BAM! Kerr-ACK!

2010-04-30T16:47:00.000+02:00

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

2010-04-28T13:36:00.000+02:00

"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

2010-04-27T16:12:00.000+02:00

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?

2010-04-23T14:36:00.001+02:00

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

2010-04-22T18:17:00.000+02:00

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

2010-04-21T15:44:00.000+02:00

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

2010-04-13T14:24:00.001+02:00

"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:

2010-04-09T16:34:00.001+02:00

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

2010-04-07T16:42:00.000+02:00

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

2010-04-01T15:02:00.001+02:00

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.

Helping Papa

2010-03-31T15:26:00.000+02:00

The BadPuppy isn't even a year old and already wants to help Daddy with work. Not only is Puppy not even fazed anymore when Daddy's head repeatedly fills the new REC's-head-shaped-dent in front of the keyboard in the home office, she howls and yelps with him in unison, demanding to sit on his lap and help.

Today I let her help me write an answer template for mail I too often have to send.

Dear ____________,

Your response makes less sense than an unemployed art history major protesting cheap instant ramen. Considering the current economic situation it's really unfair that someone like you has a job like this when there are so many qualified and capable people out there still unemployed.

If you ask a question, you have acknowledged that the person who is answering it knows more than you. That means you don't argue with the answer before even trying it, following the instructions you were given exactly.

You are a fuckwit and this ticket is closed for "Customer Refusal".

Love,
My daddy.

OK, I translated it for her since she's still working on her first yips and barks. What she actually bashed out (before drooling like a bull mastiff all over the space bar sending me into an enforced work time-out) was

iadsdsaklöl ä####ä
ö

sdaae21d21-l
ö
dwqe12e21,m,mmlölöqdwmkl
<xx<<lppü+<

+
+
+üö
#
ö#
löö
lklm
lkmxqdwl
ömdqwl,m,mnmn

That's still a few orders of magnitude more intelligent and congruent than most of the shit that appears in my Inbox. They grow up so quickly.

What Women Want

2009-10-29T13:01:00.000+01:00

So you're thinking of having your bitch squeeze out a few puppies? The following is my answer to a question someone recently asked me about "pregnant sex".

First trimester:
"I'm gonna barf." Once a week there's a 10-minute window with, "I don't feel sick! Get your ass over here and fuck me NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!!!"

Second trimester:
FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME NOW NOW NOW FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME SOME MORE! Go make me toast! And bacon^*. And more toast. Now FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE! I need more toast. Since you're headed toward the kitchen anyway you can make me some bacon-flavoured toast and pile it high with bacon, and then bring the bacon-toast-bacon sammich back here and then FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME MORE!!

Third trimester:
I'm fat. I'm horrible. I'm ugly. I can't even see my overgrown bush. You only want to fuck me to make fun of me. I can deal with that. So are you going to fuck me? I know you only want to do it to mock me. That? It's my cervix. Yeah, it dropped. No, the baby probably doesn't notice your cock is pounding against her little head but.... huh? That's disturbing? GODDAMMIT I NEED SOME SEX NOW, BITCH! No, you can't fuck me in the ass. Because half of it is falling out, that's why! I'll blow you if you just... move... over this way... If you make that Greenpeace dragging me back into the water joke again you're going to bleed now FUCK ME ALREADY! You did this to me so you damned well better do this to me, NOW!

Immediate post-birth:
GODDAMMIT I'M HORNY! And in pain. And my guts will be leaking out through my crotch for the next two months. NO, you CANNOT go UTBNB because my asshole is still trying to turn itself inside out. No, I'm too tired for a blowjob. Handjob, too. You know that youporn site I told to quit spending so much time at? Yeah, spend some time there. But once I've healed you better fuck me like your life depends on it BECAUSE IT DOES.

Three months post-birth:
The kid's asleep. We have five minutes. Pay attention: fuck me, fuck me good, and for gods' sake do NOT make a fucking sound because I will end you if we have to stop in the middle to replace the damned pacifier or sing the Sleepy Song again. Let's GO! ^* She was a vegetarian before she got pregnant.

vsworld.com are spamming cunts.

2009-10-02T05:33:00.003+02:00

People who work at or for this company of blog spammers probably have very tiny penises and definitely don't know how to use them. I already don't like most of the idiots I have to deal with from the subcontinent but fucking idiotic blogspammers who leave a fucking trail really annoy the fuck out of me.

By the way, andy@vsworld.com, while you were busy spamming my blog and others, I was busy fucking your girlfriend up the ass. Women make a very special noise the first time they experience a cock longer than 3". I love that sound. Tell Naima I said hello.

LookOut

2009-07-28T16:01:00.000+02:00

A lot of stupid found its way into my inbox. This is nothing new, except that yesterday I was dead tired due to a super-pregnant wife who couldn't sleep and is in much pain, so my cognitive shields were in desperate need of recharging. I knew better than to actually go into work but I couldn't help looking at my inbox and responding.

No matter how fast I type (and I can beat 80wpm on a good day), I tend to forget points as I get involved with other points, so I've learned to make notes for important mail in order not to miss out on a salient fact in my corporately-acceptable non-ranting missives to the Powers That Be. Notes which I tend to write in much the same way as I write this blog because it's just that stream of consciousness shit.

You can see where this is heading...

$BrokenBusinessProcess_X requires subprocesses H1, J1, K1, L1 & L2, M1/2/3/4 and N14. $MistarManagar decided he's going to make things better (read: worse) by modifying subprocess L1 to cover M1-4, moving them to Q7/8/9/10/11/12/19. Yet another bureaucratic "simplification" which complicates things further. And so I fired off a quick note.

Except I've learned over the years that "firing off quick notes" is akin to "raping babies" and so I open a few text editor windows and spew my bile in them. And then I cool off. And then I come back and extract the actual content and reorganise it into some semblance of bullet points to be addressed. Which I then let myself think about and reconsider so that I can address them in a way which ensures both my child's parents remain gainfully employed.

Fire up Notepad and rant away.

$MistarManager,

You're a cuntnuzzle. You suck donkey cocks for a living. You're more incompetent than Amy Winehouse in a fucking surgical theatre. Process L1 is ass. Process L2 is even more ass. You can't fix it, you moron, so cut your losses. Join us. Come to the dark side. You know just like the rest of us that $BrokenBusinessProcess_X is completely fucked. Cut the shit. Look, We can deal with K1 but not if you try to break it into K1/2/3/4a/4b/4c/4d. Ain't gonna happen and you know it. Get on -board and we'll support you. (Fail to and we'll be sharpening our knives).

Love, REC

Fine. Bullet points established. Certain bits might be a bit strong but the general feeling is conveyed. There's no way in hell I'm actually sending this though. Not even if I took more drugs than Keith and Michael combined could I be stupid enough to do that. And so I wait, let the points filter through, come up with "acceptable" ways to present my opinions, and then I'll send off the mail.

Oooohhh! An oldie but a goodie!

Where was I? Oh yeah....

Let me just proofread this quickly. MS LookOut has a decent enough spell-checker, and unlike FireFerret and LightningBird, it has all the company addresses and the specialised terms in it. I'll use that.

{copy}
{click}
{control-N}
{paste}
{F7}
{fix, fix, fix}
{control-A}
{copy}
{paste into Notepad}
Right, that's done. Now to write the "correct" mail

$MistarManager,

I received your note concerning the modification of Processes L1 and L2 earlier and hope that I'm not disturbing you as I would like to take a moment of your time to discuss them with you. Process L1, since its inception, has been of questionable benefit, at best. You were on the conference call when we discussed the trebling of resources necessary in order to implement such a process and in practice, not only has it required a quintupling of resource allotment but those involved in carrying out this process have found that they are not relieved from their other tasks which already exceeded their expected output capacities based on both worker metrics and Charts 12-YP-14 and 12-PP-09 which you yourself presented at the $UpperManagementMeeting last September.

In this meeting it was you who pointed out and described in great detail the potential difficulties resulting from any number of exigencies in any one of a set of potential affecting variables. It is for precisely these reasons tat I believe you may wish to reconsider the point of L2 as regards its standing in the overall position of $BrokenBusinessProcess_X with respect to sub-processes M3 and M4 as well as the potential knock-on effect to process G which up until now has been wholly unrelated but which, when one considers the externalities raised by questions concerning K4c, could possibly become a serious mitigating factor.

{blah blah blah 18 more paragraphs of this sort of shit blah blah blah blah}

Spell-check.
Re-read.
Tweak.
Spell-check again.
Hit send.
Notice that the business-like mail is still visible but that the "framework" mail window has disappeared.
Notice the Outbox icon blink and disappear.
Remember there's no Exchange Server to allow for a hasty recall.

Wait for a pink slip with a big 17 written on it.

In my defense the guy really is an incompetent cuntnuzzle who's managed to Peter Principle himself at least three steps beyond what he's capable of handling.

An Ideal World

2009-07-21T14:21:00.000+02:00

We have certain business processes which are supposed to be followed. In their misguided attempts to stick their heads as far up their asses as possible management have finally recursively pushed their foreheads out from between their teeth. The sensible processes refined over years are no longer adhered to quite as they were in the past nor quite as one might hope for in a company of over five thousand people worldwide with revenues in the billions.

An example:

L-user -> On-site SysAdmin: HALP! ~~There's sand in my vagina!~~ The App's not working!
On-site SysAdmin: Stay calm. Try Foo.
L-user: OK. Tried it. Still doesn't work.

On-site SysAdmin -> $MegaCorp 1st line support: HALP! ~~There's sand in my vagina!~~ The App's not working! Already tried Foo!
$MegaCorp 1st line support: Stay calm. Try Bar.
On-site SysAdmin: OK. Tried it. Still doesn't work.

$MegaCorp 1st line support -> $MegaCorp 2nd line support: HALP! ~~There's sand in my vagina!~~ The App's not working! Already tried Foo and Bar!
$MegaCorp 2nd line support: Stay calm. Try Baz.
$MegaCorp 1st line support: OK. Tried it. Still doesn't work.

$MegaCorp 2nd line support -> REC: HALP! ~~There's sand in my vagina!~~ The App's not working! Already tried Foo, Bar and Baz!
REC: Stay calm. Set logging to ALL, run foo, bar, baz, quux and muux. Send logs, screenshots and run a truss.
$MegaCorp 2nd line support: OK. I'm sending it to you.

REC: {ponder}
REC: {research}
REC: {this game's neat}
REC: {test}
REC: {this one's also pretty cool}
REC: {epiphany}

REC -> Engineering: We have a defect. Here are the details. Repro environment on 4DA33.testbed.internal.megacorp.com. Directions, truss, logs, screenshots, dumps attached.

Engineering -> QA: Here's a fix. Test it.

QA -> Eng: We tested it. Looks good to go. Here's the protocol and results.

Eng -> REC: Here you go, Sport. All nice and pretty and working.

REC -> L-user & On-site Admin: Here you go. Enjoy.

L-user & On-site Admin -> REC: Thank you!!!!

That's how it's supposed to work.
Now for a little dose of reality:

L-user -> REC: HALP! ~~There's sand in my vagina!~~ The App's not working!
REC -> L-user: Talk to your On-site SysAdmin.
L-user -> REC: NO!!! FIX IT NOW!!!!!
REC: OK, fine. Stay calm. Set logging to ALL, run foo, bar, baz, quux and muux. Send screenshots, logs and run a truss.
L-user: WHAT? SAND! VAGINA! Wash it for me now! What's truss? Are you calling me fat? I don't see truss.exe under Start:Programs! HALP!!! Why do you need all this?! FIX NOW!!
REC: Let me hold your hand as I explain in excruciating detail how to perform the tests. You'll need help from your admin.
L-user: Here's a screenshot.
REC: Run ALL the tests and send me the results.
L-user: WAAAAAHHHH!!!! ~~There's sand in my vagina!~~ I don't have time for this! Fix it now!
REC: Please run all the tests as specified and send all results. Failure to do so will result in this ticket being considered abandoned.
L-user: {petulance}
L-user: {pissing and moaning}
L-user: Fine Mr Smart Guy. Here! Now get the sand out of my vagina!!!

REC: {ponder}
REC: {research}
REC: {This Joey Betz guy writes some really nifty games}
REC: {test}
REC: {Other "classic" Flash games are great, too}
REC: {epiphany}

REC -> Engineering: We have a defect. Here are the details. Repro environment on 4DA33.testbed.internal.megacorp.com. Directions, truss, logs, screenshots, dumps attached.

Engineering -> REC: Huh? Rejected. We need a repro environment.
REC -> Engineering: The repro is on 4DA33.testbed.internal.megacorp.com as I wrote already.
Engineering -> REC: Huh? Rejected. We need the logs.
REC -> Engineering: The logs are already attached.
Engineering -> REC: Huh? Rejected. Not reproducible.
REC: WTF???
REC -> Management: Look at ticket A7-44W-1A. Eng is dicking about again.

Management <--> Eng: {tons of E-Mail I shouldn't have to look at but which is CC:'d to me anyway, allowing me to catch them out in one lie after another.}

Engineering -> REC: Here you go, asshole. Test it.
REC -> Engineering: Fuck that shit. I ain't QA, bitch. Pass it to QA, follow the testing protocol, then send me the patch and report.
Engineering -> REC: It's done. You can test it.
REC -> Engineering: Fuck that shit. I canNOT test or approve. Send that shit to QA.

QA: Huh?
Eng: It works.
QA: Oh. OK. Approved.
REC: Give me a cert.
QA: We're fresh out. Take our word on it.
REC: Bite me. Follow the Approval Process and send me the cert.
QA: Fine. Approved.
Eng: We're outta here, suckaz.

REC -> L-user & On-site Admin: Here you go. Approved by Eng and QA.

L-user & On-site Admin -> REC: FORGET THE TWATSILICATES! THERE ARE GIANT CHAINSAWS UP OUR BUTTS! THIS PATCH JUST CRASHED OUR FUCKING PRODUCTION SYSTEM YOU ASSHOLE! HAAAALLLLPPPP!!!!

Only another 23 years of this and then I can retire. If I don't have an aneurysm first.

Uncertainty

2009-05-20T14:54:00.000+02:00

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

2009-05-19T15:09:00.000+02:00

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

2009-05-14T15:49:00.000+02:00

"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

2009-05-13T17:00:00.004+02:00

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

2009-01-27T14:29:00.000+01:00

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

2008-11-26T14:42:00.000+01:00

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

2008-11-20T14:30:00.001+01:00

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- Fuckwit~~6.5- 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

2008-11-13T14:43:00.000+01:00

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

2008-11-12T14:06:00.000+01:00

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

2008-08-27T15:38:00.001+02:00

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

2008-07-29T15:35:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-28T14:06:00.001+02:00

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

2008-07-10T16:23:00.000+02:00

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

2008-07-07T15:09:00.000+02:00

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

2008-07-04T12:46:00.001+02:00

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

2008-07-03T20:48:00.000+02:00

"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,

2008-06-27T14:47:00.000+02:00

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

2008-06-25T15:08:00.000+02:00

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'

2008-06-11T15:15:00.000+02:00

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

2008-05-29T15:47:00.000+02:00

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.

Closing Time

2008-05-26T16:19:00.000+02:00

Goddamn I hate when the phone ring. It was Meathead, my new manager after his recent promotion and the latest management shuffle. Having himself spent so much time kill floor he's much more tolerable and understanding of our problems than any of my previous headaches.

"Hey, Dog. I need to see you in my office." Fuck. What did I do now?
"Gimme five to write up this ticket solution and I'll be there."

"'Sup, Meathead?"
"It's coming up on the end of the fiscal quarter. We have to close tickets."
"I'm still trying to answer all the ones I've got! By the way, what can you tell me about a corrupt RAID-5 superblock when an fsk returns 'bad inode number 0 to ginode'?"
"Oh, hey... fuck, man! Ask TT if he can help you with that. I have an emergency conf call in 15 minutes with the other $MyLevelManagers and our boss. Stop what you're doing and close all the tickets you have which are customer-close-initiate or have expired response dates."
"Sorry. Can't do it.
"You have to!"
"Nope. I'd like to help you out but I can't."
"Look, you have to close these tickets!"
"I don't have time. There's no way I can do it and follow the brand-new ISO9K process. To complete the mindless masturbatory exercise in uselessness and fill in all that shit takes more than an hour per for any open ticket."

They sprung this one on us a couple weeks ago in a useless meeting (redundant, I know), in which a PowerPoint presentation was sadistically read at us and repeated. Lies were told about how this has been mandated for ISO9K compliance -- ISO9K makes no such requirements, only that a process exists and is fully carried out. Among the required entries in each ticket are a rephrasing of the question, a research item even if the question is "Does your software run on an Atari 800?", an initial suggestion, an internal entry justifying that suggestion, and so on.

I've been having some fun with justifying my fucking suggestions, among them:

Space færies from the planet Scripplick came to me in a daydream, interrupting my Tower Defense game.
Thanks to a very large meal the previous evening, the suggestion was one of many items which exited my gastro-intestinal system minutes prior to responding to the ticket.
Because I said so
I first tried to extract an answer by pulling every nth word from MacBeth using the Fibonacci series. This failed so I tried again with the original Pulp Fiction script. While this latter result was infinitely more amusing it still left much to be desired so I went over to ITToolbox and yanked the answer written by one of our former colleagues.

"Fuck the process, Dog!"

Huh?

"We have to close the fucking tickets! Fuck the process. Close your tickets!"
"Can I have that in writing please?"
"I just told you to do it."
"Yeah, and in a few months when I'm reviewed I don't want this showing up. As soon as you send me the fucking mail I'll close 'em. You'll be amazed."
"I don't have time," he answered.
"You take one minute to mail me that ISO9K requirements are suspended for end-of-quarter closing tickets and I'll move from the top of your list of expired open issues to the bottom."

Two minutes later he was on the phone again. He'd fired off the mail but wasn't about to wait for our shitty server to take its sweet time in delivering. He promised I could look in his Sent Mail folder. I set to work.

Twelve minutes later I'd closed out 32 mooks and there are another dozen or so I can knock out this week.

I think I'm finally getting a little better at this game.

Make room! Make Room!

2008-05-23T14:44:00.000+02:00

In comparison with the cost of our software licensing and support contracts, the cost of a the hardware is negligible, even with the most expensive OS running on it. In fact we could probably give away racks of 2U dual-Xeons with 16GB RAM and dual 300GB hot-swappable SCSI drives in order to push our applications. We could even throw in copies of Windows Enterprise Datacenter edition for those companies too cheap to outsource their operations where competent UNIX/Linux admins can be found.

Over the expected life of the hardware, the cost of the equipment is statistically 0 at a confidence level over 95% as compared to the costs of the software and people to make it work. Few idiots realise this -- not even our own. So perhaps I shouldn't have been as surprised to receive the following question:

File System 80GB not enough.

Please can you advise the $Megacorp recommended stategy for low cost solution with regard to Files Attach Archiving. We currently have a single FServ of size 40GB which is bound to grow by 25% every year. Thanks,
$CommonNon-WesternName

WTF? A dozen 2Us, half a dozen 4Us, a bodacious cluster all worth around a quarter-mill, and you not only want more disk space but you want it to be low-cost?!

