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I've spent the last couple of months slowly catching up on this thread, mostly at work. To Blackswordca and Dick Trauma, if I ever see you two in my town, I'm gonna have to buy you guys some drinks. You two basically went through what I went through at a bunch of previous jobs. That is, getting used and abused by my superiors and asked to do everything above and beyond my pay grade for no reward or acknowledgement, then getting poo poo on for it. Currently, I'm the sole installation and support technician for an up and coming credit card and payroll processing company in my town, and have been working there for a bit over a year. It's honestly a really good job, and the partners all care about the employees and want to see them succeed. For the curious, when a business wants to process credit cards, they come to us. We do a cost analysis, determine how we can save them money, they sign the contracts, we set them up with a merchant account, and then I program and install a credit card terminal for them. We utilize several different types of terminals, which are suited to different situations, as well as a couple of online and mobile processing portals and as of this past summer, a point of sale system. We also do payroll processing for our clients, but I don't touch that side of things, so I don't know a great deal about it. So basically, my job boils down to knowing the internal intricacies of programming and troubleshooting roughly 7 different systems that are all end user facing, and doing so for roughly the western third of my state. We've got just shy of 1,300 clients and this year we were labeled one of the top 10 fastest growing companies in our region, so that number is always going up. I'd like to say "A ticket came in...", but we don't have a ticketing system. Everything's done through Gmail, Google Hangouts, and a couple of programs that we use to view client info and comments from the various helpdesks and POS providers we regularly talk with. For a shop of 15 people, it works well enough. My story for today, is that a text came in, from Tim. See, Tim's on a family vacation right now. His away message says he's got limited email and phone access, and to call the office if there's a big problem. Apparently, about 2 weeks ago, one of our clients contacted him and asked him to replace a broken USB card swiper they had. This shouldn't have been a big deal, since they're pretty close to us and we have tons of replacements. Instead, Tim forgot to do it, and never mentioned it to anyone. Fast forward to 8pm today, and he sends me a text frantically requesting that I drop everything I'm doing tomorrow morning to go to this merchant and replace their swiper. He forwarded me the email through text. It literally says "Hey, just wanted to know if you're going to have time to bring us that swiper any time soon. No rush or anything, we just need it by the end of next week." I'm going to be on the other side of town all day tomorrow installing a POS for a client that I scheduled with 2 weeks ago, so I'm forwarding this to my manager, whose on the same level as Tim and filing the whole thing under "Nope", with a note saying "get to it whenever". Thankfully, the client is very understanding, and my manager knows Tim does this poo poo literally all the time. Like, at least twice a week. I've got more stories about Tim, as well as stories from previous, non-IT jobs. There's a bunch of poo poo that happened at the bowling alley I worked at before this job which can be tangentially related to the thread topic, as well as a completely unrelated story about The Worst Shift I Ever Worked, which was fast food. If you guys wanna hear about any of that, I'm game to write something up tomorrow.
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Dec 31, 2014 04:18
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That sounds like tons of fun, in the "will it be a burning wreck when I wake up?" sort of way. One of my favorite parts of my job is dealing with POS providers. In an ideal world, if we acquire a merchant who uses a point of sale already, we'd do the following (relatively) simple steps to make everything work:
Sometimes, the merchant is processing through the POS provider itself. Sometimes, the POS provider gets a bit pissed off when they learn through me that their soon-to-be-former client is moving away from them. Sometimes, the POS providers like to try to "retain" the client by telling me "Hey, sure, we'll make that change for you. Right after someone pays us the changeover fee. How much? Oh, you know, $1,300, the standard fee."  "Oh, wait, what's that? Oh, that's right, the merchant has 3 POS stations, don't they? So that'll be $1300 per station then."  For anyone who might be considering starting a business with a POS, don't use Micros. Their systems are ancient, finicky in most cases, and they just got bought by Oracle, which may or may not be a good company, but they cut off all ways of contacting our local Micros branch office, which used to be the only way to get poo poo done quick* with them, and replaced it with the shittiest ticketing system I've ever seen. You call in, and the system forces you to either create a ticket or enter a ticket number in to get the status on it. If you start a ticket, it disappears into a black hole from which it will never escape. The last time I was able to talk to a human there, they were willing, but unable to create a ticket because their system wouldn't let them. They assured me that they were sending an email to the right person about it, and I never heard from Micros again. *"quick" is used loosely here. It takes them weeks of us badgering them to get poo poo done. I have 3 clients who signed up with us back in September who still arent processing through us because of them dragging their feet and also being bought out. chocolateTHUNDER posted:This is where a ticketing system would help. Also, Tim is the Special Snowflake here, and is the only one who uses Outlook in the office. He also doesn't email anyone unless he deems it necessary or they tell him to send one or it won't get worked on. He also likes to take equipment from our store room to use on his personal installs, which is fine, except that I'm in charge of inventory and he never tells me what or when or for whom he's taking poo poo. I only find out when I do the monthly audit and see we're missing 3 more terminals. I'm also fairly sure he's the one whose been turning the toilet paper in the bathroom so it feeds underhanded, but I don't have any real proof of that, but still. Guy's got some serious "I do it my way" issues.
