I added my own signature on top:
This message was hand-crafted with 100% recycled electrons and environmentally friendly green pixels. Before printing an email, please consider how many trees have been wasted by needless disclaimers.
I added my own signature on top:
This message was hand-crafted with 100% recycled electrons and environmentally friendly green pixels. Before printing an email, please consider how many trees have been wasted by needless disclaimers.
@fatdog said:
Oh my, you guys keep understimating the habilities of human kind to repeatedly and consistently do stupid things. In any case people print emails for more reasons other than ineptitude or stupidity.
It might surprise you to learn that all of us are aware that there are valid reasons for printing an email.You forgot one:
0. To pin to the wall an instance of utter stupidity
@Lingerance said:
@nixar said:In green. I mean in #00FF00Most people call that lime.
You can be pretty certain in their sick, rotten, perverted mine it's very Green™ indeed. Fun fact: they can't be fucked to put compact fluorescent light bulbs to replace broken ones, because "they don't have a budget," even though it would save them money.
The IT dept of my employer (ie the morons responsible for the crappy PCs on our desks) has many quirks.
One of my pettest of peevests is the retarded corporate signature they add to all outgoing emails. It reads:
" Please consider the environment before printing this email"
In green. I mean in #00FF00
First time I saw this, I thought, who's moron enough to print his emails in this days and age? Only someone technologically inept enough to print his own emails would think it a neat idea to remind others not to do it. You know, just like anti-drug anti-gay are called Ted Haggart.
@katana said:
Fair enough, now that we know what he's supposed to know, yes, OK, you win, new guy is a retard.
Still though I thought you could have handled it better.
Handled what? The guy tried to attach 300M to a ticket and couldn't be farked to take a USB key to the next door before I even entered the narrative.
Ok the same guy just managed to physically destroy his 4 day old USB token yesterday, and proceeded to lock up the new one this morning.
Wow.
He's still sporting the same nonchalant smile.
@amischiefr said:
Yeah but you didn't state it that way. You said "a guy from the support team" which could have been anybody. Especially when you say a "new" member of the support team. Could have been a 19 year old intern for all we know.
But, being as he is supposed to be higher up, he's a douchebag for not being able to figure something so simple out.
Well I said he had access to the database logs, and implied it was a production system since it impacted clients, so I thought it was somewhat obvious.
@katana said:
Totally agree. you have to give some people a break, take a deep breath and count to 10...and begin again from the start. Losing the rag with them just because they can't describe what they are trying to do smacks of pure arrogance. That's the RWTF in this case I think.
You know, you'd have a very good point if we were talking about an old lady having trouble with 'em newfangled intarwebs, or a minimum wage call center drone.
But we're talking about a level 2 support technician whose job description includes basic Unix shell and SQL, log analysis and reporting, and supposedly went through an ITIL training session.
Although my immediate cow-orkers are currently both nice and competent, there is no lack of _____ in the building, nice or otherwise. And coincidentally, just today, a new guy from the support team dropped by our office, with a USB key in hand.
- There is a problem with the extranet, the dev team asked me for the logs but it didn't work.
- What didn't work?
- Well the logs.
- Oh there is a problem with the log server?
- No, no, I took the log file on the log server.
- So what is the problem?
- Well you see the dev team wants the database logs.
- Ok that's the answer to the question "what does the dev team want", but what is the answer to the question "what is the problem"?
- Yes I understand but the clients can't use the web site you see.
- Ok what is the problems with the logs.
- Well I created a ticket like you asked me.
- I never asked you anything. What is the problem with the logs.
- Well I tried to send the logs to the dev team but it's 300M so it didn't work.
- How did you try to send the logs?
- Well I created a ticket and it didn't work.
At this point I lost it and my boss had to ask me to calm down (but he was laughing). I've had the experience of such unproductive conversations, but never face to face.
- What didn't work!
- It didn't want the log file
- WHAT didn't want the log file!