Monkey: All you have to do is stop the App service, change $Value to $NewValue in the config file, and restart the service.
$CommonNon-WesternName: How do you stop service?
--
$CommonNon-WesternName: I turn off Name Resolution Server and now system not working!
--
$CommonNon-WesternName: Config file $YourBigApp.cfg does not execute! How to start server??

No, I don't think we'll be able to walk him through something as complicated as the four clicks it takes in Win2K3 to span volumes.

Software Support is prohibited from making hardware recommendations. This is a matter to discuss with your TAR or Sales Rep.

That said, you have almost 2TB available on your cluster. Please see our Cluster Admin documents and move the file storage system to the cluster machine as we recommend.

Regards,
REC

Easy. Free. Effective. Fully documented with explanations any techno-tard can follow. And that should've been the end of it. But it never is...

Hi there,
Thanks for your update. We are not for use the cluster for file savings. Please provide a working solution as we have only 80GB for the file storage.

WTF? The only thing running on a big honking $80K cluster doesn't eat as many resources as FreeCell or Notepad and you won't move the file storage to it? OK, maybe the solution is another box. And it has to be inexpensive. Let's try this...

If you are unwilling to move the files to the cluster you could build a white box file server with the OS on two small drives in a RAID-1 configuration and six 500GB drives for storage in a RAID-5 configuration for under €1500. Most PC motherboards include hardware RAID support. Our file storage system is an independent subsystem which is handled by the machine's operating system. Files are only stored and read; no special handling or communication exists.

Simple. Get a white box which costs less than a single 300G hot-swappable SCSI drive for the rackmounts.

Hi there,
Thanks again for your update. The amount of book keeping involved in removing, updating and adding files, attachments, etc. is huge no wonder we have third party products like File System Archiving Product "Livelink ECM - File System Archiving' from OpenText Corporation".

Bookkeeping? Huh? You're not supposed to touch those goddamned files, you ninny! No wonder you filed those other two tickets about missing and b0rked files.

There should be no "bookkeeping" involved in the file storage system. This is a function which is handled by $OurBigApp. If you are unable to store your attachments on your available 80 GB drive then you need to provide more storage space. I have already explained how you can move the files to space you already have available as well as how to build a 2.5TB storage machine in an inexpensive, safe and supported way. If you cannot or will not build such an external file storage server then you need to contact your TAR or Service Representative.

TAR Handoff. Force-close with prejudice. Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit.

And Yet I am Surprised

2008-05-20T16:11:00.001+02:00

I have to leave this job. I must. I've reached a point I didn't think possible and having seen it, I know this can't go on.

Another high-prio Class 1 ticket came in which wasn't really Class-1 because the system wasn't down.

Hi,

Our server is very close to running out of hard drive space due to the fact that our file storage is located on this server. We do not have any RAID slots available to add new hard drive space so we are looking to move the file storage to a new server. I want to make sure that I am doing this correctly with you all.

Do these steps sounds correct, or is there something I can follow for this?

[complicated 9-step process redacted]

Are there any other steps necessary for this?

-Doug

So I wrote back a simple answer within an hour:

Doug,

The Admin Docs explains how to move the file storage system to a new physical location in Chapter 3, "Administering the File Storage System" under the heading "Moving the the File Storage System".

However, you can simply copy the entire parent directory and structure over from the old system to the new. There's nothing else to do other than provide the new path in place of the old in the two config files and File Storage Administration records. This easier method requires a server restart.

Regards,

REC

And that should've been the end of it. I got an update two days later and I was gobsmacked. I read it and sat there with my mouth wide open in shock.

Thank you. This worked perfectly. Have a great weekend.

Doug

I was in shock because a customer did what I told him to do and then he actually thanked me! Compare and contrast this with Mook-Man, to whom I'd sent exactly the same response seven weeks earlier (I'd cut and pasted the answer I sent to Doug from Mook-Man's ticket).

It would take me too long to detail the plethora of activities but in Mook-Man's case there were 17 attempts to call me, two escalation demands, 14 follow-up questions (each one ignoring everything previously stated), 14 follow-up answers, 11 demands for Web conferencing (always around midnight my time, natch), and because this still wasn't enough, that attention whore brought in his Technical Account Representative whom he demanded work on-site. The TAR of course didn't; he used teleconferencing. The actual "problem", of course, being that Mook-Man never even looked at what I'd written much less actually try and follow the simple instructions.

This I'm used to. I've become as inured to such fuckwits as Rob the Bouncer has to Guidos. You see a problem, you sigh, you do your best to avoid escalation, you sort out any resulting mess, you collect your money and go home. So far, so good. But when I'm literally shocked because someone did the right thing and then thanked me for helping him, and then went so far as to wish me a nice weekend, there's a problem which needs to be dealt with.

And I'm now doing just that.

Solving a Difficult Sudoku: The "Group Cut" Method

2008-05-12T13:59:00.000+02:00

It's been a year since I posted a new method for solving sudoku puzzles. Maybe it's just me but the hardest puzzles seem to have gotten a lot harder over the past year or two and some friends have agreed. Over the past six months I've come up with another method to retaliate: the "Group Cut". Being able to solve the hardest sudoku inside 10 minutes, I decided to make things more difficult and stopped writing helper numbers in unknown squares. That led to my discovery of this method which I use on around a quarter of all sudokus I solve these days.

Thanks to a three-day weekend (today's Pfingsten, dontchaknow) and having gotten many other things out of the way I was able to put in the necessary time to make the graphics and write this up, ensuring the method was necessary for solving the puzzle rather than just useful due to oversight.

This method is a more holistic approach but it has nothing to do with newage stupidities like crystals, perfumes and furniture arrangement. Rather, I'm using the word "holistic" in its dictionary sense: approaching the puzzle as a whole rather than as a series of discrete digits. Read on and see what I mean. I promise that there's nothing about "chakras", "chi", "energies" or any such similar nonsense.

As in previous explanations, I order each block of nine squares with a letter and each individual sqaure in the block with a number:

You can play along by grabbing yourself a copy of this puzzle from websudoku.com, a site I'm happy to plug because they allow unlimited free access and keep things simple. This time we're going to use Evil Puzzle 9,725,408,088:

The first thing we do is run through the rows & columns to pick off the easy prey:

That's seven boxes out of the way. A second round of row & column scanning from 1-9 places a 1 in H2 (G5 & B6 block the other possibilities) as well as in A9. The 1 at G5 and the blocked right column of block D mean that the 1 must be in the right column of A1, This then places the 1 in C1.

It's time to do a little deduction. We still have no 2s but the 3s in G8 and H5 force a 3 in J1 or J3. Now using the Double Pairs technique we see in block C there are also only possibilities in the outer columns so a 3 must appear in the middle column of block F. Due to D6 it can only be in F8.

That, in turn, places a 3 in E2.

The 6s in B1 and C5 along with the 1 in A9 force A7 to be a 6 and that's where everything comes to a grinding halt.

You have two choices: 1) Fill in every box with a load of candidates and try to fish out some pairs and triplets...

OR, 2) employ "Group Cut".

In this case the 4-6-9 in the sixth row and fourth column combine to leave only thee possible spaces in block E. These can then only be 4, 6 and 9.

The remaining numbers are 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8, and only the 7 isn't cancelled out in 6th column.

A look at the remaining two squares in this column show that the top can only be 4 or 9, tripling with the 4-6-8 we already have in E3 & E6, so H3 must be a 5 which means H5 is a 6.

Once this 6 is in place G7 has to be a 6.

From here on out it's a simple matter of elimination. Check the row, column and box of the number you just filled in and unless another group cut is necessary (possible), everything should fall into place relatively quickly.

We just added a 6 in box G and only 2, 5 and 9 are available. A 5 in H3 covers the top row of box G so G6 has to be a 5, putting a 2 in A6 and completing that column.

With the 2 filled in A6, only A2 and 5 are unfilled and the 5 in C3 determines which is which.

That leaves 2 & 4 in the top row in B2 & 3. B3 has to be the 4 and so B2 is 2.

The 4 in the sixth column determines the 4-6-9 in block E.

And so on. The puzzle is effectively done.

Here's another example if this first one wasn't clear enough, this time with evil-level puzzle 8601687531.

This time, Group Cut can be employed even before the first rounds of row and column scanning.

There are only five open squares in block D and the 2, 5 and 4 in the left column of block A cancel out two of them, leaving three. These must then be 2, 5 and 4.

The only possible numbers left for block D are 1 and 8 which already have complements in block F.

With the 1 and 8 in place, Column 1 is complete in blocks A and D, leaving only a 3, 6 and 7 available for the left column of block G. Since there are 3s in both blocks H and J, G4 must be a 3.

There are also 4s in blocks H and J which force a 4 into square G5.

So without having even scanned the rows and columns for single digits 1-9 we already have some numbers filled in.

And we can use Group Cut again because the right-most row of block J does the same thing as before to block F, placing the 3, 7 and 4.

And that's about it. If this is still unclear, add a comment.

Distribution

2008-05-08T14:31:00.000+02:00

I'm in the wrong business.

In order to ingratiate myself to management and colleagues alike, right after our local data center was moved to the UK for "consolidation" I built a local file server. This held various software builds available via resumable FTP. Since Windows Exploder has never been able to move 12GB of data across even a 10 fibre channel connection, this pleased everyone.

That wasn't enough. I also made directories full of general tools and easy HTTP download menus for my fellow monkeys as well as setting up shares for management applications and data. Once I got my hands on a couple external drives I was able to then offer each monkey 20GB of personal temporary space and set the server up to auto-delete after 14 days. Considering our laptops only had 20-40GB drives, this was seen as a godsend. I was a hero and thanks to automating everything, didn't have to do much except occasionally manually check builds and add some new tools.

But as always happens, the regular availability of such a service was slowly taken for granted. Until, of course, there was no availability. One of the external hard drives with 250GB of builds died and within a week, the video on the machine's motherboard died and wouldn't accept an ISA card as a substitute. Compaq sucks.

Luckily we had one more of this exact model which was working. I was able to swap out the drives and spared myself a full install of Win2K3 and other software. Within four hours I had the system up and running and was once again the office golden boy, if only for a day. The external drive with the builds was another matter.

Both the disk and the housing are shot. We need a new one. Here at $MegaCorp we have to go through a procuremnet process. My latest manager (I'm no longer under Vera!) ess-plained what we had to do. Knowing how important it is to have builds locally available, he told me to go to the procurement site and he'd approve immediately.

No problem. Once I fought my way in through seven -- count 'em, seven log-ins -- I was on my way to getting a brand-new, shiny external drive. Except that I couldn't find it. Back to $Manager who explained that it's hidden and gave me some keywords to try. Success!

It was shaping up to be a four-banananana day. I got to the page and with only 71 clicks (yes, I counted) managed to order the thing and send off the Procurement Approval Request. A 500GB drive would come in as a cost of almost €300! I can get the same damned thing for about €99 in a local store but we're stuck with this procurement crap.

I figured it was just a matter of that being some sort of internal accounting number, that we'd only actually pay the €82 wholesale but that the €275 was a cost basis to include accounting, shipping, and all the other departmental disbursements.

$Manager asked me to come to his office. No prob. I'm a hero today. I didn't tell any customer to fuck off. My queue is clear. I can do no wrong.

"Did you SEE how much they fucking want for this drive?"

Uh... yeah. But we need the drive and we're not allowed to go out and buy it on our own.

$manager happens to have some private distributor accounts for his own sideline business and did a quick look-up.

"We can't afford this in the budget. Here's what you need to do: Go back, go to custom orders, I'll send you this distributor information and attach it to the Procurement Request. In the notes tell them that we have to go to an outside supplier because this is only 40% of what the standard supply costs are."

No problem. "I'll also add something about the standard supplied model being an unreliable drive and give 'em a link to something too technical to bother reading."

"Good idea."

So the procurement request has gone through and we're waiting for an approval from the HQ Asset Procurement division, undoubtedly something which will require approval from no fewer than five levels of hierarchy. If I get the drive before the end of the year I'll be surprised.

But something wasn't sitting right. How the hell can we be cost-basing a hundred-euro drive at almost three times its value? I asked my buddy in the equipment holding pen in the basement. The guy's a serious troll-under-the-bridge but I've helped him out a couple times so I get what I want and I don't have to appear between 14:00 and 15:15 to get it. I'm welcome down in his cage any time.

"Asset Procurement has contracts with suppliers for stable prices."
"Stable?"
"Yeah. We get guarantees for a stable price for 12-24 months on every item. We lock in at the current price and they have to sell us whatever it is at that price for the next year or two."
"Uhh... WHAT?!"
"Huh?"
"You're telling me that we're paying 2006 prices for a 500GB drive in 2008?"
"Yeah."
"Same for the 2006 model laptops?"
"Yup," he said through his teeth as his lips held onto the cigar stub.
"Where do I sign up to be a supplier?"

Wotta deal. It takes a village to raise a village idiot and that's probably where we found the guy who negotiated that contract. Fuckwit.

Archie

2008-04-25T14:35:00.002+02:00

I am the (proud?) owner of a first-place medal. In bowling. My 5-man team's combined best score never exceeded 730 and yet we beat the other seven teams at a $MeegaCorp-sponsored evening out at a bowling alley. It wasn't because the others sucked even worse than we did.

When I was sent off to summer camp as a kid, I was provided with reading material consisting primarily of Archie and Richie Rich comic books. I wasn't allowed to take books like Principles of Orbital Mechanics because "they might get ruined". More importantly, I was geeky enough that I didn't need the aggro and torment my bunkmates would've heaped on me for the entire month had they seen me reading such things.

Oddly, one Archie storyline stayed with me through the years. Archie was in some athletic competition and kept being bested in every activity, always coming in second. Reggie beat him in a race and Betty beat him in the long jump and so on. Even Jughead beat him in something. But Archie won gold at the meet. He did this because he placed consistently 2nd whereas the others who'd gotten first place in one event placed 4th or 5th in others.

Supergeek noticed something wrong and I demonstrated that the author was lazy and hadn't actually done his math; the numbers didn't add up and I said so. "Jesus Christ, Canine! Who the fuck adds up scores in a fucking Archie comic?" my fellow 9-year-old incarceree screamed. My nickname for the rest of August was Columbo.

But I was intrigued. Could there be a way to make the scoring work so that Archie could win even though he always came in second place? It took me a few tries but I figured out how it might work.

In my university prob/stat course we had to write programs in some glub-awful language like MAPLE. The Archie conundrum was still in my head and so I used it as the basis of a complex assignment. It turns out that theoretically it's quite probable that a second-placer will win overall as long as he's consistent and there are enough other actors (probabilty becomes >50% at 6 or 7 actors).

And now it's happened to me in real life. An evening of bowling on the $MegaCorp dime. We came in second place in each of the three full games played. But while some other team would soundly trounce us in one round, they'd play poorly in another. We played consistently and won.

The best thing of the night wasn't winning the damned "team-building" event -- like I could give a rat's ass about that. It wasn't even the free food (we had to pay for our own beer). It's that my Archie conundrum which has followed me for three decades or so has finally put to bed.

Me. First place in bowling. Insanity, I tell ya.

Cars & Trucks

2008-04-23T15:50:00.003+02:00

Part 1 in an irregular series about bad management

Imagine what things would be like if a major truck manufacturer -- let’s call it Peterworth – were to function like $MegaCorp. If Peterworth wanted to get into the automobile manufacturing business, it might make sense for them to purchase Maserati. It's a high profile manufacturer, a market leader in its division, and Peterworth would stand to gain valuable technology as well as aerodynamics and design engineers. However, it would be absurd for Peterworth to then insist that Maserati use the Cummins ISX engine for production vehicles.

But perhaps Peterworth’s managers might respond that the 11-liter Cummins truck engine offers 530 horsepower while Maserati’s top engine only puts out 405hp. If management’s only goal was brake horsepower and they ignored everything from design to weight to fuel usage we would at least understand the reasoning behind such a bad decision.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Peterworth likes consistency throughout their design and production. One constant design element is cab-over: to access the engine the entire cab rotates up and forward hydraulically. Maserati engineers would protest that the engine is in the middle and it’s impossible to lift the entire body to expose the engine since the car incorporates unibody design for safety and stability.

Peterworth management ignores the explanations and demands a new, cab-over design, telling the Maserati engineers to figure out how to do cab-over to expose the engine which wouldn’t fit under a normal hood anyway, and that if safety is an issue then they better get back to work on the design already. After all, they’re part of Peterworth now.

The engineers figure out how to mount the massive engine in the middle behind the driver, cut the body and strengthen it using steel beams, incorporate a cab-back design so that the back half of the body can lift and rotate, and they do their best to make the thing aerodynamic.

The drawings still look workable even if the result looks nothing like previous Maseratis. But then a Peterworth engineer notices that there’s no way to stack the front of one car onto the back of another. Maserati engineers ask why the hell you would need to do that to which the Peterworth engineer responds, "So we can deliver the things." Trucks are normally delivered by chaining a few cabs onto the fifth wheel of the truck in front of them, sending them out to dealers in this configuration three to five at a time.

Of course the Maserati engineers are floored and try to explain that cars are delivered using car carriers which can hold six to eight at once. Peterworth replies that the have no car carriers and their market research shows that customers like the current delivery method. Some smart-assed dog-monkey in Maserati asks Peterworth management if customers had been asked about car delivery being handled the same way as trucks and is quickly muzzled.

So the engineers go back and make further design changes to reinforce the rear of the Maserati with more steel so that if can bear the additional weight. They then realize they have to increase the tire size and change the rear suspension. Maserati engineers also have to modify the front design to add weight and a linkage so that this stacked delivery method could function.

The car is now uglier than a 1972 Volvo, heavier than a Hum-Vee, has the aerodynamics of a garden shed, the handling of a canoe, and costs more than a Ferrari Enzo. But Peterworth management is thrilled because the car meets all their metrics: it has the highest horsepower available in a stock car, uses many of the same parts already used in production in other divisions, and it’s capable of being delivered using the Standard Delivery Methodology.

Despite poor reviews, complaints, dropping sales, drastically reduced customer satisfaction and constant demands that Maserati cars at least perform and handle like they used to, management sees raving success thanks to the chosen metrics being fulfilled.

Management has another idea: worker equality. The workload is widely distributed at Peterworth and there's no reason that the Maserati people should be treated differently. Peterworth's way of thinking doesn't allow them to differentiate between the ¤100/hr engineers, ¤80/hr monkeys, ¤30/hr secretaries and ¤8.37/hr outsourced monkeys. They all know Maserati, they can and will all do each others' jobs.

It doesn't matter that most secretaries have never drawn a single mechanical sketch in their lives or that the engineers don't know how to hand-bore an engine. Work is to be distributed fairly, meaning each person will complete X number of "tasks" each day. Anyone working for the Maserati subdivision ought to know how to work on Maserati issues.