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Dec 31, 2014 05:42
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Mattavist posted:Sounds like you should have done that in the first place. Yeah, I'd absolutely do that next time they hand you a ticket like that.
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Dec 31, 2014 23:51
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Paladine_PSoT posted:This sounds like one of those jobs that underpays hilariously poorly and includes a stipend of stockholm syndrome. That's pretty much every single job I held previour to this one. Here, I am getting paid a bit below average, but I am also up for a raise, and just need to find the time to talk to my manager about it. It's been kinda hectic the last couple weeks, so I'll wanna try maybe next week, since the holidays will be over. Today, a call came in. The owner of the company lives in an obscenely rich neighborhood full of mcmansions. Like, one place about a block down from him literally looks like they took two fancy brick houses and joined them together with half of a brick house in the middle. It literally has two front doors, on two separate sections of the house. Think like the Mcallister house from Home Alone 1, add some extra yard space and a separate garage, and you're starting to get there. Anyway, said owner is on vacation out of the country until next week.I guess one of the owner's daughters is house-sitting while he's away, she called him all frantic because some dumb kids egged his house, and she didn't know what to do. He called my manager, who asked me to go over there and clean the egg up. In his defense, he actually was swamped with 5 different things he had to get done today, and I didn't actually have anything important to do. Also, I was getting paid for this, and it's a 5 minute drive from the office. So I get there with a bucket of warm water, some 409, and a scouring sponge, expecting some huge mess of egged up window screens, protein stained wood doors, and milky glass panes. Instead, it appears as though whatever kids did this dragged his welcome mat over to the driveway and got it with 3 or 4 eggs, then from that spot tried to egg his door. They missed the door entirely, instead landing 3 shots on the steps leading up to it. There was also 1 egg thrown at a window to the side of the door, which missed that and hit the window sill. The problems though, are thus: Everything about this house, except for the door and window frames, is made of extremely porous brick. It is also ~20 degrees outside, and the egg is firmly frozen by the time I get there. I begin making a token effort to scrub the egg off the steps nearest the door, when I find a bucket full of cold water, some kitchen gloves, a hand towel, and a spatula with some frozen egg on it sitting behind a potted plant next to the door. I guess the owner told his daughter to go scrape up the egg until someone could get there. At least she tried? v  vI ended up scrubbing for a few minutes before taking pictures to forward to the owner and calling it a day. He's gonna have to suck it up till spring, then go at this with a wire brush and some elbow grease. The egg isn't very noticeable, anyway.
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Jan 1, 2015 01:16
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The Fool posted:There isn't enought Like I said, I got paid for it, and it's not like I had anything else to do. If either of those were different, I wouldn't have done it. That's not even the strangest, stupidest, or worst thing I've ever done, either. That's just today.
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Jan 1, 2015 01:25
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EDIT: ^^^ Exactly.^^^Mo_Steel posted:Heeeey buddy! Actually, PCI compliance stuff is one of my favorite things to talk about with our merchants, because every single time our company gets a new client set up, we give them a folder, in which is a PCI compliance guide sheet. This sheet gives them a time frame for what they need to do to become/maintain PCI compliance, as well as a URL for the PCI website. The merchant must register an account on the website and pass the self-assessment survey to become compliant before their time frame runs out. When they don't, and they call us up wondering why the hell their monthly fees went up $20 this wasn't what they signed up for, we're pulling bait and switch and gently caress you guys, I'm canceling my account, we get to remind them of the PCI sheet we gave them and go "tough poo poo, it's not us, go become compliant, this isn't going to go away even if you cancel your account with us." As far as EMV requirements coming up this year, that's a whole other beast. Imagine that guy at your company that hates spending money on anything. If he was in charge of the building's toilet paper supply, he'd force you to purchase your own individual roll to bring in. Now multiply that by ~1300, and you have what I get to look forward to in the coming year. The way we have everything set up now, this is going to require roughly 1/3 of our merchants to purchase completely new terminals, 1/2 of our merchants to purchase a peripheral pinpad to bring their terminal up to standard, and the rest use online portals and mobile solutions, of which there's been no mention of EMV compliance changes yet. Everyone with a terminal will require an updated file to be downloaded to their terminal, which can be done on install for the replacements, but will take between 5 and 45 minutes, depending on the terminal, for those that don't need to be replaced. Everyone will need to be trained on how to use the new technology. We have no way to roll this out ahead of time because currently, our processing partner, who makes all this technology, doesn't have a functioning file structure for this stuff. Sure, we can technically enable it, and it's supposed to work with Apple Pay, but it definitely doesn't work with Google Wallet, and we don't have an RFID card to test that side of it with. Now, out of all of our merchants, I'd say only maybe 1/5th are willing to spend the money. The rest don't see why they should be forced to upgrade, even when they're running terminals that are 8 years+ old, with card imprinters for backups. Thank god I'm not in sales at this company.
