Wizard needs ninja skillz, badly.

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.

Lock & Load

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

LOCK it

Before

You Leave IT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cow-Orkers XVIII: Shrek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cow-Orkers XVI: Starkbier!

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.

Cow-Orkers XV: Every Silver Cloud

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.

Cow-Orkers XIV: Misery Mercantilism

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 CubeDesk 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.

Cow-Orkers XIII: Don Quixote

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.

Cow-Orkers XI: Inflation

Mary just stopped by the CubeDesk of Hate and was shocked. It's clean, relatively speaking. Granted there's a board to ensure one of the four monitors doesn't fall off the edge of the desk and there's a semi-circle of keyboards and mice (and a docking station for the lappy), but gone are the piles of papers, books, food wrappers, Pot Noodle (empty and full), empty bocutlery, napkins, dictionaries, toys, CDs, you name it.

Oh, some of the stuff is still here, but most of it actually has a place to be, even though the DoH is considerably less roomy than the CoH. But the old clappy-hand fly-swatter (release trigger and two hand-shaped pieces of plastic slam together) which she loathed was nowhere to be seen. She's a bit high strung; she'd jump every time she heard it which, of course, only made me use it that much more.

Anyway, this is not the REC and the CubeDesk of Hate she was oh-so-familiar with when once we were colleagues. She's now with $BigCarCo and decided to visit us on a break while she's here in the building on some sort of training. While she didn't drop of a heart attack, she did manage to let out one of her incredibly shrill shrieks (patent pending) to indicate her surprise, a noise I'd almost forgotten, and one which is only slightly less painful than a carbide-tipped bit in a Hole Hawg making its way through the ear.

I busted her padding her numbers once. Our tickets are limited to single subjects. Ask multiple questions in unrelated areas and we'll split the ticket into multiple pieces ourselves. Come back at us with another question about something completely unrelated to the problem we've just resolved for you and we'll open a new ticket for that (or, more likely, tell you to do it your own damned self because you should know by now that this is how shit works). But a follow-up question about the same damned thing in order to get further clarification? No. That stays in the current ticket.

Not Mary's customers, no siree. And the reason I found out was that I took a fresh ticket out of the queue because it dealt with one of my specialties. About a minute later she peered over the cubicle wall and started ranting, "REC! You can't that ticket! It's mine!"

First come, first served, sweetie. That's how the queue works.
"No. Look at the creator. I made that ticket so it's mine!"
Huh?!
"It's a follow-up that I am going to answer."
A follow-up? I remained silent, giving her my WTF face as I tried to piece this together.
"I have a customer and they asked a follow-up question in their ticket and so I made a new SR to answer it."
Bingo. Now I grokked. I also knew how she had managed to increase her production to compete with my insane numbers.

I laid it out for her, explaining that 1) it's the queue and first-come, first-serve is the law of the land; 2) the question was my specialty; and 3) follow-up questions don't get new tickets unless they're completely unrelated to the subject of the ticket.

And that should've been the end of it. But it wasn't. Had she shut up there she might've been able to keep using this little trick. Instead she went off to bitch to the manager and came back five minutes later very quietly, dragging her tail between her legs.

It was a few weeks before relations normalised. There were other annoyances like the incessant slumber party yapping with another cow-orker and her long phone calls home to a South Pacific nation with a language that can only be described as a concoction of staccato noises, diphthongs, triphthongs, and a general shrill tone. I've dealt with worse. Hell, I have worse now.

The visit over, she turned to go to the door. As she walked away I pulled out the flyswatter. For old times' sake. All were amused... all except Mary who jumpede, then yelled out like Wilma Flintstone, "Ooh! REC!" as she clenched her fists, put on a frumpy face and marched off to see some of her other old colleagues. She shoulda known.

Cow-orkers X: Diaper Rash

Not three minutes after returning to the CubeDesk of Hate from having a cigarette I had to leave quickly for another. Tony, who sits across from me, had picked up the phone. When he does this it's to call his wife and kid. You might think, "What a good father!" Yeah, well... Tony talks to his kid with a high, lispy, baby-talk voice, one which makes the rest of us cringe while looking for sharp objects to stick in our ears, sharp knives for dealing with Tony having been removed from the floor long before I arrived in this office. Tony, like my neighbour Joey, also tries to talk to his kid in English despite his lack of mastery and incredibly bad pronunciation.