The workers themselves are smart enough to know their limits so while some engineer is trying to figure out how the hell some glub-awful spreadsheet was put together, the secretary who should be doing it is asking him about metal alloy shear strenght since she's been tasked with a piston redesign. They're not allowed to trade tasks; management knows best. But they end up wasting even more time trying to figure out how to do their assigned tasks and helping others to do the tasks they themselves could do best.

But management is also always on the look-out for ways to improve a product. They approach the engineers and tell them that there’s only one small problem with the car: it’s not pulling enough weight. Literally. Next year’s design needs to raise the rear end and incorporate a fifth wheel so that the car can haul at least a standard 20´ trailer. The following year’s model can be upgraded to allow for hauling a full 40-footer.

This is exactly how management at $MegaCorp think and act. If you thought you knew who $MegaCorp was before, you can now be certain whether you’re right or wrong.

ATTENTION JULIE BECKMANN INFIDEL:

2008-04-22T14:16:00.001+02:00

...and the rest of all you Googlies: Turn off that fucking geotracking already! When I go to Prague and need to use your site, I can't fucking find anything! I don't speak Czech and I don't know which fucking link is the one which will give me your goddamned page in English!

Geotracking is stupid. That's why most of us gave up on it a decade ago, about three and a half weeks after we figured out how to do it with some JavaScript and cgi. That's what the fuck cookies are for. If I don't have a cookie, default to the goddamned locale for the TLD I entered in my browser. If I wanted to see the results from google.de or google.co.uk I would've typed them -- and not google.com -- into the fucking browser. Do you have any idea how many fucking expats there are in this country? Stupid question; of course you don't or you wouldn't do this.

If I go to google.COM (or .co.uk, or .ca, or .nz or .au...) then give me the fucking site in English you fuckwits. Don't sit there querying my browser about the computer's locale; I have it set to Iceland, Afghanistan and/or Barbuda to fuck with anyone else trying to track me for marketing through any machine on which I have to run Windows (thanks for working on Linux compatibility for PhotoShop, BTW).

If I wanted your German site dann hätte ich google.DE in der verdammten Browser-Instanz eingetippt. Og ef ég vil lesa þetta á íslensku, skrifa ég google.IS í Firefox, fávitarnir ykkar. I typed google.COM. English, motherfuckers; I SPEAK IT. Or allow language specification through a language code prefix the way Wikipedia does it: en.google.com, de.google.com, jp.google.com. Simple, huh?

You're doing this with Adsense, too. All attempts to view my account are met with your stubborn insistence on throwing up the new T&Cs in German, even though I'm logged in and you know my preferences. You force me to click through this page and accept or deny the new T&Cs. In German. By doing this you're giving me all sorts of rights you really didn't intend to.

German law makes it very clear that unless a contract benefits all parties it's invalid. We already have an agreement and you must live up to it if I'm not willing to renegotiate. You're not giving me a choice to keep my old contract or accept the new one, a condition $MegaCorp was forced by law to do when they took over $BigCorp. They made the new contract slightly more agreeable in order to get me to sign.

A contract which I'm coerced into accepting though I don't understand it is equally invalid. This boils down to the following: by using that goddamned geotracking and not giving me any option to change the language so that I can read the contract in a language which I am comfortable with in a legal sense, you have denied yourself any new rights this contract gives you. Any attempt to enforce the new terms when they differ from the old terms will be futile. Stupider still, the Accept/Bug-Me-Later/Deny radio buttons and accompanying text are in English. So you know I want English and still refuse to present it to me.

I speak German but not at a level necessary to understand the ramifications of legal documents. The less-than-stellar outcomes of my German legal experiences serve as clear evidence of this. You're not allowing me to read the goddamned documents in the language of my choosing which happens to be your official language of record.

I am now no longer legally bound by the AdSense contract, Google. You are; I'm not. I know you don't realise this yet because your I18N group is seriously lacking thanks to your decision to do most internationalisation work via volunteer intarweb translators. Y'all might want to read up over at Michael Kaplan's blog. I'm curious: how long did it take you to realise how much you were pissing off Spain when their calendars were starting on Sunday instead of Monday? Was it before or after you realised the Icelanders were upset because they could search in Klingon, Fuddian and SwedishChefian but not in their native language?

If you, like the typical geek coders you hire (fluorescent tan and only the most abstract idea which end of a girl is "up" much less "in"), just have to keep the damned geotracking turned on, then for fuck's sake add a fucking language preference dropdown at the top of every single page. Or just pay attention to any of the 14 cookies for each of my IDs that you've dropped in my browser, almost every one of which specifies English as the language of choice. Like both of the AdSense-accessing accounts.

In case you haven't been really paying attention to what I've been writing over the past couple years, Im willing to entertain job offers and it seems like y'all are in some serious need of an I18N czar. I prefer to work primarily from a home office (currently in Krautreich) although I'm willing to commute. I fly business when you want me to show up for meetings because you'll expect me to be functional within 20 minutes of arrival at SFO and that ain't gonna happen if I'm stuck in cattle class.

So here's the deal. You turn off the geotracking and I'll consider your job offer as long as it's in English. I think that's fair.

Charting the Present

2008-04-21T15:00:00.001+02:00

A picture rather than the usual thousand words. Click for a legible version.

That pretty much sums it up. Now back to some guy's HP-UX problem. Not that I know HP-UX but that didn't stop me from getting chosen to resolve it,. The Citrix problem that came in from Germany, from a German, written in German, needing technical knowledge... that went to someone in Bangalore. Her only comment in the ticket: "What is Citrix?" It's in my queue now.

Which Side Are You On?

2008-04-18T15:10:00.000+02:00

Current Location: Near a high tower
Current Mood: Murderous
Current Music: Billy Bragg - Back to Basics

So the conf call is over. I was right. Had I not had the logs beforehand we would've been completely confused and gone in the completely wrong direction based on their verbal descriptions. But just before it began...

Another mail from upper manager arrived with a distribution list including extra names of people who had nothing to do with this issue or customer. Like the director of Program Contract Management. I ess-ploded.

John the upper manager is actually an upper upper upper manager. And instead of doing his job and getting a PITA customer to provide information so that I didn't have to sit on a conf call with my thumb up my ass saying, "Durr, I don't know," for the duration, he instead demanded I waste time and make us look like incompetent jackasses. This company has a cornucopia of stupid from which each level of management drinks more deeply than their underlings.

Luckily my lowest-level manager did manage to get the company to send shit in and delay the call. This angered upper upper upper manager who believed we should simply be on the phone rather than pissing about with technical information. When 1500 users are doing nothing but searching their machines for winmine.exe, most companies don't want group hugs and idiots empathising with their situation. They want fucking answers.

Can we have a customer focused monkey assigned to this ticket. The customer is extremely concerned, most of their business is unable to run and we won't speak to them!

I spoke to the customer, they are reasonable, they feel they can explain what they have done quickly on the phone and are willing to work with us on this but just would like the reassurance of a discussion.

Please help.

Judy,

FYI for when the customer satisfaction complaint arrives.

Regards,
John

I hit the fucking roof. He's not only put in writing the claim that I'm not "customer-focused" (a Very Bad Attitude indeed), he additionally added his expectation of a customer complaint.

As soon as the call was over, I got to work. Not responding would only indicate my acceptance of his letter. 'S how it works in shitty corporate life. I'll be damned if this cocksucker's bullshit is going to affect my reviews.

John,

I strongly resent the baseless and patently absurd characterisation that I am somehow not "customer-focused". I'm currently focused on 31 customers and I have a long history of high customer sat.

I followed procedures and asked management to do what management does whenever we're confronted by an customer making unreasonable demands. Discussing the problem without seeing the logs is an exercise in futility and a waste of time which could be better spent resolving other customer problems. I have been told to follow such a procedure by three different managers over the past eight years.

$BigInsurer sent the logs and we were able to make a diagnosis. Had they not sent the logs this would have been impossible; their descriptions of the problem would have led us /away/ from the true cause. On the call I provided further information and testing procedures they can follow. Before joining I sent an answer which they agreed was more easily understood when read.

Please retract your unconscionable statement and atrocious characterisations of me. I'm shocked and appalled that you would not only fail to support me in trying to do my job but that you would publicly claim I was not "customer-focused" and note such an expectation of negative feedback.

Oddly enough mail from him has since dropped to zero. $BigInsurer is happy. Their system is working and they're getting quick updates from me. They're praising me in each reply.

One might expect this bastard to try and take credit for this by having forced me onto the call. Enough mail and customer comment proves otherwise. What this fuckwit John doesn't know is that I know his boss supports my position. I know this because $LowestManager was at the big meeting where $BigBoss explained this. As dangerous as my response might seem, my ass is covered. Turns out that John has become notorious for screwing the workers and taking the idiot customers' sides despite explicit corporate policy to the contrary. Which side are you on, Boy? Which side are you on?

Not five minutes after hitting send, up popped an IM window from ~~sn4tchbuckl3r~~ the manager in Bulgrohungria. "OH NOES! We fucked up a ticket! Nobody answered for a week! Can you take it?"

Why me?

"It's Citrix."

Of course. Surprisingly it wasn't filed by $VeryTouchyCustomer. That company is in the same country, and the business is related. More importantly, it reads almost exactly like tickets which $VeryTouchyCustomer does send in.

<clicky clicky>gg: $VeryTouchyCustomer $OtherCustomer
A subsidiary.

<clicky clicky>SELECT Contact, DataCenter from T_CUSTOMERS WHERE Profile=(SELECT Profile FROM T_CUSTOMER.$OtherCustomer);

Like Wile E. Coyote, he never learns. As he stood there in his Acme Shell Corporation Account suit wringing his hands with anticipation of the answer he so wanted to hear, I pushed him off the cliff with a quick cut & paste from the last $VeryTouchyCustomer ticket. At which point Sandra walked over to ask me certain Citrix-based questions. I didn't have to ask for whom. She was curious about $StupidDocument and hadn't yet had a chance to talk to Gloria.

Dinner was half a tray of 4-day old leftover Indian take-away and bottle of 18-year-old single malt Scotch. I finished my entire meal.

Heart Attack

2008-04-17T15:36:00.001+02:00

No, I didn't go to Donnie's Happy Place. A couple weeks of pneumonia followed by a vacation during which I caught a cold gave me enough time out of the orifice that I actually arrived today in what could almost be termed a state of "calm" (for values of boolCalm < "mania").

Inside three hours my blood pressure has returned to its usual value of astronomical-over-gargantuan.

Right away I was hit with bad news: Mini-Me is gone. Fucker. He sent me a note. I don't blame him. Under the circumstances I'd've done the same thing. Smart puppy, Paul. Getting out before his skills deteriorate and he's locked into this hell the way so many of us are with few externally marketable skills is the smartest thing he can do. The pay increase doesn't hurt either. The reasons for his departure are the subject of a half written, less-ranty entry.

As I started clearing out a load of dead and forgotten tickets, I was visited by a TAR who wanted to know about Citrix. He then started arguing with me saying that we do support it as if he himself was the fucking customer. A light went off. He wasn't arguing like just any customer, he was arguing just like these jackasses.

"Joe," I asked, "is this about $VeryTouchyCustomer?"
"Yes, why?"
And I explained all our time they've wasted over more than a year, coming here, having me go out there, letter after letter after document. They thought they'd found a loophole. This belief was made possible by their ignoring the fact that I'd told them "Vendor-verified" still doesn't mean we'll deal with any problems. Shit won't work, period.

I checked the worldwide tickets for references to Citrix. There are only two people in the company not getting Citrix tickets: me and Mini-me, odd because we're the only two people qualified to answer them. Mini-Me knows at least enough to cut and paste my answers. Not so the other monkeys. I had to add notes to a dozen other people's tickets.

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

Gloria showed up. Wanting to know about Citrix. And vendor verification. And documents. Gloria's some sort of non-technical Company Rep. No, she hadn't talked to Joe. No, she's not sure if it's for $VeryTouchyCustomer. I had her check. Of course it was, and I got to spend the next 30 minutes explaining the same shit to her that I'd told Joe an hour before. While she didn't fight like Joe did, she kept interrupting because she didn't understand how "vendor verified" wasn't the same as "$MegaCorp certified and supported". Muppet.

And just as I got back to the ~~Cube~~Desk of Hate high atop Munich on the first floor of the Panopticon Greenhouse, up popped a note. I have a Sev-1 ticket from $BigInsurer. Surprisingly their data center is not on any subcontinent but rather an actual island. Oh joy of joys!

It was then that a flood of mail came in. Escalation mail. A quick peek at the audit trail showed me the following:

11:17 Ticket submitted
11:19 Escalation level 2
11:20 Escalation level 1
11:24 Activity: phone number changed
11:26 Activity: Manager response
11:29 Ticket dumped in dog's lap
11:29 Escalation notice sent to REC, managers, upper managers
11:31 Demand for conf call
11:34 REC requests basic information, logs, etc. since none were provided
11:37 Conf call details provided
11:38 Conf call details changed
11:41 Another demand for conf call
11:44 Response to info request: we'll wait for the conf
11:47 REC demands info immediately, gets manager to explain pointlessness of joining call.
11:53 REC receives demand from upper management to get "customer-focused" and join call
12:12 Lower manager gets customer to agree to send logs and reschedule conf call
13:04 REC receives logs eleven minutes before conf call

Fuckwits, all of them. In ten minutes the fun starts.

I know need nitroglycerin. I just haven't decided if it would be more appropriate to ingest the shit or just detonate it.

To be continued...

IRCing Wat Ur Doing

2008-03-21T14:48:00.000+01:00

After four hours of conf calls with people so stupid the only reason that they don't check the level of gasoline in their cars with a lighter is that flicking a Bic without a 14-page PowerPoint explanation is beyond their feeble mentalities, I finally got home. In trying to relax I hopped on #husi at slashnet and got into a chat with others facing the same sorts of hell that I do. Thanks to aph for sparring with me and making me laugh in a moment when all I wanted to do was deepen the my-head-shaped-dent in front of the keyboards.

The sad thing is that it's nearly impossible to tell this "conversation" apart from real internal communications. Only the lack of useless managerial buzzwords -- "synergy" and "paradigm"come to mind -- prove this wasn't cut and pasted from internal mails.

[00:06 aphrael] dear developers: the problem QA is reporting is critical and must by its description be something low-level. the minor fixes you are throwing at them with "this ought to fix it" without actually bothering to investigate the problem are ... useless.
[00:06 aphrael] please stop wasting their time and mine. thank you, integration.
[00:07 REC] Dear QA, please to be writing accurate reports of EXACTLY what the problem is. Please to be providing images of the test beds and the logs, monitors and dumps we need to fix it. Love, Eng.
[00:08 aphrael] engineering: the problem is that the software does not print. at all. this should be trivial to reproduce. love, integration.
[00:09 REC] Dear Sales, please to stop fucking telling customers about all the great print features which Eng hasn't worked out and QA can't certify before you sell the product, leaving US to come up with a fucking solution. Love, Support
[00:09 aphrael] Dear Support: our product is a printer. Love, Management.
[00:10 REC] Dear Management, please to be providing some fucking ink already. Love, Support.
[00:11 aphrael] Dear Support, Sales, QA and Management, Ink? I think we've found the problem. Love, Eng.
[00:11 REC] Dear Integration, Please to write specs for ink. Love, Eng.
[00:12 aphrael] Dear Eng, Project Management provided this spec for ink three years ago. Why haven't you implemented it yet? Love, Integration.
[00:14 REC] Dear Integration, PM inserted said spec in an Excel sheet which was copied over as a WMF file into Word. This Metafile was dropped into a PowerPoint presentation. Our department uses HP-UX. Please to be sending text files. Love, Eng.
[00:15 aphrael] eng: aah! i see the problem. you deviated from the spec in this fashion, while the other engineering department deviated in this other fashion, and the two outcomes don't work together. please resolve.
[00:16 REC] Dear Integration, Please note that each Engineering department works independently. If integration between the two is necessary, I think we know which department needs to pick up some slack.
Love, Eng (Division 1A)
[00:17 aphrael] see, this is the joy of integration. all responsibility with no authority!

I was never much of a Dilbert fan and now I live that fucking cartoon. Somebody kill me please.

I Luv Teh Webs

2008-03-20T17:59:00.002+01:00

Hi b3tans and b3tards. Yes, it's me, Mister Splashycunt. I wish I'd made the newsletter for a compo entry or some stupid experiment but trolling'll do.

Note: I did not submit this blog to b3ta nor do I know who did.

N.A.V.Y.

2008-03-20T17:11:00.000+01:00

When I joined the Navy many moons ago, I quickly learned that the name of the service was really an acronym: Never Again Volunteer Yourself. It was a lesson that I continue to forget.

"Hi, Monkeys. $MegaCorp has a new support contract with Microsoft and we don't talk directly to Blackie and his department anymore. Instead we follow $MSprocess. We need a couple volunteers to be our internal contacts."

Well shucks, I'd been dealing with Blackie and his gang and had acted as a go-between for a lot of my fellow monkeys for years. This could be another rung on the ladder to the position of ESSM (Extra Super Senior Monkey) and the additional 20 bucks or so a year that such an esteemed position offers. The more projects like that I accept, the fewer tickets I have to take. Works for me.

With a second round of nagging mails our chief hooked another sucker, none other than Lenny. I pointed out that I hadn't had the training. "That's OK. We'll get it to you in the next couple weeks."

Suzi can't wait a couple weeks. She sent Lenny a request to file a ticket through $MSprocess and CC:d me. Lenny's note arrived not ten minutes later. "REC, I didn’t get chance to attend the $MSprocess training. Could you please log this issue on this occasion?"

Before I could laugh, up popped our annoying-as-fuck IM app. It was Lenny.

14:27 lenny: hi REC
14:27 rec: hey
14:27 rec: I think it's a hoot
14:27 lenny: is it?
14:28 rec: We both suckered ourselves to do this, neither one of us has a bloody clue, and no help or direction is being offered
14:28 rec: If I didn't laugh I'd have to cry.
14:28 rec: So I'm laughing.
14:28 lenny: kool

Ten minutes later came a mail with some links to what will undoubtedly be some very protracted, painful Death-by-PowerPoints with some fuckknuckle or another droning on and on, in an incomprehensible accent which appears to have been designed to do nothing other than rape the English language. If I'm really lucky, however, there'll be a link to the actual PPT slides and I can dodge what appears to be a total of some 11 hours of this particular circle of hell.

That'll have to wait, though. I have some tickets to answer. Somewhere in Estonia a fuckwit is trying to modify the contents of the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes
key. On an IBM BladeCenter. A blade which is running Solaris 10.

Cow-Orkers XVI: Starkbier!

2008-03-19T15:15:00.001+01:00

My married-with-kids colleagues, annoyed last night that we couldn't get into the strip club because the doorman didn't like the fact that I was wearing Adidas and not Florscheims or Ballys, are now thanking me. Under the cold light of sobriety they realise that had we indeed gone in, they'd be regretting this morning a lot more than they otherwise do with just the two liters of Starkbier each one drank last night. I'd had three; maybe I was a bit wobbly, too.