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Jan 1, 2015 03:08
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Che Delilas posted:No dude his manager is really actually nice and they're friends and a raise is coming any day now I'm sure the manager just forgot about it. I know this is sarcastic, but I guess since a bunch of people are commenting about it, I'll explain a bit. Most of my coworkers and manager are really decent guys. They've been helping me out significantly over the last year with things that happen in my life. For example, about couple weeks back, I rear ended a guy on the way home from work. Nothing serious, but my car was definitely not drivable afterwards. Since my insurance won't cover the full cost of the rental car while my car is being fixed, my manager is letting me use the company car, and is OK with me filling it up on the company dime, while my car is getting repaired. As another example, I got married 6 months ago, and literally the week before the ceremony, the people we had hired to coordinate the reception sprung a bunch of extra costs on me that they "thought they had included but forgot", or whatever their poo poo reasoning was. The owner of the company heard about it and personally loaned me the money, no interest and no strings attached, to cover it. As long as I pay him back something every month, he's happy with that. There's other examples, but I don't want to derail the topic too much further. So yeah, I agree that being asked to go clean egg off a house, while getting pad to do so, during a time when I had nothing else of importance going on, is a bit ridiculous. However, I also kind of owe these guys at least some leeway, since they didn't have to give me a free rental car, or help pay for my wedding. Now, to get back towards the topic, regarding EMV, I can't wait to see how our merchants will react to it. There's already a fair number who just pay the non-compliance fee every month for PCI, because they can't be arsed to pass the survey and protect their customer's data. There's even a few out there that we keep charge slips in stock for because they still prefer to use card imprinters. Most of our merchants don't understand what EMV is or why it's good for them. All they see is "I have to pay $150-$300 for a fancy looking piece of plastic when this here Tranz 330 has been working great for years!"
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Jan 1, 2015 20:39
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RFC2324 posted:Dear god it terrifies me that the penalties are not steep enough to force the businesses to pay. waffle iron posted:I did a Google image search and my reaction is "those are still in the wild and used?" I can't remember the last time I saw one of those terminals for a door entry pad much less at a store. When I first started taking over the stock room stuff, we had a B-Stock pile filled with various old technologies and "back up" terminals. Off the top of my head, we had 5 Tranz 330s in that pile, a couple Way 5000s, half a dozen Nurit 2085s, a couple Omni 3000s, some FD10 pinpads, some Verifone 1000se pinpads, and a bunch of Hypercom T7Plus'. There was also a bunch of old blocky poo poo that I couldn't identify and knew we didn't use, like 10lb modems that only had plugs for phone lines and RS232 cables, and what looked like those big bulky check readers you see at banks. Since I don't expect most of you to know what all of that is, or to want to google search it, almost none of that stuff is even PCI compliant, nor was any of it made in the last 8 years. It was all being kept as backup stock in case a merchant with an old machine broke down. I do encourage you to google search at least some of it if you can though, because it's interesting to see how far we've come from that old tech.
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Jan 2, 2015 03:35
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Crowley posted:Upwards of $10.000.000 worth of water damage, and the building inspectors are talking about just tearing the building down instead of trying to renovate it.  Uh, I guess at least you'll get to set everything up how you like it this next time around? I don't know where you live, but it's been consistently 20 degrees here this last month. If that happened to a building here, now, it would probably be left to ice over till spring, and then torn down. Mold can be a severe bitch, especially in areas with poor ventilation, like between walls.
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Jan 2, 2015 12:59
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Rhymenoserous posted:Ok the shopping one I was fine with because an hour or two of a workday at frys or best buy is basically free time off. This is where a line would be gleefully drawn. The owner can hire a contractor to deal with this poo poo. totalnewbie posted:Some people in this thread seem like they wouldn't lift a finger to do anything for their coworkers if it's not in their job description. Forget it. It was a reasonable requests, on a purely human level, and you handled it fine. Checked it out, decided you couldn't take care of it, and let it go. Perfectly fine. Don't feel like you have to defend yourself for it.
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Jan 2, 2015 15:56
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mattfl posted:Did everyone else miss that there was also a seemingly adult aged person at home already?! There wasn't. I don't believe his daughter lives there anymore, she was just checking up on the place for dad while he was away. There was no one there when I arrived. Also, can we please drop it? I only posted about it because it was the Random Weird Thing that happened for the day, I didn't want it to turn into a multi-page derail or anything.  I'd like to get back to hearing about horribly unsafe server rooms, perfect poo poo-storms of things failing, and managers who are actually terrible being actually terrible. Where's Blacksword and Dick Trauma? Surely something has to have gone wrong recently that was their fault, right?