And once he's done talking to his kid he talks to his wife. In the same damned baby-talk voice. He does this at least three times a day. He has, on occasion, started speaking to customers the same way if they call within a couple minutes of these exchanges.

Joey, meanwhile, finally has his nose bent back into shape. He got rather angry because I closed all the fucking windows he'd opened when it was -5°C outside. I was depriving him of his badly needed oxygen and because I was the only one to protest his attempts to make the place comfortable for Emperor penguins out loud, I became the target of his ire, a special anger that seemed to have been fermenting for months as everyone else on the floor (save for Tony) kept closing all the fucking windows he kept opening.

I further smooth things by showing him the book I'm now reading, Fänger und Gefangene, by Landolf Scherzer. It's the story of a journalist who went aboard the "Hans Fallada" in the early '80s, an East German fishing and processing ship which ran 100-day tours of duty. Showing any knowledge and interest in anything DDR is a guaranteed way to calm even the harshest Ossi.

Now that we're on speaking terms again it's back to talking about various areas of SQL knowledge and proofreading PowerPoint presentations and distribution mail for him. This saves both colleagues on those lists and our Thai students from having to read an English presentation written and given by a German which include such gems as "Multiple rows becomes inserted" and "Teh join statements having to be for coming after the nesting SELECT in order that he can decide the choices of subdata". And this is how he's teaching his kid to talk.

And on the fuckwit front? Since November I've been dealing with "Gary" and his file server problem. He changed the machine it was mounted on but didn't change the pointers to it. Not surprisingly, no one was able to access files. He finally broke down and agreed to send logs after rounds of insisting it was our software fucking up. The logs showed otherwise.

In only one machine had he changed a single local reference pointer but not any system preference, which meant he also didn't change any other server's preferences and pointers. Still it wasn't working.

Gary was calling me five times a day trying to get me to talk. Nuh-uh. I don't talk to the clueless. He agreed to send logs again and this time I had to explain how to share a directory and write a fully qualified domain name because he figured every machine in his room ought to know that "FileServer/directory" meant "//machine/FileServerShare". Did I mention this is an AIX administrator?

Yet fixing the FQDN in each reference still wasn't enough. We checked permissions. We checked computer names. The file server machine was pingable but he'd still get read and write errors when trying to access any files.

Then I got that one little piece of information that was so unimportant there was no reason to even mention it. The file server was actually an NFS share. Which they forgot to mount.

A Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit could eliminate half the incidents which our programmers need to sift through.
x-posted from HuSi.

Cow-Orkers IX: No Time Like the Present

Most people don't give time a lot of thought. If you log into an application and enter some data, you can look at your watch and that's the time you did it. It could be a lot more complicated inside the system architecture though, and I've become $MegaCorp's expert on the subject. I've had to write a couple documents and issue two edicts, one of which is basically translated as either, "Just give me any ticket that references time," or "Take any ticket about time and then take credit by getting me to resolve it for you playing Chinese Whispers."

Carla's supposedly at my seniority level. My mentoree Paul has been with us for about six weeks now and is considerably more competent than she. He proves this Every. Single. Fucking. Day.

Also, a glimmer of hope.

---

Carla writes:

I have this ticket which I am currently working on and I would greatly in need of your expertise.

The discrepany is between the timestamp on ID Record vs the timestamp on the database for a similar record. This record was created external and synchronized.

On the Record ID = Created On = 12-Dec-2006 02:56:20PM
On the database = Created = 12/12/2006 1:56:20PM

The following are the settings:

On the Local :
$OurBigApp = (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada); Tijuana
Control Panel > Date&Time = (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

On the server :
Default Time Zone = (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Control Panel > Date&Time = (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
DBTIME = -04:00

Based on the above, I am not able to get the "1-hr" difference ( 1:56:20PM vs 02:56:20PM).

You don't have to work with databases to notice that almost everything is on Eastern time (GMT-5) but the database is on Atlantic (GMT-4). It's right there. Still, anyone can overlook the obvious and I've done before so I didn't go ballistic.

Carla,

Control Panel > Date&Time = (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
DBTIME = -04:00

It looks like the DB is set to Atlantic time (or Daylight Savings +1), an hour ahead of the servers.