- Well you see I have to give the log file to the dev team
Turns out he was trying to attach a 300M compressed log file to a ticket, and, well, shockingly it didn't work. He never said it in so many words, though. I had to ask him, "did you try to attach the god damn file to the ticket?" and he said "yes," nodding.
- And what do you have on that USB key, I asked, realizing I already knew the answer ...
- Oh, it's the log file, I was wondering if you could help me send it to the dev team.
My colleagues were chuckling, trying not to humiliate the poor guy while I was trying not to yell at him as I directed him to the dev team -- located at the end of the corridor, a good 20m away.
All that time he kept remarkably calm and nice. Maybe he just doesn't get the signals that say "you're doin' it wrong."
@AndyCanfield said:
@DaveK said:
Water is a transmission medium too, you know, and sound carries really well in it. Why don't you get a pair of 14k4 acoustic couplers, hook them up to some waterproofed mikes and speakers (bit of power amp needed too), and drop one pair in at each opposite end of the lake?Gosh, we could use Floppy Fish Net. Bolt a CD to to a fish, use a fish net at the other end of the lake. When you pull it out the fish is floppy and the CD falls off. Of course the packets may arrive out of order, but standard TCP/IP can handle that, eh?
Thank you for your suggestion.
This does sound like it's compliant with PETA-DSS.
@AndyCanfield said:
It is a real lake. That's why the phone lines are too long for ADSL - they have to go around the lake. We have a sister company a few km up the road, so I looked into wireless. Unfortunately there's a hill between us, so no line-of-sight is possible. And the radio spectrum is very tightly controlled here in Thailand.
Is wifi regulated heavily, too? It was verbotten in France to do what we did at that time -- might still be, actually.
You can get around the line of sight thing with a passive repeater, or even an active one: lead-sulfur batteries, solar panels, and 2 WRT-54G connected back to back with a tin can antenna each. Or get in touch with someone who's not in the line of sight, and give them internet access in exchange for letting you plant your thing there.
Last, that's expensive but compared to a satellite it might be attractive, if you can get line of sight you can use a laser IR transmission. Doesn't play well with fog though.
@AndyCanfield said:
5) Our ISP is so rotten that even "apt-get update" hangs sometimes. But, like I said, no alternatives. No ADSL because the nearest town is on the other side of the lake.
Assuming you're not speaking figuratively and that you are, indeed, on the other side of an actual lake and not that of an ocean, have you ever considered tin can WiFi?
Get in touch with someone there, get an ADSL line there and use two directionnal antennas hooked to wifi routers. A while back we did that for a distance of about 7km. The link doesn't work anymore nowadays because there's waay too many people with wifi in that zone, so we pick up too much crap, but over a lake, you'd have none of that problem. You can do it from anywhere between $100 (2 el'cheapo routers + Pringle cans and some copper) or $500 (with real antennas).
@Zemm said:
In my country 3GB could be $450! But then only people who don't know any better use Telstra (or who can't get anything else because of Tesltra's crappy phone lines)
That's not even a rip-off; it's simply fucking insane. I knew Telstra sucked but boy. Wow. Wow!
You could buy 6 1TB hard drives and get them delivered to the other side of the world overnight through FedEx for that much money.
Just ... wow.
Here basically most ISP (except Orange, which is at least 50% more expensive but has slightly better reliability) aligned on the €30/month for ADSL2+, which means up to 28Mbps down and 1MBps, unmetered, including free unlimited worldwide phone (except weird locations like Yemen or Afghanistan), basic cable TV channels and a PVR with modem/router/wifi, no setup fee if the copper line is up. You just pay ~90€ to close the line unless you've had it for a couple years.
Where available (slooowly rolling out) you get FTTH (50Mbps up/down) for the same price. My ISP throws in free 10GB hosting, no ads, unlimited traffic (but no pr0n). They also offer dedicated hosting, your own box for €30/month, 100Mbps connectivity, no traffic cap.
And they make money.
Cheap bandwidth is nice.
@morbiuswilters said:
I know you're somewhat new to posting here, but rezzing a 2 week-old thread to post something like this is gay.
Well what I had to say was important enough to excuse this breach of ana...err étiquette. Wasn't it?
