IT Departments :: Behind the beards

[Brains]

You reminded me of one from a decade back. One of our road warriors brings her laptop in, with the complaint that it won't turn on. She mentioned that it "might" be that it got wet, because it was raining that day and she forgot her umbrella. She, however, was dry as a bone. So I take the laptop, and start to work disassembling it. "Hey Jennifer, was it raining coffee with creamer this morning?" After a thorough flush with electronic parts cleaner and a replacement keyboard (cheaper to just replace it than my spend my time cleaning it out) it worked great...

.... until she brings it in a couple months later with a cracked LCD. "This big guy put his bad on top of mine in the overhead on the plane, that probably did it." Oh really Jennifer? Did it cause this big impact crack on the front of the housing too?

Lesson 1: Don't lie to your IT guy, we can see straight through your bullshit.
Lesson 2: When you retire your corporate-owned laptop, clean your sexting pics off it - and for the love of God, don't put them ON YOUR DESKTOP. Companies have to do an asset capture (copy files off mobile device).

 

[benenglish]

I once headed up a team of support folks who were tasked with supporting a group of newly hired employees. The hotel for the training would be continuously occupied by about 5000 new employees, rotating in and out in groups, over the course of 6 months. We never had less than 1000 on site at one time so there were always at least 40 classes going at once.

Every second of downtime was incredibly expensive. We didn't have time for tickets or formal documentation. We just had to have experienced people get to the problem right now and fix it right now. I set up a rotation of on-floor folks who could be dispatched via radio to the problem closest to them.

The entire training system was set up so that it flowed as smoothly as possible. The instructors were all high-level experts in their field, competent Officers and Agents with extensive field experience who knew the law, knew the procedures, and knew how to get work done.

After each job, support personnel returned to our work room and put a mark on a big board indicating the basic classification of the problem. We were, after all, required to keep a few records.

At the end of 6 months I prepared the final report.

All those experienced, senior field personnel had made multiple thousands of reports of computer problems in the course of their instruction. The reports were duly categorized by type of problem.

Just short of 50% of all the problems reported by those highly-competent instructors were resolved under the category of:

• "Equipment not plugged in/not powered on."

Talk about a punch in the stomach. I had taken the job because of all the weird problems I'd get to solve at record speed while looking like a hero. As it turned out, half our work was showing (often repeatedly to the same instructors) how to plug in and turn on various pieces of equipment.

 

[benenglish]

clean your sexting pics off

Porn and sexually-related media on computers is a whole 'nother subject.

I will say one thing about it, though. I was occasionally assigned to show our Inspector General staff the offending material so that they could determine what level of investigation and potential punishment was required. In that way, I got to know every single Inspector (later Special Agent) on staff.

Why?

Because whenever I did a formal presentation of sexually explicit material, the entire Inspector General staff always showed up to the briefing!

Buncha perverts, if you ask me.

 

[karlac]

One embarrassing moment when the "boss" decided to help out with the onsite "tech support" for a network client.

Hell, why not, he built the damned boxes and setup the network?

Still, a client's employee was in tears because her monitor "just didn't look right", and nothing I tweaked for thirty minutes made her happy.

In desperation, I went ahead and changed out the monitor cable, and Bingo she was pleased as punch .. although it looked no different to me??

Moral: when you're colorblind, and the "R" wire in the RGB cable is broken, you're worthless as a warm bucket of spit for tech support.

Even worse, I did the same thing with my own audio workstation a few years later in the studio ... had been using a bad cable for months and never noticed it until someone pointed it out, or after it was fixed.

 

[benenglish]

Moral: when you're colorblind, and the "R" wire in the RGB cable is broken, you're worthless as a warm bucket of spit for tech support.

There used to be a trade school that advertised heavily on TV. I don't remember the name but they promised to make you a tech support god in short order.

If you called them, the first question they asked after getting your name and number was "Are you colorblind?"

 

[karlac]

There used to be a trade school that advertised heavily on TV. I don't remember the name but they promised to make you a tech support god in short order.

If you called them, the first question they asked after getting your name and number was "Are you colorblind?"

Yep, I sympathize with that requirement.

Then again, guess who was in charge of soldering 72 pair of color coded conductors back together in a 2 mile long, offshore seismograph cable after it had been run over by shrimp boats?

Tech support at it's finest ...

 

[Brains]

Traffic lights must be fun for R/G colorblind folks, at least until you learn the light positions.

 

[karlac]

Traffic lights must be fun for R/G colorblind folks, at least until you learn the light positions.

Just slow down, let someone pass you, and do what they do.
And hope like hell they're not colorblind also ...

 

[popper]

Got no use for IT. Been working with computers since Intel 2002. Heard recently that the work 'geek' was originated as the person who bit off chicken heads. Spent 4 hrs in an Apple store, nice people who work with a 'locked' OS but can't really do much. All software is pretty much unsafe and bloated, IT tries to figure work-arounds.

