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Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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quadraginta said:
Certainly there must be some underhanded way to sabotage their selection.

Check with TM. He has a natural talent for that sort of thing.
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No way. My take on corporate ladder-climbing is don't do it! The ideal is to attain and occupy a specialize niche, becoming a guru of something important enough that they'll never not need you yet not so vital that they pay too much attention to you. Just sit there quietly, being an expert (aka "the [something] guy") for your subject, making no waves and keeping your actual work shrouded in mystery, producing results when needed but never, ever revealing precisely how you get them or how long it really takes to do so. Your title will never change but they'll throw money at you periodically to keep you around. Coast comfortably for twenty or thirty years, then retire. You won't attain glory and honor but you will live comfortably without --this the critical part-- having to work too hard.

Basically my ideal is to be the wizard who the protagonists visit once or twice for advice, not the wizard who goes along with them on the journey. Elrond sat on his butt for centuries in his comfortable house, wealthy and well-fed! Gandalf had to tramp around the countryside and fight things and fall down chasms. And they both got exactly the same comfortable retirement package so you tell me which was smarter.
 
"You should have clarified." is an obvious deflection from a person who expects you to read their mind.
 
TragicMonkey said:
No way. My take on corporate ladder-climbing is don't do it! The ideal is to attain and occupy a specialize niche, becoming a guru of something important enough that they'll never not need you yet not so vital that they pay too much attention to you. Just sit there quietly, being an expert (aka "the [something] guy") for your subject, making no waves and keeping your actual work shrouded in mystery, producing results when needed but never, ever revealing precisely how you get them or how long it really takes to do so. Your title will never change but they'll throw money at you periodically to keep you around. Coast comfortably for twenty or thirty years, then retire. You won't attain glory and honor but you will live comfortably without --this the critical part-- having to work too hard.

Basically my ideal is to be the wizard who the protagonists visit once or twice for advice, not the wizard who goes along with them on the journey. Elrond sat on his butt for centuries in his comfortable house, wealthy and well-fed! Gandalf had to tramp around the countryside and fight things and fall down chasms. And they both got exactly the same comfortable retirement package so you tell me which was smarter.
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I would also suggest cultivating a reputation for potential homicidal violence, e.g. a detailed knowledge of toxicology that you insert in conversations on occasion.
I admit these days there might be objections to keeping a case in your desk containing a range of poisons but it served me well on one job.
 
catsmate said:
I would also suggest cultivating a reputation for potential homicidal violence, e.g. a detailed knowledge of toxicology that you insert in conversations on occasion.
I admit these days there might be objections to keeping a case in your desk containing a range of poisons but it served me well on one job.
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I found giving reviews of action movies criticising garrotting techniques and such helped.
 
TragicMonkey said:
No way. My take on corporate ladder-climbing is don't do it! The ideal is to attain and occupy a specialize niche, becoming a guru of something important enough that they'll never not need you yet not so vital that they pay too much attention to you. Just sit there quietly, being an expert (aka "the [something] guy") for your subject, making no waves and keeping your actual work shrouded in mystery, producing results when needed but never, ever revealing precisely how you get them or how long it really takes to do so. Your title will never change but they'll throw money at you periodically to keep you around. Coast comfortably for twenty or thirty years, then retire. You won't attain glory and honor but you will live comfortably without --this the critical part-- having to work too hard.

Basically my ideal is to be the wizard who the protagonists visit once or twice for advice, not the wizard who goes along with them on the journey. Elrond sat on his butt for centuries in his comfortable house, wealthy and well-fed! Gandalf had to tramp around the countryside and fight things and fall down chasms. And they both got exactly the same comfortable retirement package so you tell me which was smarter.
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Likewise, after spending over a decade in one career and almost that in another, just to have both the companies sold. One I would have had to have moved and was basically told I’d be at my upper echelon, as a product designer, unless I went back to school to get a bachelor’s degree. The other they just eliminated the mechanical engineering I was doing and that company had expected us (the engineering department) to sell for them.

