RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Manslaughter posted:

I vaguely remember a story from the old thread, anyone care to recall the correct details? I think it was something like this:

An IT worker gets a letter from an unknown address, all that is inside is a CD. On the CD is a video file. That video file is nothing but a camera pointed at a computer monitor, where someone is quietly using a piece of software for several minutes, then a voice shouts "See? It doesn't work!" and that's the end of the video.

That was me. And it was even weirder than that:

quote:

Received a CD-R in the post today. It contained a 700MB zip file. Inside the zip was a folder containing thirty smaller zip files. Inside each was one part of a multi-part zip.

Once I'd sorted it all out it produced a 700MB quicktime video of somebody working at his desk. He's just working away as normal for over an hour, then something happens on the screen. He points at the screen before looking into the camera and excitedly saying "See!", then the video ends.

The quality and the angle mean I can't read the screen and I don't recognise the software. Also I have no idea who this person is. Or where he is as I've never seen the office before.

I never did figure out what was going on. Whoever sent that CD never contacted me again, so nobody had the faintest idea who they were. I can only guess the CD got sent here by mistake.

Sweevo fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Aug 15, 2013

# ¿ Aug 15, 2013 00:36

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 21:30

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Inspector_71 posted:

Auto/bike shop software is the most retrograde, fly-by-night bullshit I ever dealt with at my old job, even if it comes from established manufacturers like Yamaha. Every single piece of it required some kind of combination of incredibly specific hardware configuration and installation order for the various unconnected modules on the CDs.

And forget ever getting support for them.

I used to work for a dealership chain. The parts catalogue software from one manufacturer required that you install a specific (and ancient) version of java, and then uninstall it, and install another specific version. I have no idea how/why, but the software would not run without doing that.

Another manufacturer had a catalogue that would only run if it was installed on a FAT16 drive (this was in 2002).

# ¿ Aug 22, 2013 10:47

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

tehloki posted:

There's this gigabit ethernet switch that was used for low-importance internal-stuff-only computers in our Box Office for about 12-13 years. It never got replaced because "It's still working after 5/8/10 years! That means it must be great!" The thing was yellow as hell plastic and looked unlike any gigabit switch I had ever seen.

There's still 10mb coax in use here.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2013 20:17

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

guppy posted:

I had a guy tell me his MacBook was slow last week. We've been a PC shop for years, but have allowed a mixed environment starting last year. We have no training whatsoever, but we can figure out most of the basic stuff.

"It's slow" is almost invariably a bullshit claim, but sure, I'll look at it. He says it's been a problem for months, but he's only bothered to tell us about it now, and it took him a while to actually bring it in. He can't stay, he has things to do, so I look at it and I can find absolutely nothing wrong with it. I get an email at the end of the day as I'm on the way out the door containing both his description of the problem and his assistant's restatement of that description, which do not agree with each other. He says "it keeps spinning when email is open"; she says "the disc spins when Internet Explorer" is open. (Recall that this is a MacBook Pro. It is not running Parallels or anything like that. It is definitely not an "Internet Explorer" problem.) I get nothing more than those descriptions to go on. I have no idea if this is an Outlook issue or something in webmail or what.

I did finally manage to catch up with him and he says it's Outlook. (Of course, his descriptions so far have of limited accuracy, so who knows, but it's somewhere to start.) He still hasn't actually managed to bring the machine back in for me to look at.

Is there a new Mac out/coming out? If it's out then this guy is trying to get one. If it's not out yet then he's putting in the ground work so that when it does come out he can claim his old one has been "broken for ages."

# ¿ Aug 27, 2013 10:40

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Dick Trauma posted:

Congratulations!

If anyone wanted to know which company has the worst voice-directed customer support I can tell you: It's Pitney Bowes. Our postage meter stopped connecting via the analog line so they sent us a replacement. This one won't even detect a carrier. I call their support number and it's voice directed. It's taken me a total of ten tries to get two successful calls, because when I say "technical support" I get every other possibility (Ex: "Did you say 'sales'?") and when it falls back to a voice/keypad combo and I hit 2 for tech support it just drops the call.

Still better than TalkTalk. You'll be on hold for a minimum of 40 minutes, then when you finally get to talk to someone they'll just hang up on you if your call isn't one of the three basic things that have a script for.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2013 17:14

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Volmarias posted:

This makes me irrationally angry, when coworkers type like semi-literate teens on our internal messenger. Type out "you", not "u", you layabout!

theres a guy here..... who writes like this..... like he just....... starts jabbing the . key...... every time he pauses.......

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 10:28

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Bob Morales posted:

My boss is a maroon. We have gigabit switched ethernet network and a 3 VMware servers with 6 network cards each.

We have a 3 megabit internet connection (dual T1's). In an effort to make the internet run a little quicker I threw together a squid web cache on Linux. After trying to explain to him for a half hour that it's running on Linux and both squid and Linux are GPL and we can run them for free, he keeps insisting it can't be any good if it's free and we need to sign a software license with the company who makes the software, and have it on record.

Print out the GPL, sign the bottom of the page (or have him sign it if he wants it that way), and let him file it away somewhere safe if it makes him happy.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 15:10

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Why are there still a million different lovely video players for embedded video?

Embedded video is a solved problem guys, you don't need to write your own piece of crap player that can't buffer the video, or won't let you skip, or which shits itself if you leave it paused for too long.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2013 21:53

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 21:30

Sweevo: Nov 8, 2007; i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

BurgerQuest posted:

Email chat: ridiculously graphical corporate signatures repeated over and over in long chains.

We have a supplier that uses a 700x400 image as a signature (because they think their loving business advert needs to be at the bottom of every email :jerkbag:

). The supplier and our purchasing manager never trim down emails, and they're both top-posters, so it's perfectly normal to have multi-megabyte emails going back and forth that end like this:

>>>>> *giant image*
>>>>>
>>>> *giant image*
>>>>
>>> *giant image*
>>>
>> *giant image*
>>
> *giant image*
>
*giant image*

... nested 50-60 levels deep.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2013 11:25

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?