 

[karlac]

Got no use for IT. Been working with computers since Intel 2002. Heard recently that the work 'geek' was originated as the person who bit off chicken heads. Spent 4 hrs in an Apple store, nice people who work with a 'locked' OS but can't really do much. All software is pretty much unsafe and bloated, IT tries to figure work-arounds.

Back in the day we called that "Babbage's Disease".

The constant adding of "features" to software (or hardware for that matter, for which Charles Babbage was famously guilty), just because you could.

 

[benenglish]

There's a reason some of us loved the Unix mindset. In my younger days, I knew every program should do one thing and it was up to me to chain them together if I wanted more than one thing done. I truly believed vi was the best word processor and calendar program in the world. Enable was OK for the ignorant masses who wanted something that looked nice.

My views evolved but not so much that I'm not occasionally nostalgic.

 

[SQLGeek]

Heard recently that the work 'geek' was originated as the person who bit off chicken heads.

Why's everyone looking at me?

 

[Brains]

There's a reason some of us loved the Unix mindset. In my younger days, I knew every program should do one thing and it was up to me to chain them together if I wanted more than one thing done. I truly believed vi was the best word processor and calendar program in the world. Enable was OK for the ignorant masses who wanted something that looked nice.

My views evolved but not so much that I'm not occasionally nostalgic.

One of the reasons I love my Mac - I get a nice, well supported OS with a true POSIX experience under the hood.

... and vim is the best text editor

 

[benenglish]

... and vim is the best text editor

As long as we can put aside our differences long enough to join forces against those emacs wackos, we'll get along fine.

ETA: For the normal folks out there who don't get it - the vi (and its variations) vs. emacs argument is to the Unix world as the 9mm vs. .45 argument is to the shooting world.

 

[karlac]

As long as we can put aside our differences long enough to join forces against those emacs wackos, we'll get along fine.

ETA: For the normal folks out there who don't get it - the vi (and its variations) vs. emacs argument is to the Unix world as the 9mm vs. .45 argument is to the shooting world.

Or, OS/2 to Windows ...
The OS/2 wars on both UseNet and FidoNet were epic.

 

[SQLGeek]

ETA: For the normal folks out there who don't get it - the vi (and its variations) vs. emacs argument is to the Unix world as the 9mm vs. .45 argument is to the shooting world.

Learned all about this in Comp Sci 101. It was/is quite the holy war.

I used vi(m) quite a bit in my last job and actually got fairly proficient with it. I still like Notepad++ more.

One of the reasons I love my Mac - I get a nice, well supported OS with a true POSIX experience under the hood.

Absolutely. One of the things I like about my Macbook is that my non-techie wife can use it with ease but I can crack open the hood and mess around with all of the POSIX goodness underneath.

 

[benenglish]

Or, OS/2 to Windows ...

I was on the losing side of that one.

The OS/2 wars on both UseNet and FidoNet were epic.

I observed from the sidelines. That was too much of a mess for me to jump in.

Hail Kibo!

 

[benenglish]

I used vi(m) quite a bit in my last job and actually got fairly proficient with it.

I always got a kick out of the fact that the O'Reilly owl book, Learning the Unix Operating System, was 176 pages while the tarsier book, Learning the vi Editor, was 352 pages.

I actually worked off the SCO library. I took the whole thing home when my employer was about to throw it out. It's thousands of pages for which I have basically no use but, hey, the nostalgia is strong with that one.

I still like Notepad++ more.

BURN THE WITCH!!!!

 

[SQLGeek]

Speaking of O'Reilly. You will probably appreciate this unless you've already seen it.

BURN THE WITCH!!!!

I yam what I yam. I cut my teeth on DOS with my dad's 386 computer.

 

[benenglish]

I can crack open the hood and mess around with all of the POSIX goodness underneath.

I used to like getting under the hood, too. By way of explanation -

After an ill-advised migration from SCO OSR to Windows on our desktops and laptops, my organization used Cygwin for a while. Then Microsoft acquired Interix and renamed it Windows Services for Unix. Both were good products and I spent a great deal of time working in them. Properly implemented, they could actually make Windows bearable.

Naturally, Microsoft couldn't have software running around out there that made Windows reliable. That would just point out what a pile of crap it was in those days. They eventually killed off Interix by dropping SFU. I suppose I should be happy that MS allowed Interix/SFU a few years to strut its stuff.

And those bastards who bought SCO! I know they didn't have anything, legally, to do with the death of Tarantella but, mercy me, to see such wonderful software die mourned by so few, killed by an illusory association with the bad guys, brings a tear to my eye.

As long as I'm being nostalgic, I find myself missing the EnableOA suite and GeoWorks Ensemble, both of which were miles better than what Microsoft offered at the time. But MS had the money and the momentum and steamrolled over both.

I keep threatening myself with building a machine dedicated to running INX. It would keep my brain working.

But, no, I'll probably keep pointing and clicking until I expire.