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Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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arthwollipot said:
Wasn't the internet purposefully designed to be resistant to such attacks?
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I think the answer to that question is "not really". The Internet as she was designed was a co-operative undertaking. It was built with redundancy but not with the thought that anyone would deliberately attempt to cause its failure.
 
Faydra said:
DR test this past week.

I told people in meetings, don't do x.
I sent emails, don't do x.
I sent a video on how to do y instead to everyone.
X will not work people, please don't do it.


How many people do you think tried to do x?

All of them.

THEN, I see a problem and in the slack channel I say "Hey @user, I see you are trying to do this, it won't work, this is what you need to do to solve it". The very next message in the channel was that user saying "OMG, this isn't working what do I do????".

I love being ignored.
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I had a boss once who did that. She asked for my advice on the best way to do something.

We should be doing X.
Okay, so should we do Y?
No, we should not do Y. We should do X.
Okay, so we're going to do Y.
No, don't do Y. Do X.
We're doing Y.

This is the same boss who reported me for bullying. At the same time, three people, including me, reported her for the same thing. In the end, I wasn't the one who lost their job. One of the best days of my life was when I got the instruction to can her network access.
 
You don't seem to understand how some meetings work, grasshopper. The dominant types are:

1. Denial of responsibility. If we all talked about it for three hours, then the boss isn't to blame. even if wanting to do Y is the dumbest thing since vertical ejector seats for helicopters. These tend to continue until everyone has lost all will to live, much less to object, so it ends up counting as "we agreed to do Y."

2. Substitute for social life. Some may even delude themselves as it serving some team building purpose. Which actually they don't, unless making the team want to commit xuicide together counts as such. Easiest recognized by that unmistakable feeling of, "wait, how did we get from whether to do Y to 'funny' anecdotes from the boss's vacation?" At any rate, discussing Y was just the pretext, so nothing really gets decided there about it.

3. Marking territory. The kind where a new boss (or worse, new controller) comes in, and suddenly you're migrating everything from AutoCAD to MS Paint, because he said so. (Or to save costs.) Now some of these may turn adversarial, some may be all friendly and disguised as asking for everyone's opinion, but the point is that if the boss wants Y, then Y it is, and you better take notice that that's how it works.

And a few other flavours, like throwing a pinch of nepotism in. Like when it's actually a requirement to have a gigabyte of graphics on a web site, and suspiciously the boss already has a company in mind to do them. And suspiciously it's his cousin's company.
 
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arthwollipot said:
* arthwollipot;13000345 sings

Everything is broken!
Everyone is screwed when the servers are down.
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This bug's gonna get stuck on your list this bug's gonna get stuck on your list this bug's gonna get stuck on your list yeeeaaAAAyeeeAAH.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Dear Users,

I need an actual name for a trouble ticket, not a nickname.
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Some good description would be nice too. One ticket I got as part time third level support was literally "X doesn't work." Where X was a function of the system. Literally that was all the description. No user and data to reproduce it, no error message, not even the vaguest hint of how or when it doesn't work.

My answer was, "the last time someone got told something this brief and uninformative, it was from a king of Sparta." :p
 
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Oh I gave up long, long ago on getting any information beyond"My computer doesn't work" or "Can you come help me ASAP?" in trouble tickets. The entire concept that giving me usable information up front will speed up the process is completely lost on my "Oh a poor widdle old woman and I'm not a computer person" userbase.
 
My promotion has been signed. I will be receiving a letter of offer from Recruitment shortly.

giphy.gif
 
JoeMorgue said:
Oh I gave up long, long ago on getting any information beyond"My computer doesn't work" or "Can you come help me ASAP?" in trouble tickets. The entire concept that giving me usable information up front will speed up the process is completely lost on my "Oh a poor widdle old woman and I'm not a computer person" userbase.
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Yes, well, the poor widdle non-computer person who wrote the "X doesn't work" ticket was one of our first level support guys :p
 
I just spent an hour carefully crafting tactful emails to panicking directors who completely misinterpreted technical details. A vendor had sent us an email to confirm the specifications for delivery of a test file, which is to use the exact same method, format, and path as the current production files but name the test file something different. These high up directors, however, have no idea how the current stuff works so the vendor's reiteration of the current process struck them as something new and exotic and difficult (it's just a scheduled task to FTP a file from our side to the vendor's side!) and they've been blowing up my email since last night about it.

I also had to tactfully explain to my boss that no, sending them the data on Excel won't suffice, because it's past the stage of human eyeballs looking at data, it's time for the machines to process it. Having Cindy glance at some text fields and say "that looks good" is not the same thing as having thousands of lines of stored procedures tear through raw data.
 
arthwollipot said:
Haha. I wear a tie at work anyway. Not because I have to, but because I like to remind myself that I'm a professional and I take my job seriously, and really I just like wearing a tie. No-one else wears one. I'm the guy with a tie.
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Does your sickness know no limits?
 
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