Running on empty?

Has it really been more than 1½ years? A big chunk of that is my fault, a big chunk ain't. Life is getting back to normal. Some time ago I was pretty out of it and in an argument with my wife. She asked me, "How the hell do you keep your job?!" My answer shows why the diplomatic corps never even reads my resumes: "I'm that fucking good, that's why." Well, I am good. Very good. But I managed to keep my job despite reaching a level of incompetence Sarah Palin was too stupid to be able to dream about. Reason 1 is that I'm good but Reason 2 is what I'm good at. Exercise Bike, moves to buildings/offices, different parts, etc...

You CAN be too careful

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.

"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.

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

It could haaaaaaaaaappen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norms

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

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

   - -

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

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

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

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

ATTENTION $MEGACORP VP INFIDEL

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

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

You fuckwit.

How many teaspoons in an ocean?

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

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

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

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

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

You had your chance

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

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

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

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

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

Hi,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuckwits.

Moving forward

Am I a really dick or just realistic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myself Wants to Help You

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Surfers, timed bukkakke, depression and fuckwits:

They all come in waves.

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


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

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

Closed: Seventeen.


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

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

Closed: Seventeen.


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

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

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

Closed: Seventeen.


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

Closed: Seventeen.


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

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

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

Closed: Seventeen.


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

Closed: Seventeen.


These were all tickets from just this week.

Suit yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello REC,

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

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

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

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

But first, a prophylactic mail to management:

Dear $MistarManager

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

Cheers,
REC

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

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

Hello REC,

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

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

Regards,
JJ

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

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

Flying Blind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It ends with echo "Ook."

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