I want to thank the doorman for this because I fucking hate strip clubs. He has no idea what sort of favour he did me, and I don't just mean saving me from having to throw down double the normal beer price. He saved me from the whole thing. I don't "get" strip clubs. What's the attraction?

There's an attractive girl who you're allowed to look at but whom you can't touch. You're encouraged to give her lots of Teh Munniez but no matter how much you hand her, you can't touch her and she won't touch you. She has a boyfriend or a girlfriend (or both), despises you, and is trying to figure out what she has to do to get the rest of your money without actually having to talk to you, let alone countenance allow physical contact.

I ask again, what the fuck is the attraction? Why do people go to these clubs? Why do my cow-orkers insist on going there once drunk? I've been married. I know what it's like to want to see something fresh and different and that's why I pay €40/month for 16Mb downstream DSL -- to fill the My Documents\Faxes\Sent Faxes directory with 447GB of hot chicks doing anything you can name and quite a few things you've probably never even thought of. What do you expect from a guy whose browser home page is set to Ogrish and who was a pre-1996 alt.tasteless participant?

We can get drunk every fucking night for all I care. We can become the bestest buddies EVAR each evening, then return to this hellhole each morning and piss and moan at each other as is our daily routine. That's fine. Just leave the fucking strip clubs out of it. They're a waste of time and a waste of money. More importantly, this dog ain't married. If we stay at real bars there's a chance that I might be sniffing some bitch's crotch before the night is over. More importantly, she might be sniffing at mine without the expectation of any one-way financial transaction.

You want to keep me happy, cow-workers. Never forget I'm the Linkmaster.

With Easter coming up, the Starkbierfest is now over, but in another few weeks, the Spring Festival begins. It takes place on the Theresienwiesen -- the same spot where the Oktoberfest takes place -- and is little more than a smaller version of same festival, but cheaper and filled almost exclusively with locals. And to this festival, in one of the two or three beer "tents", a group of us will congregate after work at least once. And there we will drink. And at 10:30 p.m. as they're kicking us out, one of the group will have the brilliant idea to go to a strip club. Half a dozen such "clubs" are only a mile away.

I'd like to believe I'd just go home and play Spin the Black Circle, but I'm as much a seventeen as the idiots I deal with all day, though in a non-technical way.

School Daze

2008-03-18T15:14:00.001+01:00

Of all the things about high school that sucked, PE class was way up there on the list. The girls' coach was the stereotypical, manly-looking, semi-pro volleyball-playing bulldyke bitch, but she was nothing compared to Coach Marissey. Marissey was the absolute archetype of late 1970s high school coaches, an asshole, sadistic, self-important and imagined ladykiller. A real-life John Kreese, head of the evil dojo in Karate Kid who demanded all address him as "Coach" instead of "Mister".

I relived a little piece of hell almost three decades behind me last night in a dream, and woke up to a realisation.

At least I'm sleeping again, but I'm once again dreaming vividly, usually reliving something out of my past. Winning a pinball tournament is great; sitting in school not so much so. Marissey had called me out of class to his office.

Since I didn't like sports, Marissey didn't like me. My school was freaks and jocks and my PE class was freaks and geeks. I wasn't even that high on the social ladder. I was a freaky, geeky loner. There's nothing worse in the mind of a team sports coach than an individual.

Coach: Canine!
REC: Yeah?
Coach: You're playing football this afternoon. Be on the field at 2:00p.m. Here's your class absence note for 7th period.
REC: But I play chess, not football!
Coach: Don't get smart with me! I'm in charge of school intramurals and you're playing football. Today.
REC: But I don't even know how to play!
Coach: You'll learn on the field. You're going to be a linebacker.
REC: What the hell is a linebacker?
Coach: You block the other team from running into your line.
REC: But I only weigh 127 pounds!
Coach: Here's some pads.
REC: Coach Marissey, I'm still wearing a knee brace from tennis last month! I have a doctor's note.
Coach: Your doctor's not here and he's not in charge of intramurals. Your teammates should help prop you up.
REC: What?!
Coach: Be on that field at two or you've got a month of detention.

And when I woke up, clipped on my access badge and headed for the Subway, it dawned on me. I'd been wrong throughout high school. It really does prepare you for real life. You only have to know where to look. Marissey would feel right at home here assigning me another ticket from some customer suffering constant core dumps in a Solaris system.

Le plus ça change...

Oh, and since someone's bound to ask, I didn't go on the field and I didn't play linebacker. I did probably the most fuckwitted thing possible. Instead of attempting to gain Marissey's respect by at least suiting up and trying to participate just for one play, I went to the school library and got the Policies & Procedures book. Armed with the exact policy I went to the vice principal and told him I'd be damned if I was doing a minute of detention for not playing stupid football.

The day my doctor's note expired Marissey had me running laps for the entire PE period. Every day. For the rest of the school year. Rather suddenly there were only nine spots on the intramural chess competition roster, down from the original ten. Guess who didn't get to compete at County or State. "Budget," said Marissey with a grin.

Enough self-delusion through the fog of 20-some years of adult experience. Marissey wouldn't have found any respect for me. He would've laughed at my ass being bulldogged, then screamed at me for being a pussy and not playing anymore. He was such a dick.

Be Careful What You Wish For

2008-03-14T13:54:00.005+01:00

Confession is supposed to be good for the soul. I hope it helps mine. I feel so dirty, not about what I did but certainly about the results. My actions helped spark new interest in an organisation I wish would go away because their real interest is "brand awareness" rather than their stated and perceived goals. They're so bad that one of their founders left in disgust and started a new group which uses its funds for action rather than more fund-raising and showy but pointless gestures.

The secret's revealed here, Richard. I am responsible for that damned whale being called "Mr. Splashy Pants". I didn't make up the name (that honour goes to Omar Zayed), but I made it popular.

The 26th of November was just another shitty Monday. While waiting for an installation to crash I was perusing b3ta looking for some interesting links since I had no good ideas for the compo (not having seen the Transformers) or the QOTW. That's where I saw mince's link to Greenpeace. Everyone on b3ta thought it was a hoot and was voting for the name. The link first appeared at b3ta at 17:43 UTC. With the b3ta clicks "Mr. Splashy Pants" had gone from 4% to 5% of the vote and held a sad fifth place behind a bunch of crappy newage-sounding names like Talei, Aiko, and Mira.

I saw the link an hour after it had been posted and discovered that multiple votes were counted. Unfortunately I didn't have the time or determination to write a little program to do that for me... but I knew who did and would. I also don't have accounts at a lot of the big sites like MeFi and BoingBoing nor upmodding hordes on reddit and digg... but I know who does.

I had three motives. Firstly, it was funny. The sheer silliness drew me in. Secondly, basing any action or policy on the results of a fucking Web poll is sheer stupidity. They can be easily manipulated by just one determined person. Whether Greenpeace got egg on their collective face as a result of my actions -- be it using a pre-pubescent taunt as the official name of a mascot or publicly pussing out like the Washington National Zoo did when they decided the that "Tai Shan" was a much better moniker than the wildly popular "Butterstick" (they must be kicking themselves now) -- mattered not to me. And thirdly, I wanted to Tom Sawyer someone who doesn't like me.

Two minutes later I'd posted the call to action over at kuro5hin and HuSi as well as in a mail to a group of friends. There's one sad sack at kuro5hin who hates the site with a passion and despises me as well, and yet he can't help himself and continually returns, only to be banned again. Banning him can't stop him reading the site , and he still does regularly.

He's a student in Arizona. He knows how to program. He has a single bloody-mindedness which compels him to shit all over the Web wherever possible. Richard's description of how this person hit the Greenpeace system was exactly in line with how he also hits other sites in his vandalism attempts. When Richard's Greenpeace blog was posted I knew I'd completed objective number 3.

After Greenpeace threw away that brief click-fest our little vandal noticed and most certainly dropped the rate down, spreading the clicks through various proxies. As I expected, those with accounts at the big sites started posting the story as well. It was submitted to digg, reddit, BoingBoing 14 hours later, and MetaFilter another day after that, after which it spread quickly through E-Mail. A few days later I myself received one of those E-Mails which had been forwarded at least five times.

By the time the story appeared on BoingBoing "Mr. Splashy Pants" already had close to 80% of the vote, and there it was going to stay. I'd achieved Objective #2. The world was good. Greenpeace were stuck with using that name or publicly negating the poll which, within a day, was being slammed with legitimate clicks. Except...

Except that this thing was growing legs. People liked the name, and by "people" I mean everyone except for the weenies who submitted the sea-goddess names for the competition, but possibly even one or two of them. Oh, and Greenpeace executives. They weren't happy about it. But someone there finally recognised the value of a viral, grassroots campaign. That Clever Dick also noticed that rather than making them a laughing stock it was generating a lot of interest. They did what anyone would do under the circumstances: they went for the cash. Before the contest was even over they were already selling MSP bumper stickers and T-shirts and raking in the bucks.

I probably wouldn't be so angry if I was getting 10% of all the merch they're able to flog thanks to me. Who the fuck would've shelled out 13 bucks on a "Talei" coffee mug?

Why write about it now, so long after it happened? Because it's torturing me. "Mr. Splashy Pants" is turning up everywhere. What started as an opportunity to make a sort of political statement (Web polls can't be trusted) and laugh instead helped Greenpeace with their image, their popularity and their finances. The final straw was a picture at reddit this morning of a whale-shaped snowfall map with more than 1200 upvotes. No one would've even submitted, let a lone vote up, a picture called "Talei snowfall". But "Mr. Splashy Storm"? TEH FUNNAY INTARWEBS MEME JOAK!!11!eleven

I'm not claiming that had I not done this no one else would have, but I think it's unlikely. The contest had been going on for a while and was, up to that point, only four days away from closing. Greenpeace was going to call some whale "Talei" and the world wouldn't have given two shits. Instead they got user-involvement, held the competition open for another few weeks and let the buzz continue. And it worked.

I was the snowflake which started the avalanche that helped Greenpeace shed a bit of its "humourless hippie" image. Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!

Oh yeah, I'm a fuckwit. Here's hoping someone comes along with server logs or links to prove it wasn't me. Please.

x-posted to HuSi, sans poll

In My Sights

2008-03-12T14:50:00.000+01:00

Lasers! Pew pew pew!

MAME's running and I'm busy playing Nintendo's 1980 Radar Scope in preparation for the next time I visit my brother so I can finally give him the ass-whooping he so richly deserves. He owns an original upright and practices the only game he could ever consistently beat me on. I'm in the zone on wave 5 with all my ships and still no damage when Jabber pops up.

Yo, REC!
I got a little problem maybe you can help.

I hit pause. This can't be good, but Joey's cool. We've gone out a few times and I like him so the game has to wait.

REC: What's up?
Joey: I got this guy with a problem with the Dev client. If it manages to open, it freezes. If it gets past the freeze it crashes. Same thing happens with the connected client. They're on Windows.
REC: OK, Windows what?
Joey: XP. They said they're on a supported platform.
REC: Did they tell you it was on XP?
Joey: No, but it's got to be that or Win2K.
REC: It don't gotta be nuttin'.

A little bell was going off in my head.

REC: Happens in both Dev and Connected client?
Joey: Yeah. I've been trying for a week but I can't reproduce it.
REC: But normal browsers work?
Joey: Sometimes.
REC: Sometimes?
Joey: That's what he said, but I wanted to just focus on the Dev and Connected clients to rule out the server stuff.
REC: Hold on a sec...
Joey: ok...

Clicky-clicky-clicky where the fuck is that goddamned ticket? I know it, I know it, I just sorted this same shit out maybe a week or so ago. And another light bulb: Joey's been working on this problem since about the time I dealt with mine.

REC:
When did you get this ticket?
Joey: last Wednesday

Clicky-clicky ORDER BY DATE clicky-clicky

You motherfucker.

REC: The guy you're dealing with, his name is Abodha, right?
Joey: Yeah. You looking at my ticket now?
REC: Nope. Have a look at ticket 12-A45-33701
Joey: Hold on.

Abodha, This is a summary of our communications so far:

18FEB Abodha: I have installed Connected Client on my Remote Machine. Still doesn't work.
18FEB REC: Are you getting any errors when trying to access using a supported platform ?
20FEB Abodha: We are not facing this problem on other Remote Machines which are having Micrisoft Windows XP only 2003
20FEB REC: Windows 2003 is not certified as a client OS
27FEB Abodha: Escalate!!
27FEB REC: Escalate what? OS is unsupported.
29FEB Abodha: Problem is on server with windows server 2003.
29FEB REC: Windows 2003 not supported. Does it work on your XP workstations?
03MAR Abodha: We are talking about connected client on server not workstation
03MAR REC: Windows 2003 server is not supported for running ANY client. You cannot run a Connected client on your server.
05MAR Abodha: Your documents don't say windows 2003 is not supported
05MAR REC: Our documents don't list more than 70 million programs that aren't supported. We only list what we do support. Windows 2003 is not on that list as I explained in painful, technical detail two weeks ago.

You can't run a client on any Windows Server platform, period. This ticket is closed.

Joey: I've got tickets piled up waiting because of this guy!
REC: I don't. My short temper is an asset.
Joey: You're still an asshole sometimes
REC: You say that like it's a bad thing. I'm outta here at 4pm today. How about you?
Joey: 8pm if I'm lucky.
REC: By then I'll be downloading Dirty Jobs and drinking a large glass of port-finished Edradour.
Joey: Fuck you.
REC: If only you'd said that to Abodha.

A twenty says that fuckwit files the another ticket again today or tomorrow, tweaking it further to hide his lies. One E-Mail to management, one to all my SYSOPS homies.

Root Cause: सप्तदश ("saptadaza")

Terms of Enragement

2008-02-29T15:53:00.000+01:00

un·planned (ŭn-plānd')
adj.
1. Not intended; unintentional.
2.
a. Having no particular purpose, organization, or structure; random.
b. Not thought out or prepared in advance; spontaneous: an unplanned adventure; an unplanned picnic.

My E-Mail today:

*** MEGACORP NOTICE ***
**** CONFIDENTIAL ****

*** URGENT NOTICE ***

$ServiceApplication will have an unplanned emergency outage for important patching tomorrow, 01 MARCH 2008, from 07:00 to 08:00 EST.

Customers will not be able to log issues during this time. Employees will not be able to access the database at this time. Customers should call the 800- hotline.

blah blah blah

If you know it's going to happen at some time in the future, and you send out messages to warn people that it will happen in the future, then it can't fucking be "unplanned" you fucking morons!

Maybe someone can explain to me why we're keeping this Confidential. If the customers won't be able to log in, how the fuck will they know to call the fucking 800-number?

How the fuck does anything get done around here when everything is designed and run by mental midgets who make junior beauty pageant contestants look like fucking atomic physicists?! I heard less idiocy from my cow-orkers at McDonald's when I worked there as a teenager. At times it's tempting to just go back to fast food management, where the system in place is sensible and the hardest things to deal with are ensuring the teenagers show up when scheduled and that they ask all customers if they want fries with that. Not terribly challenging, I admit, but I wouldn't be so prone to smashing my head into walls and my desk.

Making fast food look even more attractive is the installation of wireless in most of 'em, so my actual routine wouldn't change terribly much. If only it paid a little better.

Please Allow Me to Introduce 'Myself'

2008-02-26T15:16:00.000+01:00

My father’s family name being Canine,

2008-02-22T15:03:00.000+01:00

and my atheist names Really Evil, my infant tongue could make of all names nothing longer or more explicit than "Reelk". If last Wednesday was your birthday but you only told me this an hour ago, you don't get to be angry at me for not baking you a cake.

I've been bombarded by a barrage of fuckwits ever since leaving the warm confines of the Dog Pound this morning. To the couple who tried to push their way into the train this morning before the departing passengers could get out while holding hands, I'd actually hoped to knock both your asses to the ground.

Yesterday was a management bitchfest about a ticket of mine that some fuckwits wanted to re-open. Management was of the opinion that I should've answered the Reopening Request two days ago. I explained to them that I am quite likely to do just that whenever I receive such notice, which, not surprisingly, I hadn't. Management forwarded me the notice they'd received about this request and the notice they received after 24 hours had passed and I hadn't responded.

What was the request? Just these pigfuckers. Why did they want to re-open the case?

"We are now requesting to please be reopening and revisiting the issue. This is in fact due to the fact that we are now experiencing the same problematics in our office in Hyderabad."

The solution is the same as before, you fucking moron: patch your fucking XP workstations. Re-open Request DENIED. Stop wasting my oxygen.

Among the 50 or so mails I had to wade through this morning was the following:

From: "MegaCorp Auto-Delivery System" [mcads@megacorp.com]
To: REC
Cc:
Subject: New Re-opening Request
Sent Date: Feb 22, 2008 9:20 AM
Received Date: Feb 22, 2008 9:20 AM
Priority: Normal

Ticket Re-opening Requests
(This is a real time report)

You are receiving this mail if you have a Reopen Request for a ticket which needs to be reviewed and acted upon by yourself.

Ticket #: SysAdmin 1A-2X6-11
Request Age in Days: 2
Created ticket: 2/20/2008 10:50:49 AM

That's some mighty strange "real time" reporting there, Hoss, not to mention the fucking atrocious English. I shall rant about the inappropriate use of reflexive pronouns next week. Promise.

Reopen notification forwarded to management three times until I finally got an acknowledgment. That's one more potential hit that I won't take at the next semiannual review.

Weird Al

2008-02-07T14:41:00.001+01:00

I love the film UHF. It had just the right amount of stupid and did a good job at parodying both TV and en entire genre of cheesy films which people like Adam Sandler still insist on making. As a bonus Victoria Jackson gets a lot of screen time.

Watching that film is one thing, living its vignettes is another.

I haven't had a ticket which could be considered even remotely interesting in over a month. What I've had are a bunch of fuckwits who watched this and thought it was a training video:

Update: embedding this vid was killed. Have a direct link.

A smattering of examples:

Do we need to mount the File System on Unix if it is located on Windows?

Nah. You just need to swap polarity on the network cables.

We do not understand, whether this user preference is some kind of server preference parameter, or if it is stored, in the CONTACTS table or what

You think -- despite my explanation -- that employee user preferences might be stored in the customer contact tables and you insist on appending "Systemwide and Database Engineer" to your name on all mail? The title alone speaks volumes.

Or this exchange:
Corp: Do you support 64-bit Windows 2003?
REC: No.
Corp: When will you support it?
REC: Never.
Corp: Why not?
REC: We don't process and calculate, we just move tons of data.
Corp: But we want 64-bit Windows
REC: Why?
Corp: Because it's 64 bits!
REC: And that's better because... why?
Corp: Because it's more than 32, duh! ESCALATE! MONKEY TOO STUPID TO REALISE 64 IS TEH BETTAR OF 32.
REC: You want to buy new hardware and a new OS to run our software which won't, in fact, be able to run our software half as well as your current hardware.
Corp: Yes it will!
REC: Who told you that?
Corp: The hardware vendor.

Fuckwits. Every last one of them. At this point I'd be thrilled to get a Citrix issue.

