Tech support WTF
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I returned from vacation today and my network connection was a bit strange, failing at random times. The connection suddenly died and, after checking the usual problems, I called tech support to see if it was a hardware failure. The first WTF was tech support asking me to turn VNC on so they could remotely restore my connection. An hour later the tech called in to see if everything was alright, so far the connection magically ressurrected but while it was going up and down I did a few harmless tests (e.g. ping, tracert) and got a some startling results: in thirty seconds tracert gave me everything from a "hardware failure" message to a perfect connection to our intranet server. While talking to him on the phone he connected via VNC and I showed him the console with my test results. He used the console to do his own tests, also harmless things like, pinging other servers, net use, etc.) until he typed "ipconfig /release". Then he pressed return. Then there was silence on the phone for a couple of minutes, before he said "something happened with my connection and I'll have to go to your place, ok?". The tale ended happily with my computer getting a new network card and the tech not looking up to my eyers again.
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I love it when you do things like that and then immediately realize what you've done.
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Oops!
Don't we all love those "oh crap" moments.
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@RayS said:
Oops!
Don't we all love those "oh crap" moments.
<FONT face=tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif>Not exactly my experience but I was there...
(Member 1 on a remote desktop connection)</FONT><FONT face=tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif>
Member 2: "Hey, you know how to get onshore immediately? Shutdown the server... Presto! You'll be flying off to the server half-way across the world just to press the power button then come back right after..."
(Everyone laughs on the obvious joke)
(Member 1 silent and pale)
Member 1: Uh oh...
(Silence)
Fortunately, the joke was just a joke and we just called the infrastructure support guy to drive to the datacenter and press the button for him...
</FONT>
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@RayS said:
Oops!
Don't we all love those "oh crap" moments.
Those are called "oh-no-seconds". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohnosecond
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@svennieboy said:
Ah yes I remember the ohnosecond.Those are called "oh-no-seconds". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohnosecond
Seeing the one there about 'as you click "send" you remember that you didn't add the attachment to the email', reminds me of probably the most productive, quality-increasing, life-saving bit of code I ever wrote in a morning that stops a large number of these. An outlook plugin that parses your message text looking for signs that a file should be attached that runs before you send an email, and warns you. Overnight I went from forgetting attachments probably 20% of the time to exactly 0% of the time, awith very few false positives.
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@RayS said:
An outlook plugin that parses your message text looking for signs that a file should be attached that runs before you send an email, and warns you. Overnight I went from forgetting attachments probably 20% of the time to exactly 0% of the time, awith very few false positives.
Any chance I could get this plugin? :3
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@Kerin said:
@RayS said:
An outlook plugin that parses your message text looking for signs that a file should be attached that runs before you send an email, and warns you. Overnight I went from forgetting attachments probably 20% of the time to exactly 0% of the time, with very few false positives.
Any chance I could get this plugin? :3
Well, I've not got it to hand since I don't use Outlook for mail at home, but since the idea of it is so simple, a minute or two in outlook vba produced this. Customise it to your own personal way of phrasing and terminology (and put in the ThisOutlookSession section), it should get you 90% of the way there.
Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)
Dim outMail As MailItem
Set outMail = Item
Dim MessageText As String
MessageText = Left(outMail.Body, InStr(1, outMail.Body, "--")) 'Where -- is a tag in your signature.
Dim ToCancel As Boolean
ToCancel = False
'Your parsing stuff here, e.g.:
If InStr(1, MessageText, "this document", vbTextCompare) Then ToCancel = True
If InStr(1, MessageText, "see attached", vbTextCompare) Then ToCancel = True
If InStr(1, MessageText, "attached file", vbTextCompare) Then ToCancel = True
' etc....
Cancel = (MsgBox("Do you want to cancel sending and attach that file you mentioned?", vbQuestion + vbYesNo + vbDefaultButton1, "Dimwit, you forgotted somefink") = vbYes)
End Sub
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An Oh-no-second
The IBM 370 had two big buttons (amongst many other switches and buttons): Interrupt and IPL. Interrupt was what you pressed to activate the console typewriter so you could type in a command. IPL was "Initial Program Load", i.e. reboot. Nothing happened when you pressed the buttons. It was only when you released the buttons that they did their thing.
Dick the Operator was working alone one night, needed to type in a command, reached over, pressed the button, thought to himself "something's funny ...".
Looked over: he was holding down IPL. If he released it, the machine would reboot, losing all work in progress.
He brought all the running jobs to a salvageable state one-handed. Fortunately he didn't have to leave the console to mount a tape or fix a paper jam.
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And if you're using Thunderbird:
Attachment Remember for 1.5.x. You need to configure it before you use it and type in the phrases you want it to look for. By default it's blank.
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@RayS said:
Cancel = (MsgBox("Do you want to cancel sending and attach that file you mentioned?", vbQuestion + vbYesNo + vbDefaultButton1, "Dimwit, you forgotted somefink") = vbYes)
End SubReplace "Cancel =" with "If ToCancel then Cancel ="
Hey, you get what you pay for.I don't use Firebird, but little surprise that it has a "forget your attachments?" plugin. It's something that the webmail (windows live, yahoo, gmail) guys could really do with. I guess you can bodge something up with greasemonkey, but that just seems too messy.