Love,
REC

And that should've been it. If it had been I'd be ranting about the colleague who calls his toddler three times a day and insists on using baby-talk, continuing to do so even after his wife takes the phone back. Drives me up a fucking wall. Instead I got this response not 15 minutes later:

Does this constitute a "1-hr" difference? Should the Timestamp on RecordID show "5-hr" difference" since the System Preference Default TimeZone and Control Panel > Date&Time is GMT-5?

She's Eastern Asian so "blonde" is out. She has no idea about how time zones work in real life much less in software and yet she took the ticket. My forehead probes the depths of the my-head-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard.

Later this morning I bumped into Vera in the hallway and asked about Bulgrohungria where our new offices are, just sort of making conversation and trying to get a little closer to what passes for her "good side". She comes from Bulgrohungria so my apparent interest couldn't hurt. I asked about the distance from the office to the city, the costs of hotels, that sort of thing. I figured it'd be dirt cheap. No such luck -- hotels in the city are around €100-150/night and even outside the city, finding something under €60 is difficult.

But maybe you could go there officially as a part of work...

Hells yeah! Send my ass there for a couple weeks and pay my way! I've mentored an entire office before and I could give a bunch of stupid presentations while I'm there, too. That would stop management bitching about having sent me to HQ for a week with little noticeable return on their investment. Most of the return has been terribly intangible but led to huge tangible results about which I have to constantly remind them.

I should know in February. I'll get at most two weeks' notice and it'll most likely overlap my planned vacation weeks. Two weeks in the Eastern Bloc on $MegaCorp's dime... what could possibly go wrong?

x-posted to HuSi with a poll.

Cow-orkers VIII: Sour Stuff

Germans need lots of "oxygen". They're always complaining, Ich kriege keinen Sauerstoff ("I'm not getting any oxygen"). If only. At the same time they also complain about drafts being terribly unhealthy and even have a special belt for motorcyclists to "protect their kidneys" from all that cold air rushing by. German bikers even wear it in summer.

Twenty below 0°C isn't uncommon in winter here. And yet there are a lot of Germans who will insist on opening the window all the way despite gale force winds, dropping the temperature 30 degrees in as many seconds. Because they "need some oxygen".

Berti is one of these people. Luckily I don't sit anywhere near Berti anymore. He's in a different wing and we're separated by a couple doors.

Unfortunately my neighbour Joe is also one of these people. He gets in around 6:00a.m. and opens Every. Single. Window. We're not talking much these days. He's angry that I come in and close the windows. He then waits for me to go get coffee or a smoke and tilts half of them back open, including the ones right next to me so that I get a nice breeze.

But back to Berti. He has the uncanny ability to ask the stupidest questions and keep carrying on, following up with further questions into the most niggling details no matter how improbable, taking any conversation on so many "But what if?" tangents of impossibility that you've long forgotten what it was you were talking about.

Berti doesn't save this talent just for meetings. One would think, what with Berti being a non-smoking health nut, that I might get away from him by going outside for a nicotine fix, a killer sudoku in hand to pass the time. One would be wrong.

"So what is that?"
"It's a puzzle. All the numbers 1-9 in every row, in every column, and in every box."
He studied it and looked confused so I showed him again.
"Ah okay. But you have a mistake here then," pointing to a couple 3s sitting diagonally from each other.
"No, diagonals have nothing to do with it."
"But they have to."
"No, Berti, they don't. The diagonals have nothing to do with it."
"But..."
"Look! You can't do diagonals because only the diagonals between the corners have 9 boxes!"
And that's where I should've stopped. But I didn't. I continued, asking him,
"How he hell could you get the numbers 1-9 in this diagonal which only has 5 boxes?"

He's one of those people who doesn't understand the concept of a rhetorical question. Berti took this as in invitation to brainstorm. His grasp of the hypothetical is unparalleled.

He looked at the puzzle again and started making shit up, explaining how you could connect this diagonal with that one and get a total of nine. And therefore the numbers have to fit according to the same rules because they could, since he'd just figured out a way to make diagonals count. Forget the fact that sudoku puzzles have been around for quite some time and the rules have long been agreed upon.