Mail Blues

2008-02-01T15:09:00.001+01:00

If your job is "Solution Specialist" and you're the manager of a department which is about to offer a training in some gee-whiz neat-o new stuff a particular upcoming release includes, I have a few tips for you.

1) Choose the correct addressee list.

The "EntireBuilding" mail alias is supposed to be used for things like someone leaving his lights on in the parking garage or a car blocking a delivery truck or free coffay and cake at 4:15 this afternoon. The fine people of $SupermarketChain, the schlubs at $FinanceCo, the weirdos who sniff glue at $FurnitureOutlet and the various building staff don't give a shit about our software.

The "EntireMegaCorp" mail alias is for things that interest all of us, like the free coffay but only for MegaCorp employees. Since 97% of us have nothing to do with your very specialised application and 84% of us can't touch it for security reasons there's little justification in filling my fucking mailbox. Idiot.

The "MySmallGroup" mail alias exists for a good reason. Use it.

2) Err on the side of caution.
When one considers our craptastic mail system one is quite justified in concerns that a mail didn't go through. There is a right way and a wrong way to deal with this.
The Right Way:
1) Wait 15 minutes for it to be delivered to you as well
2) Check your Webmail account (which is more reliable than the POP-3 system) to see if a copy of your mail was delivered to you.
3) If, after 30 minutes you still don't see it in your Webmail (having refreshed it from 15 minutes ago), then re-send it.

The Wrong Way:
1) Send the mail.
2) Send it a second time immediately.
3) Send it a third and fourth time five minutes later.
4) Send a follow-up mail asking people to please reply if they got the last mail since you forgot to add a return receipt each of the four previous times.

3) Consider your content wisely.

There is a right way and a wrong way to highlight points you wish to make when you want to differentiate the importance of those lines.
The Right Way:
1) Outline format
2) If it is utterly impossible to get your info across otherwise, font size changes

The Wrong Way:
Three different fonts
Multiple font sizes on the same line
Four different colours
Dingbats and smilies

And while I'm on the subject, yes, I know we're expected to use big graphics but including them is not a requirement. Megacorp is quite proud of its ubiquitous and very expensive logo. While it's not necessary to send the graphics, they can be included. There is a repository and creation template. But if you're unable to find the desired graphic, do not start searching the Intartubies for 800MB animated GIFs like Judy does. Judy is a secretary. You are not. Judy is bubbly. You are not. Judy's job is to be happy and perky. Yours is not.

Four mails, each 7MB, all looking considerably less professional than a 14-year-old's MySpazz page. Half of us had to log into the goddamned Webmail client just to delete that shit since it put us over quota, at which point our standard POP-3 mail clients fail.

And no, that's not the end of it. You'd be disappointed if it was, so here's the punchline: The product being discussed:

.

.

Business Inteligence.

I swear.

Cow-Orkers XV: Every Silver Cloud

2008-01-28T12:56:00.000+01:00

I've finally been granted a new desk location away from Mr. Doodoo-Head and Mr. Yelly-Mouth!

My new digs: next to Mrs. JeebusFreak, catty-cornered from Ripa. Jacobs' Monkey Paw story was a fucking documentary.

I Got Your Back

2008-01-25T17:30:00.001+01:00

I am the worldwide expert in $Subject. I have been the worldwide expert in it for years. Cow-orkers all come to me for assistance. Programmers, when they have to make a new fix for $Subject, come to me. PM asks me. Our customers' upper fucking management gets sent to talk to me.

Hey, REC,
Can you tell me about the impact of FOO and BAR when dealing with $Subject?
-Gary

Sure, it'll only take me an hour to do some research and write up the two pages. But why do you give a shit, Gary? You don't deal with $Subject. You're a fucking line manager.

REC,
I need that answer pronto!
-Gary

I sent it to you yesterday, Gary. Our mail system is perm-b0rked. Here ya go again.

Hey REC,
Thanks a lot. This sorts out the questions. I think I'm going to make you my back-up on $Subject.
-Gary

You'll what? A blind, lobotomised, quadriplegic Robin is going to make Batman his back-up? Yeah, right, whatever. Hell, Clinton offered Obama the VP slot after she lost a few more states.

But... Hold on a sec... what are all those lines and names in this mail?

Oh, I see.

Isn't that interesting?

Gary forwarded me the wrong mail. Last week it would've been the right mail; it's wrong now. It shows the reason he needed my explanation of $Subject: every $MegaCorp division had to provide this information concerning their apps and products. To $MegaCorp's Super-Senior VP. And instead of telling SSVP to talk to me, Gary's taking the credit.

$Subject may change as soon as April. Gary will pay dearly.

A Night in the Life

2008-01-25T01:28:00.001+01:00

Change must take place. The wheels have been set in motion.

I can't remain in the monkey cage unless I am literally willing to kill or be killed. I truly am in deathmatch mode mentally. My initial attempts to move to a different field have been met not with laughs but with Gen-You-Whine interest. And shock.

In short, the guy who runs the division and makes the decision can't believe his "luck" that I might relieve his personnel shortage. Unfortunately he has ten fucking thousand layers of red tape to smash through in order to take me under his wing.

Additional weirdness: I like the guy. Personally. And he likes me. We sat around about a year ago talking about all kinds of shit. We see eye-to-eye, a definite improvement on my current mouth-to-ass position with managers which hasn't changed over the past 3/4 decade.

Yes I am an atheist. No I won't get upset if you pray for me. Of course I'd prefer some sort of written, business-like recommendation (thanks, Gedvondur) since that's a lot easier to submit to the Red Tape Demons than your heartfelt pleas to the Flying Penne Monster (sometimes I like thick noodles) but I'll take whatever I can get at this point.

If it's required I will move to the Bay Area for a couple of years as long as I have it in writing that I can move back to Europe (at company expense). I'll miss the sushi, burritos and Combos^©filled snack cracker snacks, but I can't see any long-term future in USia, one of my primary reasons for having moved back here to Yerp.

A couple years in Cali? There are worse ways to live. For starters I'd have a new desk with no dents. And good dim sum.

Cow-Orkers XIV: Misery Mercantilism

2008-01-11T13:46:00.000+01:00

I tried to be nice. All I wanted to do was warn my cow-orkers about a particular meme involving more than one girl (but less than three) together with a drinking vessel, a meme they'll likely come across within the next month or so^†. I warned them over and over, repeatedly explaining that I wasn't fucking around. They didn't listen. Fuckwits.

I'm known for sending a lot of cool links around. There are no greater-than symbols preceding any URL I send. The other monkeys like this because they can be the first ones in their own circle of family and friends to provide the latest Intartubes entertainment.

People here know when I'm playing around because I make it pretty fucking clear when I'm being serious. Those who have incurred my wrath over the years painfully discovered a different set of links I can provide: goatse, lemonparty, tubgirl, and various renditions of numa numa.

When the guy who sent you the link to pteradactyl porn (no longer available), who showed you another cool Flash game, who got revenge by sending you to a shock site, who invited everyone around to watch Japanese drumming porn [NSFW] so they didn't have to load it onto their own machines, and who is generally known for Intarwebs knowledge tells you to avoid something, listen to him. Don't question him further.

Of course I knew curiosity would get the better of them. I went back to the ~~Cube~~Desk of Hate to deal with Mook-man's latest inability to perform the most basic Windows operations (Explorer: directory, right click on $OurBigAppModule.exe, Properties, Compatibility tab) and began to smile as one cow-orker after the next groaned and screamed in horror and disgust. It eased my pain.

^†Originally written back in November '07.

Text Adventure Games

2008-01-10T13:49:00.000+01:00

Remember in the olden days how the only graphics you got with a game were the box design? Infocom made some killer games, my favourite being Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What I wasn't so thrilled about were some of the steps you had to take in an exact order. Do any one thing wrong and you'd only find out far too late in the game, forcing you to start over and once again order the beers and peanuts and sandwich. If you didn't take the junk mail with you, you were fucked up in the Vogon ship and couldn't get the Babel fish.

Corporate games are no different, except that the plot's not nearly as amusing.

"Single sign-on" means you only sign on one time for everything. It was never meant to be an abbreviation for "sign into each fucking application and each goddamned screen every single time". It would also be helpful if, when I have to access something within this "SSO" environment, that the fucking user ID you want remains the same. By definition a "global" user ID number is my world-wide ID and not just one of a collection.

I tried to log into my MegaInfo account. Error in name or password. Fine, try the old passwords. None worked. No problem, just check the "lost password" button which takes me to a screen that requires me to again enter my E-Mail address.

We're sorry but the e-mail address really.evil.canine@megacorp.com was not found in our user database.

WTF? Great, another automagically lost account. Off to the account activation applications.

You are not authorized to access this screen. Please log in with correct credentials.

You gotta be shittin' me. Off to IT I went, where it was then explained I have to use this link to get to that page; coming in from the link I was using passed the wrong credentials. Huh? Our user names are always fname.mi.lname@megacorp. Not at account activation, where I'm just really.evil.canine.

Back upstairs to try again. Success! I could now enter the account activation area! Click on new account, fill in information, and... I need a corporate ID code. Back to IT.

"You need to use the Employee Account screen."
ORLY? Where the fuck is that?
Johnny tried to show me but couldn't find it himself. He clicked around a while, did a few searches, and was finally able to bring up the correct account activation screen. The correct one isn't on acct.megacorp.com, it's on acct.emea.megacorp.com. Johnny mailed me the direct link.

Back upstairs to try again. Open Johnny's mail, copy the link, paste it into Fireferret and...

You are not authorized to access this screen. Please log in with correct credentials.

Once more into the breach. Johnny was able to paste it directly and access the section. I told him to try logging out from all open screens completely and then he figured out the problem. You have to log into the $MegaCorp Apps section, then also log into the account activation section. If you hadn't been routed via a link to the acct.emea.megacorp.com in your current session, you can only access that server via a link three screens into the accounts section.

Back upstairs. Log out of everything. Reboot for good measure. Log into apps. Log into accounts. Click on link 1, search for second link. Click on link 2, search for third link. Click on link 3 and... IN! Huzzah! All those years playing Scott Adams games and MuDs was paying off.

Go to Employee Accounts, check. Fill in name, country, employee number and global UID. And... nada. WTF? My global UID isn't correct.

Click here to open the $MegaPeople site to find your GUID.

Fine. Not surprisingly another full log-in is required. Search for me, click on me, click on details, see two different UIDs and grab the one I didn't use, and back to the accounts screen, out of which I've been auto-logged out. "No problem," I thought as I pasted in the direct address. I've already been credentialised.

You are not authorized to access this screen. Please log in with correct credentials.

Log out of everything, reboot, restart the whole above process, get back to the accounts. Remove Gown. Hang Gown on hook. Wait for Ford to sleep. Get towel and satchel. Put towel over drain. Put satchel in front of robot panel. Put junk mail on top of the satchel. Push dispenser button. Press the switch on the case.

I finally had the Babel... the MegaInfo account and could access it, allowing me to understand the Vogon poetry, from which I'd need exactly one word. Except it wasn't Vogon poetry, it was a group of "trainings" I was required to complete, every single one of them Death-by-PowerPoint with "presenters" of increasingly poor oratorial abilities reading out slides and documents we already have access to word for word.

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee.

The Hell-idays

2007-12-27T16:47:00.000+01:00

When people ask me what I do for a living, I automatically spit out a practiced phrase: "I work in the recovery and recycling of polycyclic organophosphanes." They leave me alone after that. Doctors understand. If people know that you really work with computers in some manner -- no matter how far removed from home PC maintenance it might be -- they figure you'll be happy to help them with their problem in your off time.

Funny how that knife so rarely cuts in both directions.
"OK, and while I'm fixing your malware-infected computer, you can write me a 40-page report comparing $HedgeFund with $GrowthFund."

"No problem. I'll fix your hard drive and make your computer 'unbreakable' while you bore out my car's engine, add a mad blower and custom exhaust."

"OK, while I recover the document you 'saved' to a non-existent drive, you can go kill a cow, butcher it completely and fill my freezer."

Funny how there are so few takers.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried to hide what I do from the extended family, word got out and five -- count 'em, five -- fucking laptops arrived with three families, all of which I could "easily fix" while at the same time cooking a five-course dinner for their dozen-and-a-half hungry gobs.

Trying to explain your job administering heavy iron has as much in common with their Yahoo! Messenger software as running a feedlot does with cooking in a four-star restaurant is pointless. You work in "computers". You must know.

"But it's just a simple problem."
If it's so fucking simple, fix it yourself.
"But you're the computer expert."

If Yahoo! ever ports their Messenger to AIX and you happen to buy an RS6000, then perhaps I may be able to help. The only way I can fix your Windows XP Home machine is to uninstall all that "important" shit you just can't live without, because a browser's not a browser without at least half a dozen third-party toolbars. And your spyware-filled icon buddies. And five different chat clients.

The only way I can "fix" your computer and "make it work" is to delete everything and start over, making it -- in your eyes, oh extended fambly members -- not work. And should your machine be so fucked by the hells you've visited upon it that you're willing to accept my radical idea, you'll only fill it back up with the same shit which broke it before as soon as you get home. A week later I'll get a call bitching about how I didn't really fix it, that it's now worse than it was before, and that I have some nerve calling myself a computer expert (something I've never in my life called myself).

I fucking hate family gatherings.

Haikus for You

2007-12-17T19:09:00.000+01:00

Two more tickets closed
I was right as usual.
Root Cause: 17.

My mood was so good.
Nothing could sink my spirit...
Then meetings started.

Advancement: again not.
A "merit" raise did come through;
Half inflation's rate.

Holidays begin.
I leave this hell behind me.
For snow-covered lands.

Battleground Europe?

2007-12-13T21:49:00.000+01:00

So I'm looking through the referrers and see a spike from Slashdot because, well, I wrote a decent comment which was uprated quickly. Fair enough, but the spike was higher than I'dseen in the past. I looked further and saw just as many referrers from http://forums.battlegroundeurope.com/showthread.php?t=200119 .

Battleground Europe? Dunno it. <click>

You are not logged in or you do not have permission to access this page.

I'm not logged in because I'm not a member. No problem, I'll sign up.

Sorry, registration has been disabled by the administrator.

Guess not.

So someone wrote something about my blog, referred to a particular post, and I have no fucking idea what was interesting enough to get that kind of response. I don't know whether it's for something helpful or insightful I wrote about Windows' internal workings, how to download the Sun JRE, or if perhaps someone on the forum claimed that I'm the devil incarnate and others are just checking out the blog to confirm this before joining the pitchfork-wielding mob.

Don't get me wrong: I appreciate the response. I'd just like to know what it's in response to. And why.

If someone from BE could either paste the post that points here or better yet, mail me the contents of the thread, I'd seriously appreciate it. If you're all sworn to secrecy or something I promise not to tell. This is purely for my own edification, though the more I know about what people like to read, the more I can write in that direction.

Unless, of course, you really are with the pitchfork crowd, in which case I'd probably call you a fuckwit, although I'd be more than happy to debate you on whatever topic it is you want to string me up over. Maybe I'm the fuckwit. Stranger things have happened. Hell, I even ate Icelandic rotten shark a second time. And, truth be told, a third as well.

Anyway, back to some private life stuff. Thanks for stopping by and feel free to post a comment.

Cow-Orkers XIII: Don Quixote

2007-12-13T14:30:00.000+01:00

There are certain sorts of people you can count on to talk non-stop. Canadians, for example. All you have to do is mention hockey. Or pilots. Mention anything technical about flying to a pilot and sit back in the comfort that is knowing you won't be expected to open your mouth for the next two hours. If someone wearing chromed heel pumps walks by a gaggle of New York City women sipping lattes, no one in the vicinity will even hear sirens over the babble about Dolce & Gabbana and Jimmy Chu emanating from that table.

Mention the fucking internal process databases and my neighbour Joey will be on the phone for up to eight hours, murdering the English language at over 90dB.

Joey doesn't have a loud voice normally. He's on the phone as I type this and I'm still able to concentrate. It's only when he tries to speak English. He's uncomfortable with the language (for good reason) and you can hear it in his voice as it rises in tone and volume. And it stays at a level which allows the entire wing to hear him. They don't like it anymore than I do but they've yet to say anything to him. They do mention it to me because, having been voted Most Likely to Climb A Tall Tower with a High-Powered Riffle seven years in a row, the patience and
fortitude required to tolerate this day-in and day-out is not what one would expect from me. From me they only expect screaming and Scanners-style head explosions.

A couple of guys here play Bingo, filling in cards with the words and phrases he's most likely to say and checking them off for the win: Greta, Jim, patch repository, crash log DB, Chermany, 'I tell him zat before', 'the system he is waiting', 'he did went', and so on. The game started as a tally system but when "crash log DB" reached 40 inside an hour (with "Greta" a close second at 38), it got tiresome and even more disruptive trying to keep up.

Ripa isn't as bad. She talks on and on but she isn't doing it at over 92dB. I know he hits 95dB because I bought a fucking Radio Shack decibel meter and measured him. The normal office range is 48-62dB. It doesn't hit 70dB when he's on the phone in German. The sound rockets up to the 85-90dB range which means he's one hundred times louder Not 20 times, 100. When he hits 95dB he's reached 200-400 times the loudness, and hit it he does, repeatedly.

All of this blabbering of his is nothing but whinging about the fact that this system -- his baby -- was moved to the US months ago and it ain't going to change. His US counterparts made a play for control, won it with the data center argument (since we in Germany don't have one) and he can't let go. Joey tilts at this windmill at least three times a week for no fewer than two hours at a time, and generally four to six.

I've asked him nicely and repeatedly to be quieter. On his good days I've explained to him how loud he gets when he speaks in English. I've had to tell him to STFU him when I've tried to hear what the fuck was being said in a conf call I was stuck on.

When I told him again to STFU yesterday, he essploded.

"I am NOT yell in ze phone!"
I showed him the dB meter. The fucker actually hit 98 dB.

"I can't help zis!"
Yes you can, Sparky. You only hit 62dB when you speak in German.

"Vye doan YU move zen?!"
Ah, clever. I should move my three computers and four screens to a conference room in order to work while you whinge away at Jim and Greta in the US for eight hours on end without once even checking your mail much less actually using one of the four workstations on your desk. You're disrupting the entire fucking wing but I'm the one who should move to a conf room.

"Vye doan chu talk wiz Vera ze manager zen?!"
Because, you little pussy motherfucker, I actually believe the two of us ought to be able to talk to each other like adults rather than running like little schoolgirls to the fucking teacher.

Other cow-orkers on the floor couldn't stifle their laughter at this point -- someone not only took Joey to task but more or less called him out for being such a bitch. No surprise that it was me but I'm currently back at the top of Vera's shitlist so this won't help much despite every other cow-orker's willingness to confirm the problem. The schoolgirl remark may well prevent Joey running to Vera like the little bitch he can be but the three-week vacation I'm about to take will do much more to repair the peace.

Three weeks away from these fuckwits. Be still my heart. Or better yet, his.

Survey Says...

