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

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Okay the calls have calmed down a little. Wait time is down to only 15min. And I've been taken off VoIP and back onto phones for the week. :(
 
I just spent four hours unscrambling somebody else's spaghetti code because it needed a minor addition. What was all the spaghetti for? Oh, it was for "optimization" and saves five milliseconds of processing time! On a thing that only runs once a quarter. Let's see, that's five milliseconds saved, four times a year...how long does that take to equal the four hours I wasted on it? I'm not great at math but I think it works out to over seven hundred thousand years. I'm pretty sure we aren't going to be running this particular script quite that long.
 
The out sourced DBA's are going to "try something" to fix the problem that they were ignoring and I discovered when researching the problem that they'd sent the glib response to. No answer to our original problem
 
TragicMonkey said:
I just spent four hours unscrambling somebody else's spaghetti code because it needed a minor addition. What was all the spaghetti for? Oh, it was for "optimization" and saves five milliseconds of processing time! On a thing that only runs once a quarter. Let's see, that's five milliseconds saved, four times a year...how long does that take to equal the four hours I wasted on it? I'm not great at math but I think it works out to over seven hundred thousand years. I'm pretty sure we aren't going to be running this particular script quite that long.
Click to expand...
You can be assured that the non-optimized code would have caused the run-time to exceed 90 days.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I just spent four hours unscrambling somebody else's spaghetti code because it needed a minor addition. What was all the spaghetti for? Oh, it was for "optimization" and saves five milliseconds of processing time! On a thing that only runs once a quarter. Let's see, that's five milliseconds saved, four times a year...how long does that take to equal the four hours I wasted on it? I'm not great at math but I think it works out to over seven hundred thousand years. I'm pretty sure we aren't going to be running this particular script quite that long.
Click to expand...

I had to modify some code on a large project I'd worked on, to update the data it stored and accessed. The bright spark responsible, who was one of those always giving the impression that he was a guru level UNIX programmer, had written some complicated code that meant that the data was in blocks of index information followed by blocks of data. I forget the exact values now, but something like 1k of indexes followed by 3k of the data that index referred to. The idea was that it would save time by reading the 1k of indexes, and skipping to the next index block if the data wanted wasn't there. What he overlooked, surprisingly for a claimed guru, was that the block size for a read was 4k, so all the data was being read anyway, and his code was probably slower than a simple sequential search because he'd added an unnecessary index.
 
zooterkin said:
I had to modify some code on a large project I'd worked on, to update the data it stored and accessed. The bright spark responsible, who was one of those always giving the impression that he was a guru level UNIX programmer, had written some complicated code that meant that the data was in blocks of index information followed by blocks of data. I forget the exact values now, but something like 1k of indexes followed by 3k of the data that index referred to. The idea was that it would save time by reading the 1k of indexes, and skipping to the next index block if the data wanted wasn't there. What he overlooked, surprisingly for a claimed guru, was that the block size for a read was 4k, so all the data was being read anyway, and his code was probably slower than a simple sequential search because he'd added an unnecessary index.
Click to expand...

And this why, as a programmer, you should always understand the organization of the hardware you are programming for. Knowledge of memory segment sizes and boundaries, and the number of general purpose registers (and how they ate assigned) are important things to know for efficient execution. I have seen some horrible inefficiencies due to lack of such understanding.
 
Listen as much I complain about my userbase and how much they honestly do cause me grief, 99% of the time they are just annoyingly and amazingly unreasonably clueless. These are not minor sins in my worldview but there's not a lot of actual intentional maliciousness directed at me or the IT department.

But I have one guy for whom there is no euphemism to be used. He's an *******. He ********, using ******* as a verb. You could conjugate all the verb tenses of ******* with him. He's ******* as a verb, noun, and adjective. He's an ******* like "*******" is his job description and his pay rate is tied to how much of an ******* he is. He ******** like he's afraid if he ever stops being an ******* for even one moment he'll forget how to do it and he'll never be able to be an ******* again. He's an ******* like he thinks if he doesn't put in a certain number of ******* hours in a week he's gonna lose his ******* certification with the State Board of ********. He could join the crew of Spaceball One without getting any new qualifications.

He's someone who is on the absolute far end of the bellcurve on the "How much I benefit from living in a society where I can say whatever I want and not get popped in the mouth" scale.

He's high level, basically a de-facto Department Head in charge of a medical system that we do not own, in fact we are forbidden by contract from pretty much touching it. Outside of absolute base level "We provide connectivity" we not only have nothing to do with it but can't do anything with it. Maintaining this system is his job. His only job. And he's paid a lot more than... probably the entire IT team. By any sane measure we should barely interact on a level by nodding at each other in the hallway every once and while.

But he constantly tries to get us to basically do his job for him and/or do shady, backdoor crap for him to make his job easier. Now the trade off to these medical workstations not being our problem is they don't go on domain, they don't touch our stuff, again we just provide a pipeline for them to get out to the internet and that's it. If goddamn bandwidth wasn't such a huge requirement for them they could run off a cellphone hotspot. They need to connect to the internet and that's it from our perspective.

