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

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CORed said:
Whereas, in Vietnam, everybody's family name is Nguyen.

I don't thinks that is actually true, but Nguyen seems to have a higher frequency than Smith, Jones and Johnson combined in the US.
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You don't know the half of it.

Nguyen makes up 39% of family names in Vietnam. Nguyen, Tran, and Le (the top 3) make up 60%.

In America the names Smith, Johnson, and Williams (our top 3) make up... less than 2%.
 
I've had offshore backups from India for 13 years now. There have been at least 6 of them. Every single one was either Chandra or Prashanth.
 
Wudang said:
And when parsing a list of free text strings that may contain Spanish people with 2 surnames. Some systems handle Chinese people putting family name first other don't.
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Depending on the country and the socioeconomic level of the people involved, the first surname may be the one that people use, or the second one may be, or both (hyphenated, or non-hyphenated) may be.


In my academic field, the custom has developed of putting the preferred citation name in CAPITAL letters. Thus:



ANDERSON, Jon Paul; NGUYEN Naminianta Tran; and ðORENSON, Petr J.
 
"Hi, I want to follow up something, someone left me a message about replacing my computer?"

"Do you have a job number?"

"No."

"Was it in regard to something you logged with us?"

"I don't know, I just got an email saying that this person was trying to contact me."

"Can you reply to the email?"

"No, the email wasn't from him, it was from a colleague."

* "Can you give me any kind of information at all?"

"No, I'm requiring you to be telepathic and give me the direct contact details for one particular person in a branch of two hundred people. I don't know why he called, but it was for a project that was nothing to do with the Service Desk."

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

*this is where my account starts to differ from the reality.
 
jimbob said:
Oh, yes, he said that there are basically about ten family names (I suppose that's better than surname, but I couldn't think of the appropriate word earlier).
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When I was in the Army in Korea nearly 50 years ago, we had two local girls in the office as keypunch operators. Miss Kim and Miss Kim. When Miss Kim left, we got a replacement, who was Miss Kim. None were related.
Miss Kim #2 had a terrific crush on me, which I tried not to encourage.

Koreans, who like other East Asians put the family name first, got very confused by the American practice of putting it last, except when we didn't. Sometimes John J Smith and sometimes Smith, John J.

Darat said:
And when you ask how old a Korean is do you get the Korean age or the other age? :)
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That's a real question, I think. They started with age 1 at birth.
 
Trebuchet said:
When I was in the Army in Korea nearly 50 years ago, we had two local girls in the office as keypunch operators. Miss Kim and Miss Kim. When Miss Kim left, we got a replacement, who was Miss Kim. None were related.
Miss Kim #2 had a terrific crush on me, which I tried not to encourage.

Koreans, who like other East Asians put the family name first, got very confused by the American practice of putting it last, except when we didn't. Sometimes John J Smith and sometimes Smith, John J.


That's a real question, I think. They started with age 1 at birth.
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And age 2 at the next New Year, IIUC.
 
Everyone thinks its the robots that will eventually take over and destroy us.

It's not.

It's the auditors.

Soon every last thing we do will have to be documented, approved, defined and delivered as part of an ever-widening CONTROL.


Um, I had to go to the bathroom.
Who approved you going to the bathroom?
Nobody, I just went, because I really nee-
Is there a defined and documented process for going to the bathroom?
No, I pretty much know how to do that.
Do any critical functions rely on you going to the bathroom?
Well, yes, If I don't do that I'll be pretty miserable?
Do you have a formalized process for being miserable?
Yes, it mostly involves auditors.
How do you ensure you have protected and safeguarded assets when going to the bathroom?
I lock the door
Please provide the approved Service Now change request that you submitted for locking the door. Include supporting evidence.
 
Faydra said:
[snip]

It's the auditors.

[snip]
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That actually seems quite plausible. I can see a scenario where you are allocated bathroom time and a limited number of visits per day at specified times. So many minutes to shower, so many for each function. Washing clothes or dishes at allocated timed for a certain time. Pretty much everything is allocated.

Oh you want to bake that? You have 12 baking minutes left for this period. Want to boil an egg you have 20 minutes of boiling time left for this period.

Doesn't sound like much fun but it does sound like like most of the MBAs I've had to deal with industry.
 
Faydra said:
Everyone thinks its the robots that will eventually take over and destroy us.

It's not.

It's the auditors.

Soon every last thing we do will have to be documented, approved, defined and delivered as part of an ever-widening CONTROL.


Um, I had to go to the bathroom.
Who approved you going to the bathroom?
Nobody, I just went, because I really nee-
Is there a defined and documented process for going to the bathroom?
No, I pretty much know how to do that.
Do any critical functions rely on you going to the bathroom?
Well, yes, If I don't do that I'll be pretty miserable?
Do you have a formalized process for being miserable?
Yes, it mostly involves auditors.
How do you ensure you have protected and safeguarded assets when going to the bathroom?
I lock the door
Please provide the approved Service Now change request that you submitted for locking the door. Include supporting evidence.
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I DO hope you didn't bring them a sample of output they could paste in the auditor's record...
 