2007-12-12T15:47:00.000+01:00

Dear Microsoft,

When I fill out your dynamic survey, and in it I specify that I'm not a manager (question #21), that I have nothing to do with corporate policy (question #25) and that my job duties entail IT and software support (question #35), do not then throw management-style idiotspeak at me in a follow-up question.

In your current job, which of these statements best describes your strategic engagement with corporate IT policy?
Please select only one.

Setting IT strategy, policies and/or goals for your company
Working with others to help establish IT strategy, policy or goals for your company
Translating business requirements of internal clients into technology solutions
Implementing established IT strategy, policies or goals

None of those, you fuckwits. What the fuck does number three even mean?

At 2:30 yesterday some guys from $BigComputerCo stopped by to meet me in the ~~Cube~~Desk of Hate. They're involved in hardware consulting for customers implementing $OurBigApp. Hi, How are you?, Nice to meet you, Thanks for the card, Why the fuck are you talking to me? I don't even deal with these guys tangentially. An hour later Shrek told me that we're going out to drink Glühwein (mulled wine) with them in half an hour. Cool beans!

That half hour became a full hour, in which time the rain had started. Instead of going within walking distance of my home we were going to the winter fairgrounds. Fine. Then Shrek told me they're treating us. Aw, HELLS yeah!

The guys were nice enough, the beer was free, we chatted for a few hours, and at the end of it I may be getting some free rack boxen. Big rack boxen. Stuff that's anything from 4-16U and runs some flavour of UNIX. Now I just have to figure out where the hell to plug it in -- I can't afford the juice at home.

One week from today I will be in a bar in Paris although not on $BigComputerCo's dime. Say luh gair.

Creation 'Science'

2007-12-07T15:40:00.000+01:00

Over at Whateveresque there's a LOLCreashun thread with LOLcats-style TOAP on John Scalzi's Creationist Museum photos. While some of them are pretty good, one particular picture stands out. User "saswann" summed up my daily life.

In other news: if I catch the person who keeps throwing away my jars of mustard and mayo he's going to find out about Survival of the Evilist when I go all Darwin on his ass.

A particular ticket has been dragging on for months. Thanks to a number of my absences Mini-Me's been in on the action. Their claim is that $OurBigApp doesn't work. There are "communication problems" and user sessions constantly die, resulting in lost work and much logging in again and again. For five months they've displayed a level of incompetence on par with that of FEMA during a CAT-5 hurricane.

We again were forced to participate in a Web and phone conference. They again tried to first connect via Citrix. I again told them to cut it out. They again tried to connect via terminal services. I again told them to cut it out. They again were unable to reproduce the problem.

As four different "admins" in three different locations -- none of whom knew what the other was doing or had done -- struggled to get a machine up and connected, I directed a question at the lead "admin". The words came out before the brain could stop them: "So this issue that we've been working on is about 'connectivity problems'... which you've been continually unable to demonstrate to us in conferences you've demanded we hold because of... your own internal connectivity problems, right?"

"Yes. I mean, no! I mean, not as such. We're trying to demonstrate this for you now."
"You're trying to demonstrate connectivity problems but you can't because you're having connectivity problems."
"You don't understand what the problem is."

Yes I do, Sparky. I showed you back in July that your traceroutes demonstrated the problem quite clearly. I told you back then that when 60% of your internal network pings fail, your network sucks and it rather than $OurBigApp is the source of your trouble. You refuse to accept this fact. If our app can't communicate with the server, it hangs and dies. This should not be a surprise, especially to someone who works as a system administrator for one of the world's top-ten telecomms providers.

There's another conference next week. Mini-Me and I are intent on closing this ticket with a Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit within an hour of hanging up on them.

Region Locking

2007-11-30T14:40:00.000+01:00

That Citrix training I was promised? Yeah, it's right there with that advancement I was also promised. And the raise. There's Citrix training to be had, but not here, nosiree. It's too expensive here in Germany. Citrix offers training all over the world, even in Bulgrohungria. Do you see where this is going? I did as soon as my manager Vera mentioned it.

Citrix does offer training in Bulgrohungria but not in English. It's only available in the local Eastern European language which I, oddly enough, don't speak. Vera's great plan: send Mini-Me for the training. And she has another bright idea.

Vera has decided that it would be good to bring Mini-Me over here for "training", such training to be provided by this dog. Now I like the guy enough but there's one small problem which, despite me telling her repeatedly, Vera continues to ignore: I don't have anything to fucking train Mini-Me on! Nothing. Nada. Zip. Nimic. Diddly-squat.

I'm supposed to teach him Unicode? I haven't finished writing the training, a massive brain dump of everything I've learned over the past 30-some years about it and all related subjects. I'm supposed to teach him everything about I18N? Where the fuck would I start? I've never taught anyone I18N because as it applies to us, it's not something you can teach. You either know it or you don't. Citrix? How the fuck am I supposed to teach him anything about it when I haven't had any training myself?

Citrix training is shit to begin with. The company's software is built around licensing. The first classes are only concerned with licensing and license management. Fair enough, I guess, since you can't make Citrix work after installation without running all the goddamned licensing components. After that, who the fuck knows? I haven't had any fucking training and I can't get any time away from tickets to even try to figure out how this shit works.

If you want to do anything with Citrix, you have to become a member of the Citrix License Police Force. Cocksuckers.

My protests and explanations are being ignored. Vera's creaming to get Mini-Me over here. Call me a cynic (or maybe I recognise my own), but I can only surmise that Vera's doing this to try and shitcan both of us, me for failing to teach Mini-Me anything after we spent a couple thousand to get his ass over here, and him for not having learned anything after we spent a couple thousand to get his ass over here.

I don't begrudge him the trip. Hell, I'd like to meet him. It's also nice to travel on the company's dime and more power to him if he can swing it. But in this case there's precious little to be gained and much to be lost. I've got to write a formal E-Mail to Vera to recap the pointlessness of his trip in order to cover my ass and save his as well.

The real bitch of it all? The money Vera's willing to spend to bring Mini-Me over here is more than enough to cover my tuition for both the basic and advanced Citrix classes here, classes I could take and afterwards write and give presentations to spread the working knowledge throughout our division worldwide. Fuckwits. Sheer, utter, vindictive, scheming, dastardly fuckwits.

Hey Dingbat!

2007-11-28T15:15:00.000+01:00

Our Functional Team leader knows of this blog. Being German however, he knows not of All in the Family and so may take offense at being called "Meathead", but that's going to be his name. It's not nearly as bad as his office nickname which is, more or less, "cunt".

Joseph Heller wrote the script almost 50 years ago.

I'm the Duty Monkey today. I get to look at every fucking ticket which comes in and decide if it's really, really important and which group of ours gets stuck with it. There've been a lot of tickets coming in lately in my specialty areas but I'm no longer getting them, the reasons for this being withheld until I can figure out an analogy which won't clearly identify my employer and get me fired before I send my very long and detailed explanation of every reason why this new system is such ass.

REC: Hey, Meathead. I've got the morning's backlog sorted. Oh, and I can take ticket #A23-88ZQ. It's about $Issue which I did all the research on and wrote all the documentation about six years ago. Piece of piss.
Meathead: Nope. I'm assigning it to Klaus.
REC: WTF? He wasn't even with the company when that version was released!
Meathead: But he's coming up at the top of my list so he gets it.
REC: He's fucking swamped!
Meathead: Not according to the list here.
REC: Did you ask him if his workload is accurately represented?
Meathead: No need. The system says he's available.
REC: He just told me he's not, and in 15 minutes he's taking over as Duty Monkey.
Meathead: Well, he'll have to manage.
REC: Just give me the fucking ticket. I've already talked to him. He doesn't know this shit. The only person in Europe who does know it is me.
Meathead: I can't do that.
REC: Why the fuck not? You know damned well that I'm going to be the one resolving it anyway.
Meathead: See? You'll get an assist!
REC: I don't need a fucking assist. I need a ticket so that I don't get assigned some other problem that I have no idea about.
Meathead: I can't give it to you.
REC: Why the fuck not since I'm going to be the one to resolve it?
Meathead: Because you want it.
REC: What the...?
Meathead: You can't choose your tickets. They have to be assigned now. And since you want it that's like picking it yourself and you can't do that so I have to give it to someone else.
REC: Because I'm the only person available who knows how to resolve the problem you're not going to give it to me?
Meathead: Right.
REC: So instead I have to resolve it anyway but I won't get the credit.
Meathead: Exactly.
REC: And I'll have to do this resolution while I'm struggling to find some person who happens to know how to handle the shit you assigned to me that I haven't got a clue about.
Meathead: Precisely.
REC: This is fucking insane.
Meathead: This is how we have to do things. Oh, I do have a ticket for you: #A12-1AP0.
REC: And it's about... what exactly?
Meathead: Pending threads in a DB2 system running on OS/390 causing crashes. I'm sure you'll figure out something.

A Successful Life of Crime

2007-11-27T14:36:00.000+01:00

If you're not willing to join the rat race -- and really, who could blame you? -- you will in all likelihood consider some other sort of career path. Unless your goal is state-<sponsored/enforced/delete as necessary> care, there are a few important things you need to remember.

1) When you enter a secure building, try not to look directly at the cameras. Hats and scarves are your friends. Dreadlocks, Mohawks, and custom Bayern München football jerseys with your own name on them are not.
2) When choosing the prospective laptop to abscond with, check the soon-to-be-previous owner's title on the door of his office. The higher that person's position, the more vigourously the return of the object will be sought. Avoid "director", "manager" and any acronym beginning with a "C".
3) Having obtained the laptop, you must replace hard drive with a new drive of similar capacity. A little planning and patience will allow you to both swap the used drive with the new one and return the used drive as defective for a full refund (unless you boosted that, too, in which case you have an extra drive you can then format and sell as new).
4) Do not place your newly-obtained laptop on eBay one day after acquisition.
5) When you do put the laptop up for auction some weeks later, list it as being sold from a different city. If possible, list it from a neighbouring country. Computer buyers are willing to pay shipping.
6) Ensure the serial number can't be seen in photos of the laptop.

If you fail to observe these simple rules, you -- just like Markus S. -- could face €2500 in fines plus court costs and lawyer's fees, six months of prison and another €3100 bill to pay CBL for data recovery from the quick-formatted drive.

Fuckwit.

Check-one-two! Check-one-two!

2007-11-23T14:21:00.000+01:00

"REC! You still haven't signed up for the new version 4.b certification training!"
"You said it was optional. It's 70% $Area_I_don't _work_in and not 5% of what I do work in."
"It's mandatory. You have to sign up!"
"I have a mail from you that says..."
"It's now mandatory! Sign up today!"

And so once again I have to take a week of advanced classroom training about subjects I know nothing about to get a certification I don't need for things that I don't work with. Such is corporate life and I have no idea how I've held out this long. The last time we had such training was four years ago with the version 3 roll-out. You could only attempt the certification three times and if you didn't make it, you lost your job. I failed twice but then it turned out a similar but higher-level certification would also cover the basic necessary one. I failed that one on my first attempt.

I was given two weeks off to study to take it again because they weren't willing to lose me for the corporate bullshit of requiring everyone to be certified. I spent the time studying and creating a very small, compact and useful cheat sheet. I went in to take the test. This time I'd taken extra precautions. I'd shown up in a suit, and in my breast pocket was a mini recorder which I'd tested the night before. I read every question and answer out loud before answering it.

I failed again, but this time I had everything I needed. I transcribed the entire tape, then over the next couple days went over every bloody question with my cow-orkers. Armed with the correct answers to every single question I returned for what would probably be my last chance. It wasn't hard to position myself out of view of the cameras and the company doing the testing wasn't all that interested in this anyway. It was easy enough to slip my notes between the pages of scratch paper and took my sweet time.

I didn't score 100% -- two or three of the "correct" answers they had were wrong. Still, it was more than a passing grade and my ass was saved. The Übermanager gave a sigh of relief.

Currently, word is that there's a certification test but no maximum number of attempts. Of course, this training and certification were optional and voluntary two weeks ago so I have little doubt that the passing certification will likewise become mandatory. My only hope is that the testing is held at the shithole "training center" and not here on $MegaCorp's premises, a longshot on par with the odds of hitting the lottery jackpot.

I have no qualms about cheating for this cert. It's not "real", it's unnecessary, and it has nothing to do with my work. It's corporate bullshit so that they can tell customers "Look! All our monkeys are certified!" They actually believe customers attach any meaning to this.

I'm not too worried about sneaking notes into the room. My real concern is that since moving I don't know where the pocket recorder disappeared to and I may have to shell out another €40 or so for a new one. I wonder if I can write that off my taxes as a necessity for my job...

Press Save to Reboot

2007-11-22T15:21:00.000+01:00

I had to update a Notice today because Sun finally fixed a bug which we reference because, well, it fucks up $OurBigApp rather severely. I'd been putting it off for a few days since I'm so backlogged but I finally got it sorted. When I went to save the doc in Word, I did what I always do: hit control-S. And my desktop rebooted. Firefox may have a session restore but there's no such thing in Notepad. Three blog entries must now be rewritten from scratch.

Little has changed on the customer front:
"We want to do the impossible."
"Can't."
"But we want to."
"Can't."
"We NEED to."
"Can't."
"Not acceptable. You have to make it work!"

Right. I need to figure out a way for them to reboot a server on which persistent, interactive user sessions are running without those sessions being killed. I'm a big fan of String Theory (not surprisingly I'm in the M-Theory camp) and I know there are two ways that this problem can be resolved:

Move to a different universe. Since they've imagined such a thing being possible there is a chance which is ever-so-slightly greater than zero that one of the other possible universes allows the rebooting of Windows 2003 servers while managing to maintain secure persistent sessions.
Keep rebooting. Thanks to Uncertainty, sooner or later you'll reboot that server and the sessions will all remain connected. This may involve some creative use of a wormhole in conjunction with the server or router, but it may be possible to achieve once before our own galaxy is ripped to shreds or possibly incorporated into the Andromeda galaxy. On a bright note, should the galaxies collide our Sun should still have a couple billion years left in the main sequence before going all red giant on us. At that point any concerns about session persistence after reboots will likely be moved to the back burner, so to speak.

I'd strongly recommend the second solution since it's more likely to occur. I've experienced something similar myself. Back in the early '80s I was sitting at a Moon Cresta video game and had only a couple dollars left in my pocket. Only a couple days before I'd dealt with a weird error on a prototype board we'd built. Even though we were doing chip resets and warm reboots, we hadn't bothered to run a RAM-clearing routine because, well, you expect 4116s and 4164s to be full of 0s when you turn them on. Not so. An idea formed.

I started switching the game off and on very quickly. This generally resulted in garbage on the screen that self-corrected within 10 seconds, but after a minute of this I'd jumbled a name in the high score table. I kept switching the game off and on and finally it worked: the machine came up with 42 credits. I got very good at Moon Cresta that day and was able to sell the remaining 20 credits.

True, RAM is usually cleared before the OS starts, but if it's a really fast reboot, maybe -- just maybe -- those persistent sessions will remain connected. I'd sooner believe that Microsoft will one day write a truly professional server OS that doesn't need constant rebooting and even if they manage that, it's guaranteed to come with a Teletubbies UI. But hope springs eternal, right? Right?

In My Absence

2007-11-02T16:51:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Mini-Me I'm not getting fired although this could well be a curse in disguise. While I'm away that poor monkey's charged with the task of sorting all my ticket callbacks. There are only two or three that I expected could come back, all owned and run by some superlative fuckwits.

Maybe I should start sending out hand-scrawled resumes listing my education as "10th grade (twice)" with post-not-quite-graduate specialised studies in DOS 3.0 and Microsoft Works (no it doesn't!) at Jake & Abner's SuperTech Skool of Advanced Computamatic Training, (Big Bone Lick, Kentucky campus) because apparently it's attendees of such fine institutions who are being hired by the biggest names in corporate bigness worldwide.

The Scotchlandia portion of my vacation is over and thanks to management's speed in replying to me I wasn't able to book an affordable ticket to the US until Tuesday so I'm taking care of stuff at home, currently certain liquid items and a Web site redesign, with a purchase of computer parts planned tomorrow since the magic smoke escaped from three different places on the primary (games & Photoshop) machine, so no San Andreas for me before tomorrow night.

While catching up on my mail Mini-Me caught me logged into GhugelMail and we had a brief chat:

Mini-Me: : 'sup, canine.
REC: working on a site redesign.
Mini-Me: : I wanted to tell you I finished that ticket with the connectivity problem.
REC: Got the PHP shit working and now I'm breaking out headers and footers and shit. stupid old design with multi-nested tables I screwed up 10 years ago.
Mini-Me: fucking retards.
they didn't do shit.
REC: What do you mean?
Mini-Me: i had to fucking uninstall from their machine, during a webconf. they couldn't even run the script to collect info about all patches installed.
REC: fucking morons
Mini-Me: : after uninstalling the MS patches [documented in Notice A223-A1 which we told them to read back in August] the application ran fine and dandy
assholes.
and their boss, you remember the fag who couldn't 'organize' shit and wanted us to be "more analytic"? he didn't move a finger.
REC: ROOT CAUSE 17
Mini-Me: talked yesterday with him, he asked his subordinates if they attached this and that, they said no, and he just moved on.
I recorded the whole damn thing, it's attached to the ticket. good speed, low cpu, fast navigation.
they can kiss our monkey asses.
i've never seen anyone that lazy.
they couldn't even read the notice, I had to give them the list of shit to uninstall.
i talked to Vera this morning, she couldn't say shit to us.
she just listened and nodded.
REC: Four months and repeated attempts of explicit instructions and they couldn't even send a fucking ping result. I just showed my technotard girlfriend here how fucking complex it is to get a ping and a traceroute.
Mini-Me: it wouldn't surprise me for these morons to give bad numbers in the survey
REC: No doubt
Mini-Me: well, i taught these guys how to start > run, type msinfo32, enter and save the nfo file.
REC: Just as complex
Mini-Me: it took about 10-15 minutes.
REC: The fucking instructions on that were in the fucking request for info three months ago!
Mini-Me: who the fuck hired these guys?
they're IT...
they couldn't get organized enough to send in the ethereal logs.
and it's been 2 weeks.
oh, and another precious thing: the guy with the 150 mb filemon log.
he didn't take that log when they had issues with the server.
REC: Of course not
Mini-Me: you asked for a log, he gave you a log. you should have specified to take it during the outage.
you can't expect him to think that far.
REC: How stupid of me
Mini-Me: and your queue goes on and on...

Had I been on that conf call I would've lost it. I never would've had a chance to hit the mute button before exploding and I'd be scrawling out my resume. I wonder what kind of signing bonus I can demand if I manage to do it in blue crayon...

I can't get too upset though. Six distilleries visited in the past week, 12 rare bottles brought back, another week and a half of freedom to go, Absolut Pears finally available in Germany (though at a 40% premium). Things are looking OK. I may even get a chance to do some flying while in the States.