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Jan 2, 2015 17:07
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My boss made it clear when he hired me that we get 6 paid holidays a year, plus 10 vacation days. So, I get paid for Christmas Day, New Years Day, Thanksgiving, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and the 4th of July, and then get to pick when I want to use the 10 other vacation days I get. Those days don't roll over, and expire on the anniversary of my hire, which is in early October for me. Since we're not open on the weekends, that works out to 2 weeks vacation a year. Pretty easy to understand, I feel.
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Jan 5, 2015 23:00
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Completely serious here. If you guys end up quitting, please please please at least attempt to do it to part of this song in some way.
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Jan 20, 2015 03:29
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Storysmith posted:Expected a link to this song. "I took a whole desk from the last place I worked. They never noticed, and it looks great in my apartment." Fair enough. Do something with my song while your boss is there, then as they leave and you're packing your poo poo, do something with this song.
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Jan 20, 2015 03:53
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Daylen Drazzi posted:Me: "For gently caress's sake! I've been doing this poo poo for 25 years. Either trust that I know what I'm saying or go to Best Buy and get robbed blind again - I really don't give a poo poo which. Your choice." All moms are like that. I used to work at Best Buy, selling appliances for 2 years. Now, it was a poo poo job, but I kept up on ALL the vendor training, because I legitimately wanted to make sure my customers got exactly what they were looking for. My mom asked me to buy her a vacuum one year for christmas, and I told her to come into the store and I'd talk her through them and help her pick one out. I did my research, and picked an inexpensive middle-of-the-road model. When she came in, I showed her a couple models, and then talked up the chosen one. After hearing my shpeal, she adamently refused to consider the one I picked because reasons. This other one looks nicer, that other one seems more powerful, this one is better because it's more expensive, right? Finally, my shift was just about to end and one of my coworkers came over to take over while I went and clocked out. By the time I came back, they had convinced my mom that one particular model was the one she wanted. It was perfectly priced, with great features, and was exactly the same model I tried to talk her into. My coworker had used all the same selling points I had, so the only difference was that my mom had heard it from a person who was not her child. Sometimes, parents just never end up trusting their kids judgement on anything.
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Jan 21, 2015 17:53
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For my "gently caress Sales" rant for today, you might remember Tim from my previous rant. The guy has been intimately involved with bringing on a new client over the last month. It's a (very popular, successful) donut shop with two locations, each with a POS and backup terminal. The actual conversion has been planned out for the last couple of weeks, and it's simple. We've been biding our time while Tim and I play nice with the client and get them to love us. I do this by going there and being proactive and encouraging about the changeover, and reassuring the owners that things will go smoothly. Tim does something similar, but tries to do more relationship building than professional confidence building, which isn't too bad of a thing on it's own. Where this becomes a gently caress Sales rant is that today, in an hour, I have an appointment scheduled. It's been on the calendar for literally a month. Immediately after this, I've got another appointment which has been scheduled for the last 4 days. Both are at locations half an hour away from the office, and I have the rest of the day open otherwise. Last night, Tim was doing his thing with the merchant, when they finally said "Sure, come over tomorrow and do the changeover." What does Tim do? Without calling or texting me, without consulting the calendar, he schedules me to go to both of the merchant's locations to do the changeover at the exact same time as these other two appointments. I don't find this out until about 5 minutes ago, when I walk in. Now, here's what really pisses me off. When I ask him if we can reschedule, he tells me that this client is too important to even go there a couple hours later in the day, they need to be done asap. He reluctantly volunteers to go do one of my two installations on the other side of town, which is dumb because he knows nothing about the client I was scheduled to meet with, and I still have to go do the other one after this. Further, he knows full well that the conversion is as easy as making two phone calls. I don't even need to be at the merchant's shops at all. But he wants me to go there "to make a show of it, have presence there, and just in case something goes wrong." Like it's some circus. At least they have tasty donuts. Too bad I've been dieting and losing weight for the last couple weeks.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:18
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I'm really glad the series of call centers I deal with on a daily basis are all generally decent. The centers with First Data are set up so that Tier 1 are the overseas script readers that deal with all the general idiots, and Tier 2 is the actual tech support. When I set up a client, I tell them "If you have a problem, call us first. Here's my card with my office number and cell phone number in case of emergency. If we're not available though, and you wanna know 'how do I enable this', or 'why is it doing that', or 'oh my god it exploded help me', call this 1800 number. Follow these steps when you call that number and it'll get you to level 2 support. Those are the guys I call when I have questions." Generally I find it thrills the client that they have this little shortcut that will give them the tiniest bit of power over their tech support, and generally they only really end up using it if I'm not able to help them over the phone and explicitly tell them to use it. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the other providers that I deal with. Micros, specifically, is like talking to a brick wall. They got bought out by Oracle a couple months back, and went from a lovely "we'll never call you back" voicemail system to an even shittier "we'll never email you back" ticketing system. It used to be that I could call their local office and bug them once every couple weeks and get someone to hum and haw at me about why 3 of our clients that we boarded and sent them all the paperwork for back in September still aren't processing. Now The only thing I can do is submit an email or voicemail ticket and watch it swirl down the drain. Literally all I want to know is why these three clients aren't processing yet. Are they waiting on the merchant to give the go-ahead to make the change? Are they missing something that we can provide to speed the process along? Are they sitting around assfucking themselves all day? I have no clue! Nor does anyone else!