"Hello can you tell me how to perform this specific operation in this software that you don't use, don't have access to, and have never even heard of before?"

"No."

I was able to provide some guidance to who he might be able to talk to in order to get these operational instructions, but it was really a shot in the dark.
 
arthwollipot said:
"Hello can you tell me how to perform this specific operation in this software that you don't use, don't have access to, and have never even heard of before?"

"No."

I was able to provide some guidance to who he might be able to talk to in order to get these operational instructions, but it was really a shot in the dark.
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CTL-ALT-DEL?? ;)
 
Faydra said:
Everyone thinks its the robots that will eventually take over and destroy us.

It's not.

It's the auditors.

Soon every last thing we do will have to be documented, approved, defined and delivered as part of an ever-widening CONTROL.


Um, I had to go to the bathroom.
Who approved you going to the bathroom?
Nobody, I just went, because I really nee-
Is there a defined and documented process for going to the bathroom?
No, I pretty much know how to do that.
Do any critical functions rely on you going to the bathroom?
Well, yes, If I don't do that I'll be pretty miserable?
Do you have a formalized process for being miserable?
Yes, it mostly involves auditors.
How do you ensure you have protected and safeguarded assets when going to the bathroom?
I lock the door
Please provide the approved Service Now change request that you submitted for locking the door. Include supporting evidence.
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That's not auditors, that's regulators.

We'll make a small government conservative of you yet.
 
theprestige said:
I wasn't replying to arth.

Besides, what do you imagine auditors are auditing, except regulatory compliance?

Take away the regulation, and the audit is unnecessary.
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Right, and then governments and corporations can get away with whatever they want.

Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
 
theprestige said:
I wasn't replying to arth.

Besides, what do you imagine auditors are auditing, except regulatory compliance?

Take away the regulation, and the audit is unnecessary.
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Auditors have been around since the beginning of business in some form or another. The ancient Romans had them. The Forum hawkers BC used to spit at them, I expect. So it's hardly a new, neo-liberal, commie idea. Please... :rolleyes:

Btw, Jesus tossing the merchants out of the temple of Jerusalem is yet another example of "regulatory compliance enforcement". Perhaps the dress-wearing bearded Middle-Eastern peace-nik is a better example than we thought. ;)
 
Here's something that irritates me a little bit. We have a standard process for requesting password resets. If you need your password reset, we need to verify that you are not someone who is just pretending to be you in order to get access to our network illegally. So we get you to have a colleague submit an online Identity Verification (IDV) form saying "this is a real person - I know them or I've checked their security pass". This form then displays a 4-digit number on screen, while simultaneously emailing it to us. They can then give us the number over the phone and we verify it against the number that was emailed to us. Simple, right? We've had the same process for years, it's publicly documented, and it is used by pretty much everybody who doesn't use the self-service password reset system that we provide, which is pretty much everybody.

But still. Someone will ring us and the call will go like this:

Them: Oh hi, can you reset my password for me?

Me: Certainly. Have you had a colleague submit an Identity Verification form?

Them: Sure, hang on. Hey Susan. Can you do an identity thing for me? An identity thing.

Me: Identity Verification form.

Them: Identity verification form. Can you do one of those for me? Hang on, she's just doing one now. No, the identity verification. For a password reset. No, the... Yes. That one. I think. Yes, LAN password. No, LAN password. Thanks. What? Who's my supervisor? Jane. Yes. It's not working? Oh, it's working? It's not working. Hang on.

*five minutes of dead air*

Them, suddenly: Five one three two.

Me: Okay, I'm going to need you to repeat that in a moment once I receive the form.

It's not that they don't know the procedure that irritates me. Everyone doesn't know something. It's that they make me wait, on dead air, for so long while they sort their stuff out. That's time that I could be using to take other calls.
 
arthwollipot said:
Right, and then governments and corporations can get away with whatever they want.



Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
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Slow down. I'm not saying we should get rid of regulators. I'm saying that it's not fair to blame the auditors for making your life miserable, when it's actually the regulators who make the auditor's job necessary.

Also, if you believe the regulations and the regulators have value, then it seems to me that you should also welcome the auditing process, with all its strict demands. By ensuring regulatory compliance, the auditors are helping you make the world a better place.

Also, it's possible to over-regulate. Even if you believe in far reaching government regulation, you may still believe a specific regulation goes too far, or is counter productive. In such a scenario, your hurr durr late stage capitalism arguement is worse than useless. Not that it matters here, since nobody's really arguing those points anyway. I made a lighthearted remark, appended to a comment about the distinction between auditors and regulators. Somehow you took this as a call to deploy weaponized sarcasm. It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to stay this way. Shall we both back down?
 
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