For the next few days I've got some very tedious site redesign to do. If anyone knows of a good site to learn PHP on (preferably with interactive tutorials) I'd appreciate a link. So far I've managed to INCLUDE the top segment and the sidebar menu from only one file each in one location and I've got PHP handling HTML files so I don't have to rename them but I'm sure there's more I can do to ease future pain. With the restructuring at the orifice I should have even more free time to build stupid Web sites. More on this in a week or two.

Vacation

2007-10-23T00:01:00.000+02:00

I haven't quit writing.
Written on Saturday in a vet's waiting room, posted Monday night from Oban, Scotland after many not-so-wee drams.

Things have been rough personally and I've had no respite at the office. Ripa's incredible incompetence, for example: my work was interrupted because, after eight years here, she still can't think to look in the "Associated Files" page of a technical document when a customer needs a patch specified by that particular document. Then there's the unbelievably extreme stupidity being foisted upon us which not even our competition would think to try and make us do. That sort of sheer, mindless fuckwittery can only come from within, the product of a warped middle manager's excuse for a mind. I'm still working on an analogy to describe this without clearly identifying myself and I don't think it's possible but I'll keep trying.

Mook Man continues his assault on our entire team's nerves and sanity, and he's brought in back-up, having colleagues even stupider than he submit tickets. I swear that if Man-cub was a hypochondriac he'd demand a fucking hysterectomy. No, you cannot run $SomeAIXProg on your fucking Windows server. No, not even with MS Unix tools installed. No, not even with cygwin. No, it is not a defect. No, we will not make a Windows version of a program which runs in UNIX to allow a Windows-based module to function correctly on AIX. Go ahead and file a bad survey on me. I don't give a shit at this point as long as you go away.

Down home fuckwit goodness is coming from every angle. Jill wants to upgrade her rusty old version 2.7.f to 2.7.h, This version was written almost seven years ago and we haven't changed jack shit since then. She can have the patch but she wants to know if all the single fixes from 2.7 through 2.7e are fixed in 2.7.h. She's been told by three different people that they're all rolled up and included in fucking 2.7.f which is why we have the fucking versioning to begin with. They already don't affect her because all the fixes are already installed. And no, this isn't a question about regression errors since 2.7.h is the absolute last, final, never-again-to-be-touched fixed roll-up. End of life version.

She keeps escalating the ticket so that one manager who doesn't actually read through the ticket after another bitches at some poor monkey who then has to slog back through it all and write back that the question was already answered and that Jill is a fuckwit. It's so bad that the managers actually agree and the latest one -- be still my heart -- actually wrote back to tell me I was right, no escalation, and she'd deal with Jill on Monday.

Whatever. I won't be there Monday. Or Tuesday. I will be elsewhere with a very nice glass of very rare whiskey in my hand, noting the leathery aspects of the nose and the old books and sea finish. After a very long time I'm taking three weeks of vacation to see some stuff I haven't seen before and see some friends I haven't seen for a while. I should be back in mid-November.

This vacation was forced on me; I can only take two weeks of built-up vacation with me into the new year and they have to be used in the first quarter. That's fine. I have plans.

But I may get some of these vacation days back, giving me even more of December free (taking at least half that month as well). It's good to be a specialist, and there are a couple things which only I can handle. Daylight Savings Time is coming to an end, and on two different weekends. I'm on call. Should there be a question that the weekend monkeys can't handle they have to call me. All it takes is one hour of my time to get me back a vacation day.

On top of that a couple Citrix issues are hotting back up and I'll definitely get a call for one of them. Sitting in a pub in Mallaig with a glass of Bruichladdich or Bowmore quarter-barrel cask strength is an amazingly good way to remain cool and calm on a conf call, especially when that call bought me another day out of the monkey cage. I'm no fuckwit.

Font of Knowledge

2007-10-05T17:36:00.000+02:00

There are many levels of stupidity. Drinking too much on a work night is just plain stupid. Drinking until 3:00a.m., then coming home, turning on all the lights, having another beer while playing computer games with the volume turned up to 11, waking up the guy who drank too much and has to go to work in the morning to pay the bills is really incredibly stupid. But there's a level of stupidity so mind-bogglingly high, so gobsmackingly, migraine-causing, teeth-gnashingly extreme that it makes Steve Martin's character in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels look like the Oracle of Delhi in comparison. I shall let Harish explain it for me in a ticket copied verbatim with only identifying bits munged.

Harish works for $BigBank. $BigBank decided that it would probably be a good idea if the Japanese customers could type in their native language. $BigBank got all Unicodified with the help of our guys on the scene. Huzzah! But then they left $BigBank to their own devices, said devices being sniveling, drooling incompetents who probably type with a pointer stick attached to their safety caps.

We're rolling out $YourBigApp to multiple countries (including Asian countries) and hence, there is a need to enable capability to enter and retrieve multi-lingual characters. To do so, we've made the required changes in all templates by mentioning 'Arial Unicode MS', wherever 'Arial' was specified as the font. It works and we're at UAT stage now.

However, we've observed a strange behavior wherein a few testers reported that they are not able to view the special language characters and instead viewed junk characters (Screen shot 1 attached).

On further investigation, we found that there is a font (Arial Unicode MS), which should be installed on tester's machines. It was installed on their machines, but we copied this font from other tester's machine, where language characters were appearing correctly. On doing so, testers, who reported the problem, were able to view the expected characters (Screen shot 2 attached).

However, to determine the root cause, now when we replace fonts to old fonts, the problem does not persist. We don't know that what has fixed the issue? Is it that when we copied the fonts first time, issue was fixed permanently? Now those testers see junk characters only when we 'Remove' the font altogether from their respective machines. What are your thoughts and what should we take into account while rolling out the application?

Please note that on a Windows 2000 machine, we're navigating to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Fonts to perform the font copy-paste operations.

I was too stunned to smash my head into my desk to relieve the pain. All I could think of was this bash quote. Why is this guy alive? How the fuck does this man remember to take the fork out of his mouth before chewing? How does he remember to breathe in?

If you missed it for all the words in there, let me highlight the important bit:
Is it that when we copied the fonts first time, issue was fixed permanently? Now those testers see junk characters only when we 'Remove' the font altogether from their respective machines.

He installed the font and everything worked. Then he deleted the font and it stopped working. And this surprises him, the "system administrator".

Perhaps this will stop the J'accuse comments about my intolerance. Enough's enough! Give me my fucking Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit already!

ATTENTION INDIAN INFIDELS

2007-10-04T15:51:00.000+02:00

I will explain to you how to deal with your Western counterparts when dealing with technical problems. You're more social than us in some respects and this is the root of the problem. You like people or at least are expected to act as if you like them. We're allowed to be misanthropes. Polite misanthropes, but misanthropes just the same. Here's how to deal with us:

1) Just the facts, ma'am.
Do not go off on tangents. Talk about only the subject at hand. Do not wander into the realm of related questions which inevitably takes you into the world of tangents and improbabilities. Stick to the subject.

2) We only say "Yes" when we mean "Yes".
We Westerners do not say "Yes" when we mean "No". Not usually, anyway. You're often under pressure to say "Yes" but we're not; we're under pressure to be correct. All the fucking goodwill in the world isn't going to alleviate the mess made by giving a wrong answer. Do not try to pressure us into saying "Yes" to you the way you do amongst yourselves.

3) We don't like meetings.
As a rule we fucking hate meetings. Meetings are nothing but an ego-stroking method for talkative overlords to exercise one-way communication. Decisions have already been made before the meeting and will not be changed. Most of us realise this and just sit through it. Not you guys. You love meetings and will hold them for hours, talking until no one can talk anymore. Not us. In, listen, out, done.

4) Stop repeating everything.
In your culture I know that importance is shown by repetition and that "out of sight, out of mind" is how you do things. Not us. You tell us once and that should be the end of it. It's important when someone says, "It's important." Once. That's it. Repetition tells us you think we're stupid. Our revenge is that whatever it is that's important to you becomes that much more unimportant to us. The repetition is as insulting to us as my squicking a cow in the Ganges while eating a triple cheeseburger would be to you, except that when you repeat shit at me incessantly, it's a personal insult.

5) Do not keep calling us on the phone.
Go back and read #3 again. Every fucking minute wasted on the phone with you is another minute I'm not sorting out the other fuckwits' tickets, and they were there ahead of you. Go back and read #2. If we can make this go faster with a phone call, we will call you. This is unlikely because:

6) Shut the fuck up already!
Stop talking. We're not on the phone to discuss every possible fucking bit of minutiæ and trivia. Listen to our answers, ask only relevant questions if something we said wasn't clear, and do nothing else.

Example of how to do this correctly:

Sanjay How do we do $FileRepair
REC OK, first you go to $Directory, open two DOS windows, connect to the DB in console mode, run $FileRepair in the second window and confirm on the console.
Sanjay Is there only the console mode?
REC No, you can use the GUI tools but they suck. This is the fast and safe way.
Sanjay And how do we prevent this happening again?
REC Make Registry changes $foo, $bar and $baz. Patch your system or have your developers remove $Button to make sure users can't click it again.
Sanjay Thank you.
REC You're welcome.

Example of how to do this incorrectly:

Sanjay How do we do $FileRepair
REC OK, first you go to $Directory, open two DOS windows, connect to the DB in console mode, run $FileRepair in the second window and confirm on the console.
Sanjay You said to use the DOS window but perhaps you are unaware that DOS is no longer a part of the Microsoft® Corporation Windows® XP Professional operating system which is now built with NT technology and which has a shell command window known as "command".
REC I didn't mean to confuse you. Run two instances of command.
Sanjay Excuse me but there are two different command executables delivered with Microsoft® Corporation Windows® XP Professional operating system which are "cmd.exe" and "command.exe". Please do the needful and tell us which of these we need to be running.
REC Either one is fine.
Sanjay Why will you not tell us which of the executables we need to run? You are not being helpful!. ESCALATE!
REC Personally, I use cmd. My testing to confirm this solution works was done using cmd and I've checked the Start:Run list and confirmed that I have never typed command.exe into it.
Sanjay Our database expert would prefer to use command.exe. Is this acceptable?

The my-head-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard increases in depth.

REC I told you before that it would be acceptable to use either one. It will work with command. It will work with cmd. It will work with third-party command shell utilities designed to be used with Windows XP.
Sanjay Is there any chance that we might accidentally damage the files if we used one instance of command and one of cmd?

And so on. Get the picture?

To summarise, be specific, don't repeat yourselves, don't go off on tangents and don't call every hour to show us something's important to you. My important tickets belong to people who allow me to do the work to resolve their problems.

Oh, and calling me a racist is like calling the pope an atheist. I find racism to be the lazy way out and so I strive to find something individual that allows me to hate each and every person for his own lack of merit. Noting cultural differences isn't racism, just observation and, in the case of India, frustration. Not necessarily "Indians"; those who grew up in the West don't have these problems, and experience my side of them even when they fucking talk in Hindu to the guy in Bangalore.

The Indians I know who grew up here in the West don't do this. The Raj & Raj team in a US office kick some serious technical knowledge ass. When I went to lunch with them last year at Naan-N Curry they complained more about you guys than I do because the reputation sticks to them.

You're in our field of business. Welcome. I personally have little problem with it. You're using our language. I realise this was more or less forced upon you some time in the past but it has been beneficial in the long run. But along with those classes on how to talk with a particular regional English accent I strongly suggest you take a course on our culture.

It wouldn't surprise me a bit if you had similar complaints about us and I'd be quite amused to read them.

Class dismissed.

Arrogance

2007-09-28T15:46:00.000+02:00

I want to rant. I won't because if I start to actually think about this current hell I call my job my head will explode just like in Scanners. I've got a massive load of tickets right now and every single one of them was submitted by the kind of person Compaq had to write FAQ 2859 for. These are people so fucking clueless my techno-tard girlfriend can actually say, "Wow! Even I know how to do that." I know this because when I told her about Mook-man's latest fucknuttery, that is exactly the phrase she spoke.

When I tell you four times that there are no trees with deep azure coloured leaves, asking me about this magical tree a fifth time isn't going to get you a different fucking answer. The tree is dead. The blue you see is the sky. Note how very un-leaf-like the sky, in fact, looks. One could say that, if there was a Great Designer, it was probably his intention from the very beginning to ensure that the sky would never look like anything remotely resembling a leaf.

As a result of my refusal to entertain stupidity and give incorrect answers, I'm labeled "arrogant". I can only think of one of my most favouritist bash quotes when I hear this. It's not "arrogance" when I give you a correct answer and refuse to consider your outlandish theories on what might be possible on Planet 10 in the 8th dimension if crickets had long tails. If you ask me a question, do not argue with me when I give you the answer. By asking me you have demonstrated that 1) you do not know the information and 2) you expect that I do. Even if you feel you may have been incorrect in your assumption in number 2, do not forget number 1! You do not know.

I notice it's almost always the ignorant who scream about another's arrogance, whether it be here in third-line software support, first-line help desk, cooking college or fucking arguments over religion on Teh Intarwebs. Being right is not being arrogant. Lording my correctness over you might be arrogance but the simple fact that I am correct is not. Repeatedly telling you that I am right when you question this is also not "arrogance". It is "responding to your question." Unless I rant at you the way I'm doing here which I don't do for the simple reason that, as it says in the disclaimer at the bottom of my blog, I have no desire to make the sky my ceiling nor a bus shelter my walls.

Case in point: Mook-Man's latest:

Mook: We can't install $ReportingStuff! "I am wondering if you may have suggestions to overcome this issue."
REC: Send logs.
Mook: Why send logs? You need to make it install! There are no logs since it didn't install.
REC: Please send me "install.txt" from the $ReportingStuff directory which is created when the installer starts before you even see the first screen. Send me our logs, too.
Mook: There are no logs on my machine. Make $ReportingStuff install!
Mook: 15 minutes later Hello? Are you there? I need an answer!
Mook: 45 minutes later ESCALATE! NO ANSWER! MONKEY IS NOT HELPFUL!
REC: The logs won't be on your machine. They'll be on the server.
Mook: I don't see install.txt.
REC: Send me our logs and all the Event Viewer stuff.
Mook: WE NEED SOLUTION!
Mook: 92 minutes later ESCALATE! ARROGANT MONKEY WON'T HELP US!
REC: Please send me the logs I asked for.
Mook: Here are the logs. We want a conference!!
I'd rather pose for the next goatse picture.
A look through the info reveals MSTSC and DameWare. I think I know what's going on here...
REC: Mook-man, did you try and install this over Terminal Server? That's a big no-no.
Mook: No. We use Remote Desktop Connection. CONFERENCE!
REC: Remote Desktop Connection is Terminal Services. Won't work.
Mook: But we always used it before.
Bullshit.
REC: It was never supported. It isn't supported now. The fact that you did it anyway explains the problems which have led to you opening more than a dozen other tickets. You must install locally.
Mook: "We have done the install this way in the past, but now we are unable to do so. Maybe you would get a better idea if we do a web conference, please let us know what time works for you."
I see someone went to some sort of Dale Carnegie training sessions.
REC: No conference. It won't work. Read document FOO, Chapter BAR, Page BAZ. It's repeated in Document BAR, Chapter BAZ, Page QUUX.
Mook: We find this answer unacceptable. We have installed with Remote Desktop Connection, not Terminal Server and it always worked before.
REC: No, it didn't work before, as evidenced by tickets (list of ticket numbers). It isn't supported as documented. It doesn't work at all now which you have already demonstrated.
Mook: But there must be a solution. Please set up a conference so that we can demonstrate.
I'd rather blow Tony Blair.
REC: The only solution is to install $ReportingStuff locally. That's it.
Mook: There must be another work-around. "Please let us know when you can set up the conference for us to show you."
REC: No. No conference. No support. No kidding. Ticket closed. Root Cause: 06-Customer (unsupported execution).

And in came the complaint to management the same day. I was not helpful. I didn't listen to his problem. I didn't provide a workable solution. I didn't provide a work-around. I am "arrogant". Luckily Vera has finally seen the light and understands that Mook-Man has enough sand in his vagina to double the Florida coastline. His complaints are as meaningless as the weight of a whisper and the colour of time.

I'm currently dealing with 43 other fuckwits just as dim as he.

Perspective

2007-09-24T14:28:00.001+02:00

Sunday afternoon I was at Oktoberfest in the Hacker Festzelt. I would've preferred to be in Augustiner but I had 2 chicken and 3 beer tickets for Hacker. We managed to actually find seats and got our first beers within 10 minutes. An hour later there was a commotion at the other end of the table_ I watched as a woman grabbed a full €8 Maß of beer, dumping it on a girl who was in their group. Then I smelled the reason: the girl's satin dirndl had caught fire.

The girl was completely distraught. Not only had she borrowed the dirndl from a friend, it was worth over €800. The thing hadn't gone up in flames and actually looked salvageable, most of the damage having taken place in the area that the apron normally covers. But there she sat; upset, crying, almost in mourning.

After more than half an hour of seeing her crying to one woman in her group after another, I grabbed a napkin left over from our chickens and wrote her a note: "Be happy. You weren't hurt. You can buy material but not skin. Look to your right."

She smiled a bit, then looked left to the next table. A tourist in a tank top was dancing and singing, arms, neck and back covered in keloids, the victim of a vicious burn. Satin dirndl girl smiled again and finally got back to drinking and enjoying herself. While she then thanked me, she couldn't help reminding me that the dirndl cost €800 and wasn't even hers.

I'm earn very good money, I get a lot of paid vacation each year, I have flexi-time, and I can usually spend a considerable percentage of my day reading Teh OMGLOLFunnay on the Intarwebs. The fuckwits drive me up a wall but without them I might have to do real work. I will now send a polite response to two different fuckwits explaining that storing the UTC date in the database is, in fact, a very good idea when correct time stamps worldwide are of the utmost importance to a business, without which said business would be shut down, and that if they want third party applications to access the data then those third-party companies should fucking learn how to deal with time zones.

Go Away! We're Busy!

2007-09-20T14:57:00.000+02:00

There are three jobs I can think of that have one thing in common. Knowledge of this common item in each particular field is critical. If you don't know even the basics, you need to find a new job quickly.

1) Ship's captain
2) Sommelier
3) Network Administrator

I'm sure I could turn this into a Teh Riddlar submission but I'm blowing my load here.

Give up?

Ports

And so it begins:

unable to telnet with port 23nn

That's because you telnet to port 23, Sparky. Why the fuck are you bothering me with this? Go pester your own sysadmin with this. He's in a better position to use the LART.

I will not let this bother me. I have real coffay today. Actual, honest-to-fuck 10% Arabica espresso roasted and packaged by Lavazza. It came with some jar of spag sauce I picked up last night because I couldn't be bothered to cook. It was a chore to boil water for the damned noodles but the store didn't have anything microwaveable.

Sparky replied in a record 10 minutes and essplained his bad self:

Im not trying to telnet to session just testing $YourBigApp. When I try to telnet to App Server from the Doc Server which is what the Doc Server does to generate reports before it embedding, I get an error "Connection to host lost" immediately. this is the command I am using to telnet from document server to the app server telnet $machinename nnnn

Oh, OK. He's testing connections and they're not working. Not my fault for misunderstanding the problem which was described more vaguely than plans for the Iraq War. But why isn't it working? Firewall, probably. It can't be another application using the port because it's ours. The IANA says so. Who the fuck sticks a firewall between app servers though? Could it be that horrible Windows Firewall?