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Jan 26, 2015 16:16
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Edward_Tohr posted:Honestly, with a user like that, it'll only be a matter of time before this becomes the right thread. Where is this other thread located? It sounds magical. 
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Jan 30, 2015 21:59
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Since I'm tech support for our clients, I've learned the unfortunate habit of ending my calls with them with "Did you have any other questions I can help you with?" before saying goodbye and hanging up. The reason it's unfortunate is that because most of the time, I only actually start my end-of-phone-call banter after I've made sure I've answered their questions.
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Feb 5, 2015 15:17
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you ate my cat posted:At last count I have access to 107 separate systems, most of which I use daily in my job as ISP tech support / escalated issues. 'Normal' reps have approx 90. Of those, probably 30 or so are unique passwords. One system I have 4 different username/password combos because there's no profile switcher, so to take a different sort of chat I have to log into a different user. This is for one of the top 5 ISPs in the US, so they don't even have the excuse of being too small to change. Well, I was gonna post about my paltry 10 different systems, half of which have passwords that expire every 90 days and have ridiculously long history lists, but holy loving poo poo, so much for that. Instead, I'll tell you guys about how I've had the task of redesigning the company's website dumped on me last week, despite having literally zero website design or coding experience. I forget the name of the system we're using to manage our website, but thankfully it's pretty easy to learn. The biggest challenge is creating clip art for the various pages. Still, it's coming along nicely, and we're about 3/4ths of the way done, plus I get to look like a hero to both my manager and the CEO for getting it done. Meanwhile, this past week we've been expanding. We essentially have 3 parts to our office: The foyer/conference room/accounting, the credit card processing section, and the payroll processing section. We're planning on hiring a couple new people to do payroll related stuff, so we added a couple more cubicle walls to that area. My manager has also been taking up pretty much all of the slack on that side of things, and he elected to swap offices with our CEO so he could be over in the payroll wing. Meanwhile, our CEO took over Tim's office, and Tim got shunted into my manager's old office. Still with me? No? Good. So Friday rolls around, and the CEO, who had been in Florida golfing with friends all week, comes back to see that the offices haven't been fully switched around yet. He throws a small shitfit, because frankly these things were supposed to have been done already, and leaves for a bit. Everyone in the office scrambles to move the last of the stuff and get everything working. I'm just hooking up the CEO's computer and doing cable management when he comes back, and is much happier that everything's looking more like what it's supposed to. After everything's all said and done, he decides to give me his old Garmin, just kind of because. I don't really need it, but hey, free GPS. While I'm on the subject of neat rewards, the partners collectively decided that Fridays are now Office Lunch Friday. A random restaurant near the office is chosen each week, the menu is emailed around, and the office pays for lunch for everyone who wants to order.
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Feb 9, 2015 03:52
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IndustrialApe posted:Do these people ever pay for stuff or manage their bank accounts online? They pay for everything via paper check, that they fill out at the register. Whenever anyone asks why they don't switch to using a debit card instead, they tell you that checks work just fine and are more secure.
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Feb 16, 2015 15:41
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RFC2324 posted:They are very quickly on the way out here in the states too. Most places I have visited over the past year or so have signs up that they do not accept checks. Checks are still accepted all over Western New York, where I live, but yeah, AMEX is thankfully very rare. The reason behind AMEX phasing out is because it's a special snowflake card provider that has its own special rules and transaction rates. When we're setting a client up with a credit card terminal, we provision a merchant ID for them. This MID covers MasterCard, Visa, and Discover cards. If the merchant wants to opt into AMEX, they need to fill out separate paperwork, pay separate rates for those specific transactions, and we need to provision them a special AMEX-only MID, which I have to program into the terminal separately. It's a huge pain in the rear end, and thankfully we only have a handful of clients that take it. I really wish checks would die in a fire though already. They're outdated, insecure, a huge pain in the rear end to process, require special equipment, separate accounts, and everything. For an example of how that works, if we get a merchant who wants to process checks, we have to provision their credit MID, go to a separate company to provision a check MID, get the merchant special equipment(typically an FD200) which uses an ink cartridge that we then have to supply them with, and I have to program the terminal twice to get both programs in there. If they're processing over IP instead of dial, then I have to go to a third company to provision everything to work through them for internet connectivity. So, we're basically doing 2-3 times the work per terminal to process a method of payment that is worse in every way compared to debit.