"No! The diagonals have nothing to do with the damned puzzle."
"But they could."
"No, they couldn't. They don't. That's not how the puzzle works," I explained again, stubbing out my cigarette.
"But it would be possible to do it."

I went back inside and he followed me up the stairs continuing his explanation of how it must be possible to follow every potential diagonal wrap-around and ensure they're all unique. I started to take off my jacket as I went to talk to one of his neighbours about a problem but he'd already opened the window again and the temperature was dropping rapidly. I went back to the CubeDesk of Hate only to find Joe was already treating our section to some fresh, -5°C oxygen.

The my-head-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard is getting deep enough to offer some shelter from the wind.

x-posted from HuSi.

Cow-orkers VII: Is That a Knife in My Back or Are You Just Happy to Use Me?

I just got a note from Kris, a manager two levels above me. Lenny is out on holidays and won't be back until January. I'd given him some advice on a ticket and he'd (surprisingly) done the proper thing and credited me with an assist. Unfortunately that meant that since the customer came back with another question, I was asked to give further answers. That meant I had to read through the entire ticket.

Lenny had been playing Chinese Whispers (or "Telephone").

Lenny, Lonnnie and Larry comprised a group we called "Triple Threat" (Trip-Ell Threat -- yes, I know lame it sounds). For a few years they were in my Functional Team. They were a close-knit group and all easily took offence when I fired off an E-Mail about on or another's behaviour or response to a customer. They became indignant as I rewrote their Knowledge Base documents, cleaning them up for style and content. We're not part of Microsoft's marketing and there's no reason that a technical document needs to contain "Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server Operating System" even once, much less on every single reference.

They'd run off to tattle and cry to the managers at every one of the perceived offences, embellishing their stories wherever possible. They'd likewise sic management on my if I didn't drop everything I was doing to answer their questions immediately. They looked for every possible way of causing trouble, and it all started because I'd once had the audacity to try to help one of them (Lonnie, I think it was) and fix his damned document before it went to PM.

And so ensued a war of sorts for two years, the Cerberus of LLL vs. little ol' REC. I couldn't tell them a thing and learned not to bother asking them for any assistance since the only answers I'd receive were crafted to look right and be wrong. The stupidity and pettiness began to peter out when I visited the London offices for a week and dealt with them in person, calming their egos a bit, but the enmity remained. After Larry left the company and Lonnie moved to a different team, I was only left with Lenny to deal with, and rarely since he worked the other end of the spectrum of our team and our work rarely overlapped.

He was still annoying, demanding full assist credit if he answered a single minor question confirming something like a version number or file directory. Such are his petty ways. He's going for a record on a metric which only has to exist; high numbers of assists neither bring any additional accolades (or money), nor do they excuse your ticket load as one of our locals knows all too well.

To his credit if someone gave him a significant piece of information or more than passing assistance he'd credit the assist. I stumbled over a ticket he'd been working on while looking for something else and saw the answer, a defect which I'd dealt with many times but which the customer hadn't discovered correctly. By that I mean he didn't notice a couple major symptoms and his problem description seemed to be about something entirely different. I sent Lennie a quick note with a test for the customer and the internal bug tracking numbers, saving his ass on a month-old ticket for which he had no direction.

He'd been contacting me by IM or mail every few days for some other freaky problem. The problem was based in Resonate, that wonderful/horrible load-balancing software. There are only three of us at the company who even deal with Central Dispatch anymore so it wasn't much of a surprise that Lennie'd come to me: of the three I'm the only native English speaker.

Using the team leader's note in the Prio-1 ticket, Lennie took ownership and sent a response. There's an internal entry for a mail between us a few days later when the customer came back. Right after a response signed by Lennie and copypasta'd from my mail with every warning Lennie didn't see before. And the next activities were the same. All of them.

Now it's my ticket and I got to the root of the problem which turned out to be a very different problem indeed. Because he didn't ask for their network diagram after the first signs of problems (Resonate would only work if it was the first NIC binding). My technotard girlfriend couldn't design a more perverted architecture if my vengeful, technically capable, psycho-bitch ex-girlfriend helped her.

One mail with an architecture correction and new diagram resolved everything.

I'm onto Lennie. Had he been a bit more clever, he could've asked one of the other two Resonate experts to cover that ticket and I might not have seen it. Stab me in the back repeatedly, use me continually, then go on hols and give me a chance to find out?