But he constantly calls us when a workstation goes down. Or software or updates need to be installed on them. Multiple times we've caught Lord Douchebag bullying our of our junior techs into trying to get his workstations on the domain so he can check his email or whatever without using OWA or... like moving 2 feet to the actual domained workstation right to it.

He called my boss about 3 months backs demanding that like a random group of techs in India we had never heard of be given full access to our network and it had to happen now and he was going to get us all fired...

We had to get the Client's CEO and our CEO on a conference call because was mad that we wouldn't install shelving.

He has resting "Punch me" face, he won't put anything he requests in writing (because most of it is somewhere between "not our job" and "illegal") so he just corners you when he sees you, yells out a lists of demands, and then complains behind your back that they aren't already done yet.

He went to visit family overseas and got stuck there having to work remotely for like... 6 months during COVID and it the best 6 months of this job.

Like the countless cases of "Oh lordy me I'm a widdle ole' lady who can't use a computer" that I rant about... I mean yeah those are annoying but it's the kind of annoying you get while you are having to deal with it and then it's gone.

This guy... is stressful. Like it's on a different level. Like when I have to interact with this guy I don't forget about it the second I leave for the day, know what I mean?
 
Last edited:
zooterkin said:
I had to modify some code on a large project I'd worked on, to update the data it stored and accessed. The bright spark responsible, who was one of those always giving the impression that he was a guru level UNIX programmer, had written some complicated code that meant that the data was in blocks of index information followed by blocks of data. I forget the exact values now, but something like 1k of indexes followed by 3k of the data that index referred to. The idea was that it would save time by reading the 1k of indexes, and skipping to the next index block if the data wanted wasn't there. What he overlooked, surprisingly for a claimed guru, was that the block size for a read was 4k, so all the data was being read anyway, and his code was probably slower than a simple sequential search because he'd added an unnecessary index.
Click to expand...

Is it possible he initially wrote the code for devices where the block size was 512 bytes? Lots of early PCs were like that, and some Unix utilities still make that assumption.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Listen as much I complain about my userbase and how much they honestly do cause me grief, 99% of the time they are just annoyingly and amazingly unreasonably clueless. These are not minor sins in my worldview but there's not a lot of actual intentional maliciousness directed at me or the IT department.

But I have one guy for whom there is no euphemism to be used. He's an *******. He ********, using ******* as a verb. You could conjugate all the verb tenses of ******* with him. He's ******* as a verb, noun, and adjective. He's an ******* like "*******" is his job description and his pay rate is tied to how much of an ******* he is. He ******** like he's afraid if he ever stops being an ******* for even one moment he'll forget how to do it and he'll never be able to be an ******* again. He's an ******* like he thinks if he doesn't put in a certain number of ******* hours in a week he's gonna lose his ******* certification with the State Board of ********. He could join the crew of Spaceball One without getting any new qualifications.

He's someone who is on the absolute far end of the bellcurve on the "How much I benefit from living in a society where I can say whatever I want and not get popped in the mouth" scale.

He's high level, basically a de-facto Department Head in charge of a medical system that we do not own, in fact we are forbidden by contract from pretty much touching it. Outside of absolute base level "We provide connectivity" we not only have nothing to do with it but can't do anything with it. Maintaining this system is his job. His only job. And he's paid a lot more than... probably the entire IT team. By any sane measure we should barely interact on a level by nodding at each other in the hallway every once and while.

But he constantly tries to get us to basically do his job for him and/or do shady, backdoor crap for him to make his job easier. Now the trade off to these medical workstations not being our problem is they don't go on domain, they don't touch our stuff, again we just provide a pipeline for them to get out to the internet and that's it. If goddamn bandwidth wasn't such a huge requirement for them they could run off a cellphone hotspot. They need to connect to the internet and that's it from our perspective.

But he constantly calls us when a workstation goes down. Or software or updates need to be installed on them. Multiple times we've caught Lord Douchebag bullying our of our junior techs into trying to get his workstations on the domain so he can check his email or whatever without using OWA or... like moving 2 feet to the actual domained workstation right to it.

He called my boss about 3 months backs demanding that like a random group of techs in India we had never heard of be given full access to our network and it had to happen now and he was going to get us all fired...

We had to get the Client's CEO and our CEO on a conference call because was mad that we wouldn't install shelving.

He has resting "Punch me" face, he won't put anything he requests in writing (because most of it is somewhere between "not our job" and "illegal") so he just corners you when he sees you, yells out a lists of demands, and then complains behind your back that they aren't already done yet.

He went to visit family overseas and got stuck there having to work remotely for like... 6 months during COVID and it the best 6 months of this job.

Like the countless cases of "Oh lordy me I'm a widdle ole' lady who can't use a computer" that I rant about... I mean yeah those are annoying but it's the kind of annoying you get while you are having to deal with it and then it's gone.