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Feb 17, 2015 15:12
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Aunt Beth posted:Hey there WNY Goon! You in Roc or Buff? Hello! Buffalo here. Why are there so goddamn few of us? Are we all just antisocial? The goonmeet threads never ever go anywhere. ratbert90 posted:I.. I think I just Buffalo has similar weather compared to Michigan. Please take this into consideration when I tell you run, you fool! RUN TO SAN DIEGO AND NEVER LOOK BACK! Unless you enjoy 8 months of frigid, bleary winter per year, get the gently caress to San Diego!
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Feb 18, 2015 01:09
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? I'm not sure. It's obvious I got the job, but it's now between this in San Diago or another one in Holland Michigan. 
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The Fool posted:I live in a place where this is a thing. Hey, University of Alaska. Neat. This past weekend, it was -30 with the wind chill. I heard we actually beat a not-insignificant part of your state out for being that drat cold. gently caress Buffalo and this icy hellscape, is what I'm trying to say.
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Feb 18, 2015 02:36
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Sirotan posted:Holland is a great place to live and work because it's right near Grand Rapids, my hometown and an awesome city full of delicious beer. http://live.buffalonews.com/front-pages-buffalo-news-six-days-snowvember-storm-coverage/ So, Snowvember. Some of you may have heard about it in the news. It was a lake effect storm that blew upwards of 9 feet of snow over the course of 3 days over pretty much all of the southern 2/3rds of the city, down all the way towards Pennsylvania. Then just a couple days later, it warmed up to roughly t-shirt wearing weather and we got 6 inches of rain. The first picture in that link I posted shows a literal wall of snow falling, but a somewhat better picture can be found here. I used to like the snow, once, a long time ago. Then I stopped sledding in it and started shoveling it and now all I want to do is move to, say, Arizona, or the warmer parts of Colorado. gently caress snow. gently caress it hard.
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Feb 18, 2015 04:38
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Sirotan posted:Get a snowblower, shoveling is for chumps. Can't. I live in lovely quadplex apartments that were built for military housing back in WW2 and never torn down. Admittedly, I don't have a whole driveway to shovel, but I don't have a garage and I'm not allowed to have anything larger than a weber grill outside ever. Not that I'd want to, since someone would just steal it.
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Feb 18, 2015 16:14
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CharlieWhiskey posted:As an option to research, search for electric shovels or power shovels. Much worse than a proper snowblower, but better than a shovel. Snowblower and plow guys will laugh at you, but shovel guys will think you are a wizard. In a blizzard, it's a bit like taking a Subaru to a monster truck rally, but at least it's not a bicycle. Aw, it's so cute.  My mom has/had a snow thrower. If you google "Toro Snow Thrower" you'll get the idea. It's like a step between a snow blower and those tiny little shovels. I could probably definitely shovel faster with my big-rear end snow shovel than with that thing, but it's a neat concept. When I say I have no room though, I mean it. I have to keep my shovel on our shoe mat. These apartments were designed by a loving retard, and I could honestly go on for days about how bad they are, but suffice to say I'm trying like hell to get out of it. The biggest pain in the rear end about shoveling right now is that it's so cold that the snow solidifies and turns to huge chunks of ice. To compare, it's like trying to shovel a pile of gravel that's got bricks mixed in to it. Combine that with the fact that our "off street parking" is just a row of parking spots in front of the apartments, and the amount of snow we've received this year, and this means we've got piles up over our heads, and our usable parking spots are slowly getting narrower and narrower. I can't wait to get my own house. I'll build a melting box and dump all the snow into there and let it drain into the sewer.