Fuckwit.

x-posted from HuSi, with a poll.

P.S. Enjoy a holiday GooTube link.

Cow-Orkers VI: It's Not Supposed to Taste Sour

An easy enough ticket I took asking if localisation on a server system could be done (it can) came back asking how to do it. Fuctifino, so I fired off an internal mail asking who dealt with that component.

It was only after receiving my team manager's single word response that I knew why I'd heard his laugh from across the room.

Ripa.

##

For six years I've been hounded by Ripa and her whining, REC! You HAVE to HELP me!. Six long years of her insistent prattling on. Six years of her demands that I drop whatever I'm doing and answer her questions. Six years of her pissing and moaning to Vera if I don't write her answers for her.

It was finally my turn. Revenge would be mine!

After a smoke break, I walked up to her desk and said her trademark phrase, in her style.

Ripa! You HAVE to HELP me! The COOstomer has a PRAWblem. You work with $component! You HAVE to HELP me now!.

Sitting across from her Paul just lost it. At the neighbouring desk even Egghead, the quietest, most patient yet stoic man I've ever met cracked a smile.

"REC! Stop it! Go back to your desk."
"No, seriously. I have a problem, it's in your area and you have to help me now."

It took her 20 minutes to babble through a vague explanation which Drew could've answered in two minutes. As I walked away, Paul was still laughing and Ripa called out, "You have to give me Assist!"

Most of us help each other out; tickets have an Assist field so that we get credit for this extra work and effort in addition to our own tickets. I'm expected to average two Assists a week, not too difficult thanks to my Unicode specialisation. Ripa has never once had an assist.

Until today.

On my ticket.

The irony of it all. Never hung poison on a fouler toad.

I'm a fuckwit.

x-posted to HuSi, sans poll.

Cow-orkers V: Meetings

Attention Corporate Monkey Infidels:
Team meetings, unit meetings, group meetings, area meetings, division meetings, and other such meetings are not, repeat not meant for any sort of discourse. They exist solely to stroke the ego of the numbnuts holding such a meeting so he or she can feel more import.

Unfortunately, most corporate monkeys don't realise this, believing that the meeting is taking place in order to facilitate an exchange of ideas and discussions. This might be the case in a software development meeting but it just ain't the case when the meeting includes all members of a particular corporate hierarchy.

The decisions have already been made in hierarchy meetings. The Death by PowerPoint slides were approved by upper management last week. The purpose of the meeting is one-way communication from up on high down to you fucking peons. Realise this and life becomes So. Much. Easier.

The purposes of the corporate meeting:

1. Information (such as it is) is conveyed to those lower down on the org chart.
   
2. The ego of the speaker is fed.

That's it. Meetings are unnecessary. The presenter could very well have sent the PowerPoint presentation to you by mail which would have been considerably more useful; you'd be able to peruse the info at your own pace and you'd have a copy of it in case there was something you actually needed to know.

How to get through the corporate meeting:

1. If there are slides, sit down, shut up, twiddle your thumbs until the talking stops, and go back to your hole.
   
2. If you can find a spot outside the speaker's line of sight, you can use the time to read through notes or do a few sudoku puzzles. I'm partial to the Killer Sudokus myself.
   
3. When the speaker finally asks if there are any questions, shut up. If someone else starts talking, stab him.

If you actually have a question, send it later in an E-Mail.

I was finishing puzzle number three as $Manager finished a presentation with the same goddamned slides which had been presented by two other manager at two equally useless, pointless meetings a week ago. Although Berti was there, he'd remained surprisingly silent throughout the ordeal. The last slide came up:

Q & A

"Are there any more questions?"

Of course not! During the two versions of this meeting Berti had wasted more than 30 minutes at each with meaningless questions, first about mintiæ, then following up each one with every conceivable and impossible hypothetical situation. Berti is one hell of an unintentional troll.

If some minor mention was made of ScreenClean^® windshield cleaner and how it works on all bird shit which might end up on one's windscreen, Berti would ask for clarifications. Would it work on all bird shit? What about chicken shit? How about ostrich or emu shit, something he needs to know since he goes to Australia once eveery three years.

