A Hot Market

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.

Stop, Thief!

A few years ago there was a big row over tickets being reassigned to other monkeys rather than having the helping monkey be added as an assist. The Asia-Pacific region was the worst offender, constantly taking tickets from people who'd put a lot of work into them and reassigning them to their own monkeys, justifying the action because the customer called outside of the other regions' working hours. I thought it had been resolved.

I thought wrong.

There are quite a few downsides to living in Catholic Bavaria. Stores are closed on Sundays (but not all of them). There's no dancing or playing of "joyful" music allowed on either Good Friday or some other Day of Remembrance of the Dead. Until recently it was illegal to wash your car on Sunday. The upshot is a bunch of extra holidays. I had Friday and Monday free, four days to finally process a load of photos in Canon utilities and Photoshop and deliver them.

Which is harder to do when your primary monitor (a colour-calibrated NEC MultiSync FE950) dies. And shops are closed. Finding a CRT locally is nigh impossible these days so I'm going to pay a lot for that muffler. So instead of Photoshop I was stuck building furniture, carrying boxes, and doing all that other crap you have to do when you've moved into a new flat.

Still, the break was nice. Two 4-day work weeks coming on the heels of a two-week "vacation", with four days free in between. I could get used to a schedule like that.

Most of our other orifices were open at least one of those two days and the Asians were there for both. There was a load of mail to read. Why the hell would $AsiaManager be writing me about my $HugeKoreanKorp ticket? I'd already answered it fully while also letting them add milk and eggs. There wasn't really much more to do.

REC,

FYI, I have reassigned ticket AT-115EG-K to $DumbChimp and added you as an assist since you were out both fri and today as well. Hope this is ok

No, it is fucking not OK! I know a lot of OK things and reassigning my I18N specialty ticket to a clueless n00b is definitely not one of them.

$AsiaManager,

I don't believe that reassignment was the correct action. It was, in fact, wholly inappropriate and as such was one of the most incorrect actions possible. $DumbChimp should've been added as an assist. I resolved the problem in my last update; $DumbChimp merely confirmed and held the customer's hand afterwards. Making matters worse, the answer he sent is wrong. Left alone, $HugeKoreanKorp will be fucked since they've mixed Unicode and codepage.

Love,
REC

And the response, 20 minutes later:

REC,

Sorry, the full details were not in the ticket. Typically I request backup help instead of new owner. The TAR requested reassignment of this ticket to an Asia region monkey, preferably Korean speaking since this is a new customer and they are already on the "Special Case" list. I could not get a Korean speaking monkey so I compromised with having APAC monkey picked it up At that point of reassignment, I have considered that this is a new ticket that you have just picked up, you were out for two days and since the customer needs handholding in APAC time and Korean, I decide to go for reassignment and I was not aware the SR would be resolved so quickly.

So the reason you violated our policies again and stole my ticket again to hand off to one of your incompetent chimps again was to get a Korean speaker working on the issue (which had already been resolved), but the clueless 'tard whose numbers need propping up neither speaks Korean nor understands anything about this issue. Nevertheless he gave $HugeKoreanKorp a follow-up answer which couldn't have been more wrong if it had been, "Masturbating with a high-suction Hoover canister vacuum is a perfectly safe and healthy pasttime."

Ticket unstolen. Urgent update mail sent to $HugeKoreanKorp with a CC: to my managers and a BCC: to $DumbChimp.

Fuckwittery is like gangrene or that black mold you get on damp walls. By the time you've actually discovered it, it's too late and probably impossible to get rid of. And it's everywhere. Don't forget to pay for your hot dogs in Kansas. Civilisation is truly in decline.

x-posted from HuSi, where there's a poll.