Font of Knowledge

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!

A Path Less Traveled

Three weeks of sick leave is hard to enjoy when the reason you're taking it is because you are, in fact, sick. Very sick. Between the illness and medicine I was worse than useless. All I really recall of more than a week of lying in bed was the dreadful thought that I was unable to think. I couldn't watch an episode of Top Gear without getting lost. I couldn't even follow the story line of a lottery drawing. I wondered if that's what Alzheimer's is like and that scared the piss out of me. Luckily I could no more hold onto any train of thought for more than a few seconds than I could hold a 747 down on the ground.

Upon my return to work I found I still had almost as many tickets as I'd had a few weeks before, most of them with requests to the customers to wait for my return since I'm the specialist for that particular problem area. Great. Loads of low score surveys await me.

I plowed into the mail first. After re-sorting to highlight the 2000 useless, auto-generated internal mails about problems with systems I don't use, the ETAs for service restoration, the extensions and completions I had a manageable 1500 or so to slog though. Best to start at the top and get the most current shit sorted.

Shit was right: ESCALATION!!!11!shiftone

The topmost mail was from some manager who'd promised an idiot yesterday that I'd call him today. Bullshit. I won't be in my office when they arrive at theirs and I can't stay late.

I fired off a note stating that such an action was unacceptable. You don't make a promise on my behalf without clearing it with me first. You don't presume to know my schedule and you sure as shit don't volunteer me to stay at least three hours past my normal working day. I have a life outside this fucking cubicle and that's too short as it is.

The E-Mail I sent back expressed these sentiments. Fuckwit manager, rather than accept reality, took offense. I've now insulted her as well as clearly refused to do my job. That got me a 15-minute talk with Greg, a former peer and now manager covering for my other managers who are all away. For fifteen fucking minutes I sat there explaining my mail and my position on the subjects it covered, all to his nodding and follow-ups beginning with "Yes, but..."

Greg has apparently already had the managerial prerequisite lobotomy.

Idiot Manger in the US got her way: some poor schlub over there is in the assist box on the ticket. She made him call the fuckwit. His notes span eight entries. And I was right: the fuckwit not only never bothered to look at the answer he was sent two weeks ago, he didn't understand the subject matter at all. My poor colleague had spent more than four hours on this fuckwit. Four hours! To explain -- using monosyllabic words and diagrams with pretty pictures of bunnies and duckies -- the following ultracomplex 3-step procedure:

1. Go to the NetSource Admin screen
   
2. Go to DataSource subsection
   
3. Enter the true network storage paths with FQDNs after testing that they're pingable through a fucking command prompt.
   

That's it. Open the fucking admin application, go to the right page, enter the fucking path, done. My technotard girlfriend could complete that inside 30 minutes.

If your job is in a data center/NOC and you have no idea what the fuck "UNC", "path" or "FQDN" mean, you are not a "network administrator", you're a fuckwit.

Root Cause: 17