This guy... is stressful. Like it's on a different level. Like when I have to interact with this guy I don't forget about it the second I leave for the day, know what I mean?
Click to expand...

Do you not get the one free murder per year benefit at your work? I always say I'm going to save mine but I've yet to make it through January.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Listen as much I complain about my userbase and how much they honestly do cause me grief, 99% of the time they are just annoyingly and amazingly unreasonably clueless. These are not minor sins in my worldview but there's not a lot of actual intentional maliciousness directed at me or the IT department.

But I have one guy for whom there is no euphemism to be used. He's an *******. He ********, using ******* as a verb. You could conjugate all the verb tenses of ******* with him. He's ******* as a verb, noun, and adjective. He's an ******* like "*******" is his job description and his pay rate is tied to how much of an ******* he is. He ******** like he's afraid if he ever stops being an ******* for even one moment he'll forget how to do it and he'll never be able to be an ******* again. He's an ******* like he thinks if he doesn't put in a certain number of ******* hours in a week he's gonna lose his ******* certification with the State Board of ********. He could join the crew of Spaceball One without getting any new qualifications.

He's someone who is on the absolute far end of the bellcurve on the "How much I benefit from living in a society where I can say whatever I want and not get popped in the mouth" scale.

He's high level, basically a de-facto Department Head in charge of a medical system that we do not own, in fact we are forbidden by contract from pretty much touching it. Outside of absolute base level "We provide connectivity" we not only have nothing to do with it but can't do anything with it. Maintaining this system is his job. His only job. And he's paid a lot more than... probably the entire IT team. By any sane measure we should barely interact on a level by nodding at each other in the hallway every once and while.

But he constantly tries to get us to basically do his job for him and/or do shady, backdoor crap for him to make his job easier. Now the trade off to these medical workstations not being our problem is they don't go on domain, they don't touch our stuff, again we just provide a pipeline for them to get out to the internet and that's it. If goddamn bandwidth wasn't such a huge requirement for them they could run off a cellphone hotspot. They need to connect to the internet and that's it from our perspective.

But he constantly calls us when a workstation goes down. Or software or updates need to be installed on them. Multiple times we've caught Lord Douchebag bullying our of our junior techs into trying to get his workstations on the domain so he can check his email or whatever without using OWA or... like moving 2 feet to the actual domained workstation right to it.

He called my boss about 3 months backs demanding that like a random group of techs in India we had never heard of be given full access to our network and it had to happen now and he was going to get us all fired...

We had to get the Client's CEO and our CEO on a conference call because was mad that we wouldn't install shelving.

He has resting "Punch me" face, he won't put anything he requests in writing (because most of it is somewhere between "not our job" and "illegal") so he just corners you when he sees you, yells out a lists of demands, and then complains behind your back that they aren't already done yet.

He went to visit family overseas and got stuck there having to work remotely for like... 6 months during COVID and it the best 6 months of this job.

Like the countless cases of "Oh lordy me I'm a widdle ole' lady who can't use a computer" that I rant about... I mean yeah those are annoying but it's the kind of annoying you get while you are having to deal with it and then it's gone.

This guy... is stressful. Like it's on a different level. Like when I have to interact with this guy I don't forget about it the second I leave for the day, know what I mean?
Click to expand...
Okay, but tell us how you really feel about this guy.
 
Filippo Lippi said:
The out sourced DBA's are going to "try something" to fix the problem that they were ignoring and I discovered when researching the problem that they'd sent the glib response to. No answer to our original problem
Click to expand...
I hate it when you have to do their job for them. Then the boss is wondering why you take so long to get things done.
 
catsmate said:
This is why toxicology is a useful secondary field of study.
Click to expand...

Did you know that a single can of Pepsi is toxic? Even if it's only lodged a mere ten or eleven inches down the throat it can be fatal! Of course it was an accident, they must have been in a real rush to quench their thirst and forgot to take the drink out of the can first. There should be a manufacturer's warning label.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Did you know that a single can of Pepsi is toxic? Even if it's only lodged a mere ten or eleven inches down the throat it can be fatal! Of course it was an accident, they must have been in a real rush to quench their thirst and forgot to take the drink out of the can first. There should be a manufacturer's warning label.
Click to expand...

Sigh, anything for a profit. I wonder if they even tested the impact of their cans being lodged down someone's throat? An accident waiting to happen.
 
It's worse than that. The can doesn't even have to be ingested to cause potentially soft tissue damage, or depending on impact velocity, even fatal injuries to the skull or inner organs.
 
What a crazy day it has been. We are now migrated fully to the Single Protected Desktop, which means that our regular network environment is rated to handle information up to security clearance Protected (one level below Secret). Our old Protected environment, that we had to RAS into using Citrix Workspace, is more or less gone. So that's nice. But boy, did we get a lot of calls this morning.
 
I continue to be astounded at the number of people who apparently still don't know how email subject lines work. The number of times we receive an email with the entire problem typed out in the subject field... or rather most of the problem in the subject field, since it is size-limited and gets truncated...
 
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