So I tell him to check the firewall, send me a report from that, and just for shits and giggles, I tell him to dump netstat and "net view" from each server to text files.

When I talked to the unix admin he is telling that $YourBigApp creates its port and it is stopping the connection to that server port. I need your help in finding the root cause of this issue, thanks,

What? No, he couldn't be that stupid. I look at the netstat and there it is, shining like a beacon:

TCP  MACHINE:nnnn     production.ourbigapp.bigbank.com:http  ESTABLISHED

He's trying to connect to the busy port of a fucking production machine which happens to be running at the time, thus making that port... unavailable. Because it's busy. It's already talking to the fucking Doc Server. It doesn't want to talk to him and frankly, neither do I.

Bonus question: Why the fuck this mook is trying to test a working system with a port telnet? That's like reading about a Cat V hurricane in Florida, then hopping a flight to Miami just to be sure it's actually windy there.

I know this day will end in a few hours, but it's only going to pick back up tomorrow wherever I leave off tonight.

Similar Symptoms

2007-09-19T14:53:00.000+02:00

We're a big company. The software support section of the $OurBigApp division is some 450 strong, spread around the world. My functional team comprises some 50 poor saps who each take, on average, more than 30 tickets a month. The chances of the same person even seeing your ticket in the queue are slim. The chances of the same person getting your new ticket are generally below 10%.

Ticket numbers are 17 alphanumerics long, not the sort of thing you commit to memory unless you're a savant doing the talk show rounds. Idiots we may be, but most of the monkeys have yet to demonstrate their savant. Submitting a ticket which reads RE: Ticket A-40001H-4F09KC2Y. We need further solution isn't necessarily the method to employ if you want an answer before Thanksgiving.

Someone at $CaliDesign employed this method and was shocked that no answer was forthcomig within ten minutes of submission. "Files are disappearing! Records aren't being stored! The sky is falling! ESCALATE!!1!11"

I had the misfortune of being the Duty Monkey when the escalation came in, so I was forced to track down the old ticket, read all the way through it and summarise the problem. The monkey who handled that ticket has moved on to bigger paychecks and less stress, doing basically the same job but with less than a quarter of the workload. I could do the same if I was willing to move to Indianapolis. There's a reason even the residents call it "India-no-place".

So back to $CaliDesign. The problem they're having has become a sort of specialty of mine so I ended up taking the damned ticket agreeing to do so after waiting for management to demand I quickly find a monkey. My "willingness to assist the team" pleased Vera greatly. I'm learning.

It being a known problem, I sent a standard response: Do $A, check $B, is $OSfolder missing?, test $C and send me results.

"This is a Big Problem! $OSfolder is there but files keep failing!!"

Huh? The OS folder isn't being deleted? We haven't seen that before. Time for actual diagnostics. "OK, Sweetie. Drop FileMon on the server, then check the free RAM and try to add a file that's at least twice that size. Try $foo and $bar while we're at it. Oh, and send me some logs."

"We are trying to reproduce the issue in Test env. Also, we will test the work arounds and find out whether that address our issue. I will post further updates after testing these scenarios. Please hold our ticket open while we test."

A month went by, but every time I sent a request that she update the ticket, I got the same reply back. Finally an update came:

"We tried to use 800 MB file and still could not reproduce the issue. We are making further efforts to reproduce the issue. Pls wait for update"

Another two weeks passed and she wrote, "We have uploaded 800 MB file with "Add File" botton and could not reproduce the issue. The file got uploaded and succesfully. Our business owners are pressing on this to know the root cause and a fix! Please suggest next steps!

"P.S This is the 2nd occurance in production with in an year."

What the...? I tried a different tack: "Is this happening only on certain machines? Only for certain user groups?"

During the week I waited for an answer to this oh-so-urgent matter which had since been re-escalated, I'd occasionally see the ticket in my queue and cock my head slightly. There was something there but I wasn't sure what. Then it hit me...

"Are you able to reproduce this problem? If not it would appear to be an anomaly which could have been caused by any number of reasons, from a disk glitch to a network interruption to a session or activity time-out. It's next to impossible to pinpoint such one-off errors.

"If you can reproduce it then we need the server logs as well as the Event Viewer Application and System logs for the servers and client."

Two weeks later she let me know she'd upload the logs. Six weeks later she did so. Fifteen megs, uncompressed. Thank fuck for grep.

I found the errors I was looking for and explained each one of them. To each of them she said, "No, it's not that. We got shown an error message for that one."

I used the phone to get the damned name of the file which actually failed and only spent 20 minutes on hold. It wasn't referenced in the logs. This is a head-scratcher.

This morning I received an update:

"it occured twice in two years period. I can say it as intermittent. We have not seen the occurance since Jun 07. This is occcuring on different users. Not specific to one user. I have a question though Can a network glitch at the time of file upload be responsible for the disappearance of file?"

This Huge Problem deserving Much Monkey Attention and repeated escalation has occurred exactly twice in two years, both times when there was a "network glitch". And they're absolutely certain it's our fault. Makes perfect sense.

Armed with this new style of logic, the next time I visit my doctor with stomach pain and nausea I'll be sure to demand she first check me for anisakiasis, chikungunya and Ebola and ignore the question if she asks me how many weeks last night's shrimp cocktail had been sitting in the fridge.

Seventeen. Thanks for jacking up my average time to close, Sweetie. The clueless fucksticks here at $MegaCorp have no idea about statistics and refuse to throw out datapoints which lie some 14 sigma outside the fucking norm.

Truth.

When You've Got Nothing to Lose

2007-09-18T15:18:00.000+02:00

I don't do politics here but I can't pass on this one. Lt. Col. Dr. Robert M. Bowman, (USAF, ret.) has a rather "conservative" site over at thepatriots.us. His open letter to US military commanders left me wondering just one thing: what the fuck took someone so long to write this?!

We find out early on. Dr. Bowman has terminal cancer. At the end of the two-page letter he writes how he remained silent before the US went into Iraq and that he "must not make that mistake again." Fair dinkum, but why did he remain silent? It looks like for the same reason everyone in the Pentagon who might read it has: make waves and lose your pension as well as your position on the board of a contractor once you retire. The only time for action is when you have nothing left to lose. A looming deadline, for example, and terminal cancer sure as hell gives you one of those.

Satish doesn't have terminal cancer as far as I know, but he, too, was running out of options. It started simply enough.

Did install one app server on one windows machine and fileserver got installed in c:\appz\filesrvr

Installed new server on another windows m/c in the same system but then when this server tries to access the filesystem it gives following error message . To facilitate this changed the following parameters pointing to the shared filesystem path for all the components of server 2

OK, maybe that's not so easy, but being able to decode whatever the hell he's on about makes my degree relevant to my job. Satish sent me a list of errors (or "erros).

The path 'T:\uprefs' does not exist or is not a directory. If the problem persists, please contact your systems administrator.

Over and over again for every single component of the system. Pages of these, something like two dozen per user access attempt. If you work in any remotely related field (which you probably do or you wouldn't be reading this), you're probably thinking, "He didn't map the file system properly." That's what I thought.

Hey, Satish. Check the permissions and accessibility of the T: drive for the second server. The errors you're receiving indicate a missing path/directory or incorrect permissions. See KB doc 1AT9003 for all the gory details and bits to double-check.

Love,
REC

And that should've been the end of it.

It is all set correctly.. I can map the T:\ drive from m/c 2 and access all the directories, the installation on both the m/c has been done using the same id, also the sharing and security has been given as full control

No, it hasn't. I know it hasn't. If it had been you couldn't possibly see a attmod.cpp(901) error. It's simply impossible. I'd sooner believe that Lyndon Larouche isn't a crackpot thief than I would believe that you set up the system correctly. There is only one way you can get $OurBigApp to throw a mgdir.cpp (097) error: delete/remap/fail to map the fucking path.

Which is more or less what I told him. Less. Much less. And in much nicer and simpler words. Not quite as simple as this explanation of relativity, but certainly something that my cow-orkers' kids could understand and follow.

Satish came back again, his English getting even choppier.

I tell you It all is set correctly..! Our administrator is out of station and I am mapping correctly. drive T:\ is mapping from m/c 2 with all directories access , We are now ask a third once for the solution for this problem that the T:\ is not to be reached from m/c 2.

In case you're wondering, "out of station" is Indian slang for "out of town", meaning I'm dealing with a scared PFY n00b. Worse, his company has entrusted the very expensive process of setting up $our_(very expensive)_BigApp to... him.

I fired up Paint.NET, drew a quick diagram and sent him not only explicit instructions but a load of documentation page references. Bangaloreans seem to love that (more on that in a later entry this week). You give 'em written documentation of an 87-step process and they'll take that over the easy, three-step way you tell 'em every fucking time.

Since I could see that he was having a conniption fit thinking that I wasn't taking him seriously, I also asked him to send me the server logs. All of them. Within two hours I had a 25MB zip of half a year's logs and his acknowledgment that he would continue reading through the docs I'd cited and would get back to me.

I waited. And waited. And waited. Two weeks later Vera was harping on about my huge backlog of no response tickets. I told her I preferred to give customers extra time when it appeared they need it. "It's very good for customer satisfaction." She can't touch me when I say that. It's not just my Get out of Jail Free card, it's my motherfucking Get Off Death Row and Go Straight To Paradise Island card. She can try to get around it but that phrase is golden.

Still, it doesn't behoove me to piss her off so I set to work closing out tickets, first sending a personal note asking about the subject one last time. If it's sorted they'll usually ignore it but sometimes they write back. $Telco was more than a week past the go-live date. The problem had to have been sorted by now. Satish wrote back.

Resolved this issue, by setting the UNC path for the filesystem

Uh-huh. Back up against the wall he finally gave in and did what I initially told him: check the fucking path. I can't help wondering if I'd included a "please do the needful" in my original answer that he might've actually done it. This only makes me wonder more about what the hell he was doing each time I sent an update.

Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit.

Feed Me!

2007-09-14T15:16:00.000+02:00

For 17 years I was a vegetarian for a number of reasons, most of them due to a particular girl from Huddersfield who enjoyed my company, said enjoyment requiring the howl of Billy Bragg or other "socially responsible musician" in the background. While the girl and her collection of socialist, anti-Thatcher CDs and cassettes disappeared, my choice of dietary restriction remained, both a blessing and a curse.

I haven't been a veggie for some years now, but due to blood tests showing truly astronomical lipid values, I was temporarily a vegan. It's easy to be a veggie in the US, and not just on the coasts. It's easy in the UK, too. It's a different story here in Germany. Being a vegan here -- where lard is a common bread spread and fatback a "healthy" dinner -- is nigh on impossible. Few of the substitutes and specialty products are available and most of those which can be found are both high in fat content and generally inedible: they taste like my dirty socks smell and have the consistency of lumpy plaster.

One item I remember from my vegan days in the US is Fantastic Foods' "Tofu Scrambler". The stuff tastes nothing like scrambled eggs but it's a nice enough dish which can be whipped up in a couple of minutes, and it fits within the narrow confines of my diet. Finding the stuff here in Europe is another matter, and I'm not planning on any trip to the US to bring back a suitcase full. I went to their site and was presented a form rather than an E-Mail address:

Hi,
Do you have any importers here in Germany or elsewhere in Europe? If not do you sell and ship products such as Tofu Scrambler in bulk packaging (for personal use, not for resale)?
Regards,
REC

Simple enough. Three days later I got a response:

Dear REC:
Thank you for taking the time to contact Fantastic World Foods. Sorry to tell you we do not ship out the United States.
Thanks again for your inquiry. We hope that you will continue to enjoy Fantastic World Foods products!

You hope I'll continue to enjoy your fucking products when I can't get them to begin with? Pay attention to your fucking boilerplate, you fuckwits!

Another Day in the Life

2007-09-13T15:58:00.000+02:00

The coffee's out. I just set another pot to brew.

There's a retarded man walking around the floor watering all our plants. He does this once a month. Maybe it's once every other month, I'm not positive. He's one of the people you don't really pay attention to and I'm not in the office every day even when I'm healthy. The plants are in these enormous pots which are segmented and have huge reservoirs. The reservoirs aren't big enough to keep any plant alive for the duration of time between the retarded man's visits. We know this because the ficus between me and Tony half-died from drought.

There's a woman here today. I don't know if she's retarded but all things considered I hope she is. She's currently polishing the schefflera across from me. She's polishing each leaf. This is a live plant. The recovered ficus (almost 3m high) is next. She's making faces as she notices the odd dead leaves buried deep within its branches. She continuously inspects her work and returns to one branch after another like a bower bird to re-polish each stalk of leaves until it meets her exacting criteria, whatever they may be.

The yellow on some of the schefflera leaves causes her consternation. It's natural in this variety; only the newest leaves are solid green. They quickly become two-toned and after about a year, half of them start to display yellow blotches. It makes for a more interesting looking plant.

The top manager just walked by. He briefly looked over at me and nodded. More than one of my colleagues has called him a psycho. Seems nice enough to me though I rarely see him. He almost never leaves his office. He's been named as the cause of more than one manager quitting. More than just a run-of-the-mill control freak, only his ideas are acceptable, and the only appropriate response in meetings with him is agreement with whatever he says. Or so I've been told. He doesn't give a damn about what I do and that's fine with me. Occasionally he's here late. When he walks by and sees someone still here working at 9pm he'll often hand over a little USB stick or some other useful bit of $MegaCorp swag. The last time it happened, Joe got a 512MB USB stick. I was also here that night until midnight. My mistake: going to the supermarket to get a can of dinner since I'd be here all night. The big boss was gone by the time I'd returned. Fucker.

The woman is now polishing every leaf of the Benjamin ficus. I have a special love/hate relationship with Benjamin fici. My ex- had one and left it with me when she departed. She'd said she'd tried to kill it for years, long before she met me. She'd dump coffee in the pot, butt out cigarettes, it just wouldn't die.

It took five years alone with me to do the trick. I hadn't watered it for a few weeks before leaving on a three-week holiday. The girls who took care of the cats forgot to water my plants. When I got back home even the cactus was shriveled up. The ficus, despite green leaves, was history. I finally threw it out months later after it had shed all its leaves and stood in the kitchen, just some dead twigs sticking out of a red clay pot.

The only plants I have these days are herbs in the kitchen. I've given up trying to grow them; I just buy fresh plants when I use up the old ones... or when they've dried out because I forgot to ever water them and I need fresh stuff. Dried cilantro has no flavour and fresh bay laurel is amazing stuff.

Another two High-Prio tickets have come in. In the next five minutes LookOut will signal a mail from the Duty Monkey and one from the Team Manager informing us of this. I know the issues and who'll take them. Within five minutes of receiving the two mails a flurry of replies will come in with certain brown-nosers announcing that they've taken the tickets, followed by further mails of thanks and collective back-patting.

The coffee's ready. It tastes like piss. Hot, brown piss. It's also foamy. I think there's something funny going on with the water here in Munich. The testbed server I just set up is back down; the only thing to do is to send an update to the customer that testing his problem will take longer as I wait for network operations to reset the rack.

My little Lunix box, built on an old Dell desktop that the equipment room guys let me have gave up the ghost during my absence. The install was borked anyway. Maybe they have another stored machine built after the turn of the century.

I allowed Firefox to update. Upon restart it hung. I killed the process, tried to restart it and got the message, "firefox.exe is not a valid Windows application". I had to download the latest version, install it, and rebuild everything. All my session, link and password information was gone.

The retarded man is siphoning water out of a ficus pot on the other side of the room. The woman's finally moved on to my other Joe's philodendron. She pulled a lot more leaves off the draceana than was necessary. She should've focused some of her stripping intentions on the ficus. I think I want that plant gone, replaced with a "real" plant. Anything but the standard indoor office greenery comprising draceana, philodendron, braided ficus, dieffenbachia... and I think we have a musa or two on the floor. Anything but those.

No need to watch the clock. It's getting later in the day and as soon as all my updates have been sent out, I can leave. Maybe I'll check my personal mail or write a comment on some other site, but I'm almost free. Until tomorrow morning when it starts again and I have to make a fresh pot of shitty coffee.

It's just another day in the life...

Headbanger's Ball

2007-09-12T14:59:00.000+02:00

The my-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard is getting deeper and deeper. They're all so fucking stupid I don't know how the fuck these assmonkeys remember to breathe, and frankly I wish they'd stop already. It'd sure make my life easier.

$TouchyInsuranceCo is back. They've stopped scraping the bottom of the barrel to find IT employees and have headed over to the sewage pits with a few buckets. The current "Windows administrator" doesn't know how to copy files from within Explorer.

Here's the E-Mail and ticket update exchange. I'm not making this up, as Mini-Me can confirm.

Twaticus: We would like to know what is the maximum size limit on file system folder. Currently the size of $ABC folder is 80 GB. When do we decide to move to new file system folder?
REC: No limit. Add volumes if you want. No need to move the file system unless you have more than two billion actual files.
Twaticus: If we create new file system, do we need to create all the sub folders from Old file system to the new file system?
REC: If you insist on moving it, just move the entire file system parent directory and structure over from the old system to the new. There's nothing else to do besides update the path the cfg files.
Twaticus:You mean we need to create just the structure like [complex structure redacted]
REC: No. Just more the parent folder, the one called "FileSystem".

OK, it's coming. The part you won't believe. I sure as fuck didn't. I checked the audit trail to see if Mini-Me or someone else was fucking with me and changed what this fuckwit actually wrote.

Twaticus:So we should not copy the files which were existing under these folders in the old file system. Pls advise.

[Second mail 13 minutes later:] Moreover if we only mention the new file system path, how the users will be able to open old attachments?

Gobsmacked, I tell ya.

REC: Do not create anything. Copy over the entire File System root directory WITH all the subdirectories AND all the files contained within from the old location to the new.
Twaticus:There is a difference between What you suggest and what is written in the System Admin documents
REC: What are you talking about? Please cite the book, chapter, section and page number.
Twaticus:[Citation provided]

So I read through this big long section which, in essence, says what I did but does so over three pages. This document was clearly written by some outsourced contractor being paid by volume, not content.

REC: It says exactly what I said but includes more complicated directions for moving the file system when the system isn't taken off-line and when you're over 2 billion files and Windows isn't able to store more files in that directory.
Twaticus: What tool exists for to move the files to the different drive?
REC: ... *THUNK*

Motherfuck how can anyone be so fucking stupid? He reminds me of this guy in boot camp who was kicked out of our company inside a week because he was unable to march even when the drill instructor was screaming out "LEFT! RIGHT! LEFT! RIGHT!" Incredible. It's a special kind of stupid that lets you get confused over which foot to move next. Twaticus has drunk deeply from that well.

While I want to close the ticket with a Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit, I'm still waiting for its implementation. I did find an error in the documents he mentioned though -- a holdover from about 7 years ago -- so we close this as a Defect and make my metrics prettier. But the real defect here isn't the documentation...