After running through every member of the Aves class, Berti would move up to the Chordata phylum, starting with, say, goats since the farm near the office raises them. Once told "Goats can't fly, so there's no worry about getting goat shit on your windshield", Berti would first reply, "Ostriches don't fly and you said it works on their shit. Just for the sake of argument, suppose a goat was born with wings."

The presenter inevitably allows himself to be sucked into this nonsensical discussion because he's trying to look reasonable. He also lives in fear of being called to the carpet by his own manager for failing to address the legitimate concerns of an employee under him, regardless of how illegitimate they might actually be. One complaint can have a big effect come review time. "A goat can't be born with wings, Berti. It's a mammal."

"But bats are mammals too, and they have wings. Suppose the mother goat maybe ate food grown near Chernobyl or something and this was the result."
"Fine. If a mother goat ate radioactive food and the goat was born with wings, it still couldn't fly. It's too heavy and non-aerodynamic."
"But let's suppose it can. The Stealth Fighter isn't aerodynamic and it can fly, and animal brains are still more powerful than computers."
"Okay, a flying goat. If a flying goat flies over your car and shits on the windshield, ScreenClean^® will still work. Are there any other questions?"
"What if someone picked up some goat shit and threw it at the windshield. Would ScreenClean^® work then? And what about if, instead of throwing it at the car, some kids started smearing it on the windshield, really rubbing it hard?"

Such is Berti's manner. He's a master at this. Berti's German and he truly believes every single point he raises is rational.

But he'd already asked everything possible concerning this presentation, this being our third time around. This third version of the meeting had only wasted 50 minutes, Berti's and everyone else's questions having been exhausted the first two times.

The manager made a mistake: She repeated the question.

Berti, not wanting to disappoint, having already been given the answer to every possible goat shit scenario, took a new tack:

"Does ScreenClean^® work on mule shit?"

I got through another three diabolical/evil puzzles before we finally got out of there.

There's a poll in the HuSi version.

Cow-orkers IV: The Memory of a Goldfish

Ripa again. I'm getting so much mileage out of her that I'm wondering if I'll ever get around to any of the others.

Ripa's taken to talking to herself more and more. Out loud, non-stop droning on. Except that she's not always talking to herself. Sometimes she's talking to one of us and gets pissy if we don't answer immediately, yelling at the unfortunate object of her attention, "I asked you question four times now and you are not answering me!" Even one of our most patient monkeys who often accompanies her to lunch so that she doesn't have to eat alone let off some steam at a gloriously Ripa-free cafeteria table on the day the following occurred.

* * * *"REC!"
"What now?" Don't bug me, bitch. I need more coffay.

I'm the Duty Monkey today. A lot of tickets are in the wrong areas and they belong in ours. As the Duty Monkey it's up to me to determine if some ticket should indeed be transferred over to our team. Conversely, I try to transfer tickets which we shouldn't have out to other Monkeys who fight back almost as hard as I fight them. None of us want more tickets.

"I have teeket here from COOstomer about support for version. Do you think it's for your team?"
"What?!"
"I don't know what team it's for. You have to tell me.

I stare at her in disbelief. The office goes quiet, everyone waiting to see what's going to happen next. Because they know... they know.

Ripa, until a few months ago, had been in our team for some three or four years. She'd been the Duty Monkey once a week. Surely she...

No noise leaves the other cubes as my response is eagerly anticipated. Phone conversations stop. Typing stops. Even someone's Flash game clicking has come to a halt. The only sound is the droning hum of the drinks refrigerator. Will REC scream? Will his head essplode á la Scanners? Will he finally strangle the woman?

"You're kidding, right? Right?! Did you not work in our team for four years? Do you seriously not know which damned team a stupid question about supported platforms goes to?!"

"But you are Doo-ty Monkey of group. I have to ask you where it should go."

Titters, smiles, a few signs of mild disappointment. I manage not to rip her head off her shoulders or even spew a stream of curses that one would only expect from a man whose ex-wife already got everything in the divorce including 80% of his future income after he finds out that she was screwing her lawyer, the judge and his own lawyer, too. That kind of anger.

That's the reaction everyone was expecting. However, my way of handling this round has ensured I won't be fired for my response nor arrested for manslaughter (though I'm sure I could get it knocked down to justifiable homicide) and I've managed to get my point across in a way that everyone understood. Everyone but Ripa, of course.