Now I’m in it just for the job. Plant has been sold twice now, I’m still here. Thought before about just going for my PE license, had the five years of engineering experience needed for sans a BS degree (at least at that time). However, I’ve done contract engineering work and never much liked it. All the traveling and such, heck one company had forgotten what I had reported to them, that they couldn’t do what they wanted with what they had and what they would have needed. They wanted me to come back out some 10 years later, so I sent them a copy of my original report from my own files. They paid for it after all and that was the freak’n company that wanted me to move and get a BS degree to advance. Then contracted me for the original engineering services (vibration testing of transmission line dampers) 5 years after I had rejected their offer to be moved, heck they didn’t even know what a spectrum analyzer was. I prefer having at least some corporation, other than just myself, around me but not quite so full of engineering A’holes.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Possibly some advice I got when I joined the civil service might apply. I was told to apply for every position I was at least minimally qualified for because, maybe no one else would.
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Definitely doesn't apply here. Most Australian Public Service positions get literally hundreds of applicants - particularly here in Canberra.

catsmate said:
I would also suggest cultivating a reputation for potential homicidal violence, e.g. a detailed knowledge of toxicology that you insert in conversations on occasion.
I admit these days there might be objections to keeping a case in your desk containing a range of poisons but it served me well on one job.
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Well, most people know that I am proficient with swords...
 
Well, I don’t expect the Australian government to be sold. Though, I think, if it was, sword training would be handy.
 
arthwollipot said:
Definitely doesn't apply here. Most Australian Public Service positions get literally hundreds of applicants - particularly here in Canberra.

Well, most people know that I am proficient with swords...
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Do you have one mounted over your desk?
 
"My email looks different!"
"Okay... how did it look before?"
"I just looked different! This part here, it looked different."
"I can't help if I don't know how it looked before."
"I can't explain it, but it looked different."
 
arthwollipot said:
Definitely doesn't apply here. Most Australian Public Service positions get literally hundreds of applicants - particularly here in Canberra.
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Different strokes for different folks.

My area of expertise was meteorology -- the "MS" classification. I estimate there were a max of 200 of us in the entire country.
 
arthwollipot said:
Definitely doesn't apply here. Most Australian Public Service positions get literally hundreds of applicants - particularly here in Canberra.

Well, most people know that I am proficient with swords...
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You've reminded me of a tiny little notice that I once saw on the notice board in an ABC studio meal room (I won't tell you which one):

THINGS ARE SO
CONFUSED AROUND HERE
THE MANAGERS ARE RUNNING
AROUND STABBING EACH OTHER
IN THE FRONT.​
 
Want to hear something pretty crazy?

We now have a system (Cyberark) that automatically manages all of our elevated accounts - our admin passwords, local admin passwords, god-tier passwords and so forth. It automatically changes the passwords on a weekly basis, and when you launch an application from within Cyberark, autofills the password and logs you on. But there's a problem.

Not all of the applications that we use our admin passwords with can be launched from within Cyberark at this time. For example, I need to have a Chrome window open with admin credentials. Okay, Cyberark allows us to Copy the password and Paste it into the relevant login window. Except...

There is one legacy system that we use where the Paste function is disabled. Worse, this particular legacy system times out after 15 minutes and requires that the password be reentered. This means that I have to have my secure 14-random-character administrator password in clear text in a Notepad window so that I can type it in manually.

Crazy. Absolutely bonkers. And did I mention annoying?
 
JoeMorgue said:
"My email looks different!"
"Okay... how did it look before?"
"I just looked different! This part here, it looked different."
"I can't help if I don't know how it looked before."
"I can't explain it, but it looked different."
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Al Jaffee time:

* Yeah, your computer probably is infected with a virus. It'll do that.

* New directive from the execs. They're idiots to change the email that way, but what can you do?

* Sounds like your monitor is getting old. You should put in a request for a new one.
 
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