@Monkios said:
À cause de la Chartre de la Langue Française, toutes mes réponses doivent se faire en français.
@rfsmit said:
This is really strange. If I've ever had a problem of this sort, I'll complain to my manager. If he can't help, I go to his manager, and so on. I've never had to download stuff from home because it was too hard to do it at work. It would be different if work paid for my home connection, but then if they could afford to do that, I wouldn't be doing it from home...
Make the business case, file the request, job done.
Well, yeah, that's what I did. Actually been doing that for a year (for other instances of complete nonsense), going up to a VP. It's complete madness. The whole company is wasting hundreds of man-hours of productive work every month because of the moronitude.
I'm suspecting that they have a screwed up accounting of IT expenses. As in, they try to squeeze out every $ on IT spending without accounting for the fact that hundreds of highly paid skilled employees wasting their time loses them 10 times as much.
@PJH said:
Um, as you pointed out yourself, it took a few days to successfully download it.
Yes. It did.
So that makes it ok then.
@stratos said:
You yourself say it is pointless to waste your time on these kinds of moronic IT policies. So why do it then? Fine, you chose to download it yourself at home, also a valid solution of course, if you don't mind taking your work home with you. But to me the most obvious response to this problem is to then not download it and just order it. It avoids any discussion or using their sacred bandwith and keeps your time free to focus on other tasks.
Downloading a DVD that I didn't think I needed until recently on a decent connection: an hour at most
Ordering the physical copy: a few days
@stratos said:
Next time just order the dvd instead of downloading it. Simple problem, simple solution.
You car is broken? Walk. Simple solution for a simple mind.
@shepd said:
You fix this by showing your manager the email and requesting an "external connection" for your PC. IT will crap their pants once they realize this is the result of their stupidity, and then you can enjoy watching the manager wars as eventually IT breaks down and either installs more bandwidth, or you get to be "that guy" in the office with his own private internet connection. Whatever happens, you win.
Here's the thing: my boss hates them. So does my boss's boss. And his boss too. Everybody does, except the CEO I guess. Imagine a VP of a publically traded company having to waste 3 hours arguing with the CIO over a $500 hardware purchase? Well let's just say I didn't have to imagine that one.
If you have to download it at home, get your manager to pay your extra bandwidth charges. In my country, that download would cost about $8.
Well in my country a 28Mbps (unmetered, unlimited) ADSL connection is €30 a month (if you're lucky you can even get 50Mbps symmetrical FTTH for that price). Wasting hours upon hours of skilled labour on pointless IT policies? Priceless.
@Sir Twist said:
Maybe you should send yourself an RFQ and then submit a quote and invoice for the "DVD Replication Service" you performed on your own time.Or, you could go home every time you need to download something, and make sure you produce this email when someone calls you on it.
A cow-orker suggested that I tell them that I followed their advice and downloaded the ISO on the company issued laptop's UMTS connection (the only "external connection" around), and that I would be sending the $1000 bill their way since it was their idea.
My ticket:
I often experience interruptions during long downloads, the TCP connection is just shut down. For example I've been trying for 2 days to download a RedHat ISO (>3G), without much success. FYI URL is xxx. wget restarts the download automatically but it eventually fails or the download is often corrupted.
Their awesome passive-aggressive reply:
I'm a bit surprised by your ticket
The connection is currently 8Mb/s
3GB would take about 1h if the line was only used by you, in the best case.
I'm reminding you that you are about 500 to use this link and that it is not dedicated to you.
For this kind of download, I would recommend using an external connection.
It's not clear what they mean by "external connection;" I asked around and people told me to do the download at home. Which is what I did. I enjoy the amazing luxury of having 3 times more bandwidth for just one user.
How about upgrading the link? Yeah well, that would cost money, and those are the people who make you request a quote (from the one and only supplier) and a purchase order for $20 keyboard. I kid you not.
No, I'm really not kidding you.
I have to insist because I would not believe any of you if you made the same claim. Or at least, I wouldn't have until I started working here.