I sit down at my desk.

"Are you going to take the teeket REC?" she hollers again.

The my-head-shaped-dent in my desk welcomes my forehead.

x-posted to HuSi sans poll.

Cow-orkers III: Language School

I'm sitting at my new desk in the Panopticon, perched high atop Munich on the first floor, just another $MegaCorp monkey. And now, apparently, an English teacher. My new neighbour Joe interrupted me and asked, "What is ze difference between mouse and mouse?"

WTF?!

--

The seating plan was completed a few weeks ago and most of us $BigCorp people were seated en bloc throughout $MegaCorp's offices based on teams. Our Admin group has too many people and someone had to be separated. The first monkey who got the spot took it as an affront. Steve then agreed to take the spot but didn't really want it. I saw from the floor plan that this position ought to give me some extra wall and storage space and I volunteered to take it. It would also give me a better chance to integrate and if my neighbours were really bad, I could probably take a desk somewhere else as a floater.

Joe turned out to be almost perfect. He's originally from East Germany and since exGF is from there, I already knew about the mindset. We hit it off well, and our skillsets are such that they complement each other, so we'll both be teaching each other technically.

Joe has a two-year-old learning English. Unfortunately Joe is doing ze teachink. While he doesn't have the horrid, heavy Sächsischhhh accent the East is famous for, neither does he have the English pronunciation down.

Joe lifted his mouse and said, "Zis, ze mouse, yeah?" Riiiight. And then he started pointing to his mouth and said "But zis is a mouse".

I lost it. I was howling with laughter. We'd already been over the "th" sound and I'm pretty sure Joe knows how to spell both words correctly. Joe also insists that at the ends of his feet are "toos" or maybe "twos". I essplained what he was doing wrong and gave him a few pronunciation exercises I've designed to torture Tuetons:

Torturing Germans:
I think that these things can throw the balls through the roof.
A mouse has one mouth and more than two toes.
Father Victor wants very wet, fresh vegetables.

My other two new neighbours joined in on the pronunciation questions and that led to other questions which required me explaining, among other things, what a moose is. I also agreed with them that whoever decided the plural of "mouth" was probably trying to fuck with foreigners.

My neighbours learn quickly and are now certain that the plural of "house" is "hice".

x-posted to HuSi, with a poll.

Cow-orkers II: Groundhog Day

"REC!" she screams as I walk in the door more hangover than usual.
"Hhnnnngrfmm?"
"What is German word for Alpeeeen MarMOAD?"

Ripa's shrill voice rips through the fog and interrupts my only functioning thought process, that being to continue placing one foot in front of the other until I get to the coffay machine.

"Why the hell are you asking me what an Alpine marmot's called in German?"
"Because you are the A-mair-ican here. You have to know."

What the hell does being American have to do with knowing the German name of some rodent? A rodent, I might add, which is native to Europe.

"Why the fffu... Why don't you just look it up yourself on LEO?"

Treating that question as rhetorical, she carried on. "I theenk it is Murmeltier."
"A Murmeltier is a 'groundhog', just like in the film. Go look it up at LEO."
"Then tell me what is Alpeen MarMOAD!" she hollered over the cubicles, ignoring my suggestion again.

Clickity-click. Three fucking keystrokes later and I'm on the dictionary site.

Well how about that? German only has one word for marmots, groundhogs and woodchucks. "It's called an Alpin Murmeltier," I yell back, still jonesing for my morning fix: a liter of coffay.
"I told you it was Murmeltier! Why are you don't leesten to me?"

I close the LEO tab and bang my head on my desk some more. It's much less painful.

Cow-orkers I

She Who Can't Be Ignored

One of our band of monkeys is an Eastern European. She joined the company a few months before me. She's not entirely unattractive though I understand from others who went on a rafting outing that there's a lot of cottage cheese for those lucky souls who get the swimsuit view of a hard-to-miss posterior.

I have a question! You have to help me!

This is Ripa's catchphrase. It's preceded by the victim's name and is called out in shrill tones. She's been here six years now. One would think she could solve just one ticket all on her own. One would be wrong, even if dealing with exact same problem she'd worked on a week earlier.

I have a question!

I shudder and try to ignore her.

REC! You have to help me!

I quickly minimise Age of Empires as I see her making her way over.