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Feb 18, 2015 16:53
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A call came in... From one of our clients. They had done exactly $1009 in sales yesterday and only saw $909 in their account. Their very first assumption was to call me and tell me that someone manually shorted him the money in error, and we needed to give him $100 right now. Now, I'm the install technician around here. I don't know a ton about how the money moves around once it routes through us. I know the merchant's credit card terminal batches out and tells us/First Data "Hey, this guy did $XXXX in sales. Move this money." And then the money gets moved by the various banks and financial institutions that are all tied up in this. However, I also know that there's no guy, especially not me, who goes through every single batch report at the end of the day and manually moves any money anywhere. Even if there was one, it wouldn't be here, since we don't directly touch the merchant's money, except when we take out our fees at the end of the month. So, I go and look up this merchant's account, find his batch report, and lo and behold: it's says he did $1009 in sales yesterday. The merchant's not buying it. He says he's looking at the batch report that the terminal printed out and it does say $1009, but that's not how much was put into his bank account, so it's my fault and I need to fix this. Ok, next step. Maybe one transaction was American Express? Those get funded separately, so it may not have gone in at the same... No, no, none of the transactions were AMEX, and he's not even set up to take that card type. Further, none of his transactions were even for $100 exactly. At this point, as far as I can see, this guy did $1009 in sales, and had $1009 moved into his account. In the chain of terminal>FD/us>bank>his account, I've eliminated the terminal and us. I ask him if there's a deposit statement or something he can fax us so that I have proof that he wasn't paid the right amount so I can escalate this properly to First Data. He refuses to fax over the statement, and insists that since I work with the bank, I can call them and ask them myself. No, actually I can't. I know for a fact that they'll refuse to talk to me since I'm not him. he tells me that he's gonna call the bank and have them call me and then I'll see that I'm wrong(exact wording)! Ok, good luck with that. I hang up and go vent to a coworker for a few minutes until the phone rings again. It's the merchant, and he wants to talk to me. See, turns out that when he contacted his bank to check his account, they only gave him the net total, and didn't mention that he had received a deposit of $1009 and that they had taken out a fee of $100 for something or another. It wasn't until he called the bank to bitch at them that I had the audacity to make him look at his account closely that he realized the mistake. My coworker, 2 offices down said she could feel the smug coming through the walls. I hope like hell he could feel it bleeding through the phone.
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Feb 24, 2015 20:03
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22 Eargesplitten posted:And I got an email threatening to cut some time I posted because apparently it took too long for me to wake up at 5AM when I got a phone call for a high priority call. It took me 30 minutes to talk on the phone, check road conditions because we were in the middle of a blizzard, and verify that I didn't need a particular cert that account usually wants. So they're threatening to cut 15 minutes off that time, in some of the most petty bullshit I've ever seen. And they're cutting an hour off of the time that I can bill each day for travel, and they're saying they want us to start showing up at sites at 8 AM, rather than starting work at 8 AM. Thanks Ants posted:You work for a bunch of cunts Seriously, man. There's a reason unemployment exists, and in cases like this, I'd have no qualms about using it while I looked for another job. When they start getting petty is when you start telling them to shove it up their rear end and get out of there.
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Feb 27, 2015 22:52
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Inspector_666 posted:You generally don't get to collect unemployment if you quit, or even if you get fired for most reasons.  yeah, I totally spaced on the quit portion of that. But dang, where I live you can get unemployment for being fired for anything short of malicious intent, like if you got fired because you deliberately tried to kill someone or ruin the company or something. Basically, if they can't prove you knew what you were doing was bad, you could get unemployment.you ate my cat posted:I've given up asking questions that have 'or' in them for exactly this reason. I don't understand what's so confusing about it.
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Mar 1, 2015 17:55
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Bhodi posted:"Please hold", horrible music pl - "Did you know? Millions of Americans are now switching to speedy speed plans. For only 9.99 a month, you ge" - *drops call*. I just got off the phone with Micros/Oracle. It used to be that I could call their local office and just speak to a person and get things straightened out. Recently, they put a new phone system in place where they really want you to leave a message instead of talking to a live person. After dancing through the phone tree for 10 minutes trying to figure out which options would let me eventually speak to a human, I had to wait on hold for literally an hour while they looped 27 seconds on slow piano music, followed by 30 seconds of "Sorry, all of our agents are currently busy assisting other customers. You may press 1 to leave a voicemail, and your call will be returned in the order in which it was received, or if you want, you may continue to hold for the next available agent." *pause* "Please hold for the next available agent. Your call is very important to us, and will be answered in the order in which it was received." When I finally did get on the phone with someone, explain what's going on with our client, and get the client on the phone, it turns out that the local office had one of their techs personally call the merchant and the problem is getting sorted out this afternoon, so I didn't have to do any of th - *drops call* 
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Mar 9, 2015 17:28
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Hey, if it makes you feel any better, a couple months ago, I reprogrammed a terminal for a salon that we boarded. It was a specific model that I had never dealt with before, but it was in a family of models that I was decently familiar with, and everything looked the same programming-wise, so I continued as normal. Well, Thursday, I get called to go out there. Now, the terminal was supposed to be set up to take tips, and as far as I knew, it was. It would allow the merchant to adjust tips on transactions, it would report the tips when it settled out at the end of the night, but for some strange reason, the tips were not getting deposited into the merchants account. The regular amounts charged in the transaction were moving just fine, but not the tips. No one noticed for all this time until a customer called one of the stylists and said "Hey, you charged me for the appointment, but not the tip. Did you get the tip?" I ended up spending over an hour on the phone with tech support, trying to figure out why it wasn't working. We tried different programs built in different systems, different template types, enabling and disabling various options, all with the merchant watching me and getting more and more nervous the whole time. Finally, I get it all figured out. See, when I requested the file be built, I said it was a retail establishment with tips enabled. This works fine for other models in this family of terminal, but not for this particular one. What it'll do is act like everything's ok, but secretly just not report the tips as part of the transaction when it batches out. So for the last couple of months, this merchant had been paying her stylists their tips, without collecting them from the customers. And after adding up all the incorrect transactions, she was in the hole to the tune of ~$1900. After all of that, I had to submit a ticket to have all those transactions' details provided to us from First Data so we could reprocess $1900 worth of $5, $10, and $20 tips. I'm pretty sure the girl who handles our tickets now hates my guts, but I'm the one who's going to have to rerun all those transactions.