The COOOstomer is doing... something he shouldn't be. Natch. And not only was he dumb enough to do that, the sad bastard ended up with Ripa handling his ticket. Which means that one of us will actually do the work or -- more likely -- will tell her the same damed thing we've told her a hundred times. There's a 50-50 chance that she'll protest and argue that whatever she's been told was wrong and she'll then terrorise a different colleague, send a request to the customer for unnecessary information and testing, then finally come to her own conclusion which, oddly enough, matches what we'd already told her. However, she'll insist that we told her something different and will steadfastly refuse to put us on ticket as having assisted, yet another metric by which we are judged.

No one says anything about this. She's protected. A high manager in our department is also from the same former Soviet-bloc country. I found this out in a Root Cause-17 manner:

I'm the only monkey in all of EMEA who works with Eastern Asian languages (Chinese/Japanese/Korean, or as they're known, "CJK"). This ability, along with specialised knowledge in OS, database raw data and font handling, gives me quite a few easy tickets in addition to a lot of stinkers because no one wants to even look at a Japanese version of Windows despite the damned icons all being the same, as are the Control Panel and Admin program names. Although she was once an MCSE (I have no idea...), she is incapable of pressing the pretty buttons or hitting WinKey+R and calling up the Services control panel.

So I was astonished when I went back to the queue to take a fairly simple problem from $BigChineseCorp that I could resolve in about 5 minutes with a quick test and found it had disappeared. Had one of our Singaporean colleagues taken it? Maybe someone in India? An insomniac in our California office perhaps?

I ran a quick search and found the ticket. In the owner field was "RIPA". I turned to my mate and said, "She took a ticket she can't even work on! It requires knowledge in so many areas in which she's never worked that it's pointless, and I'll be damned if she's going to pad her quarterly numbers by cutting and pasting my E-Mail responses."

As I said this, LookOut flagged me that there was a new message in my Inbox. Oh joy. My friend smiled and said, "You wanna bet?"

That was a foolish €10.

Vera, a high-level manager, is from the same country as Ripa. The two of them are clearly friends and though it had dawned on me that Vera was the reason for Ripa's continued employment, I equally expected that following the proper chain of command (and doing so both respectfully and discreetly) would have results.

Results I got, but not the ones I'd expected.

Rather than whinge to my direct, lower-level manager yet again about Ripa, I went to Vera's office and closed the door. Looking back, it wasn't one of my brightest ideas but at the time... well, y'all without sin can cast the first stone.

"Vera? Can I talk to you for a minute?"
"Sure. Come on in."
"It's about Ripa."

Only in the aftermath do I remember Ver's eyes narrowing. I calmly explained that Ripa had once again taken a ticket she couldn't possibly work on, much less answer. The ticket required being able to read and enter Chinese characters. It required working knowledge of two Unicode systems. It required technical knowledge of fonts. It required knowledge in almost every aspect of computing in which Ripa was lacking.

Apparently what the ticket really required was me teaching Ripa how to speak Chinese and Japanese along with everything I've learned about code handling over the past 20-some years.

Vera exploded.

I was accused of damned near everything other than sexual harassment: refusal to assist colleagues, inability to work in a professional manner, having a personal vendetta against Ripa, lack of motivation, inconsideration -- whatever she could possibly come up with as she ranted on.

During her tirade she said how she was sick of all these accusations against Ripa. As I defended myself against the accusation of having some vendetta I said that the fact that there were so many complaints from others backed up my own complaint.

What happened next made her initial explosion look like a firecracker. I finally realised I needed to STFU, put my tail between my legs and agree with whatever was being said. I was on official verbal reprimand. Any further "unprofessional behaviour" would result in a written reprimand. I was directed to assist my colleague in any and every way necessary and if teaching a bricklayer to do neurosurgery in 15 minutes was what it took, so be it.

I left Vera's office and went back to my cubicle, handing Jimmy the tenner. I hit control-R in LokOut and started writing the answer which Ripa cut and pasted into her response to the COOOstomer.

Vera played "telephone", sending me customer responses and sending my replies back. It took a week and a half to finish the ticket instead of an hour or two. Ripa again refused to put my name in the "Assisted By" field.

The my-head-shaped dent in front of my keyboard continues to grow.