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Mar 10, 2015 01:57
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NZAmoeba posted:Why not just leave the voice mail and do something better with your life? It even says in the dialogue that you retain your position. Dr. Arbitrary posted:Maybe I just got unlucky, but based on past experiences with Micros, I stay on the line. I'll put it on speakerphone at a low volume and work on other tasks. What he said. I've left messages before, and the best I ever get to do is wave at them as they slowly sink into the inky abyss, never to be returned. I was doing other tasks, but I don't have an office, just a cubicle, so I had to hold my phone to my ear or I'd be including my coworkers in my annoyance. NZAmoeba posted:Also double post/quote, but are you saying a bunch of people are going to get small amounts charged to their card weeks after the initial purchase? That's going to piss a ton of people off wondering what the charges are. It would probably make things worse. Yes. Understandably, the merchant was pissed. Most of the transactions were for repeat clients, so they'll likely be understanding, but it's still a huge undertaking to have to call them and let them know what's going on so they don't try to dispute the charges or take their business elsewhere.
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Mar 10, 2015 14:03
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captkirk posted:I don't get why the merchant or you guys aren't just eating that 1900. It's a (relatively) small amount for the merchant or you guys and doesn't seem worth the poo poo storm likely to occur when you re-charge little old ladies and soccer moms (the lifeblood of salons). $1900 is a huge amount for the merchant, and our company doesn't eat that much lightly and just shrug it off. We also have a culture of going above and beyond what our customers expect, which sometimes has me doing stuff out of scope(like instructing one of our merchants how to add a cheap switch onto their network to accommodate a new terminal, over the phone, like I'm doing right now.), but it also results in us having fantastic retention rates(91% compared to 75% nation-wide) and getting some really good clients through word-of-mouth. Yeah, it's a huge pain in the rear end to do that much reprocessing, and yeah, some customers will get pissed, but the point is we try to do what works best for the merchant.
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Mar 10, 2015 15:39
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Tigern posted:Title: lOST AND fOUND EDIT: You know what, I'm spoiling this for people who don't want it ruined. Translate with Bing! posted:Title: lOST AND fOUND Well, at least Tigern was right? 
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Mar 10, 2015 16:41
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Sheep posted:Whichever they can blame on Gerdalti. This. Gerdalti already CYA'd one way, now he's just gotta CYA the other way and he's set. Though yeah, the VP did at first claim that it was emails sent to him from the CEO and then claim the opposite. Hopefully it gets the VP into even bigger trouble after he tries to say "Oh, well maybe the emails just DISAPPEARED, huh??" and then Gerdalti figures out that he sent them to some client or something.
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Mar 12, 2015 03:28
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A ticket came in.... EDIT: Nevermind. My google-fu actually came through for once. He's replying to plain-text emails, which can't display the image. He's fine with that as long as it's not a problem on his end, so hooray, points for me on a lovely week. 
neogeo0823 fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2015 19:55
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Dick Trauma posted:It was a "gift" for landing my new job. I want to make sure my mystery benefactor gets their Despite the fact that your old avatar combined with your username somehow made me associate it with ripping the skin off some poor unfortunate penis, I still somehow prefer it to your current one. 
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Mar 19, 2015 00:15
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worth before I switch it back.
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m.hache posted:Anyone have any experience working with a virtual merchant or something similar to that? What system is it? I'm familiar with USAePay, which has the ability to send out its receipts as coming from whatever you wanna tell it to say. There's a field in the settings menu that lets you change it, otherwise the email is sent out as coming from Billing@USAePay.com, which can seriously confuse customers when they're expecting the receipt to come from Sales@BubbaGumpsShrimpBoat.org. It sounds like you got it solved though, so at least there's that.
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Mar 23, 2015 16:01
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m.hache posted:That's what I was expecting. Give me just a simple field where I can enter my mail server and an account you can authenticate with. Every system's different. I think Authorize.net has something like that, but frankly we do so few Auth.net setups that I don't really know. Though, in my experience, I've never had a client have that problem before, so I don't quite know how else to handle it, myself.
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Mar 23, 2015 16:11
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