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So I'm the chump working 12-day weeks. Recently, I got interrogated over 15 minutes that management thought I didn't need to spend on processing a call that I got at 5AM while on-call. Then they decided that field techs should have to put the first and last half hour of travel time on their own time, rather than being on the clock for it. Because even though we all work from home, use our own printers and other office supplies, we should have commute time. And now we've got expected time to task on some of our calls, and if we go over that time, we have to justify it. Yesterday I replaced a cache card and capacitor on a server in <10 minutes, but spent nearly two hours waiting for access to the server, waiting for the remote server team to power the server down, and waiting for them to verify functionality after it powered up. Since they expected me to have it done in an hour and a half, I'm probably going to get poo poo about that too. I've got an interview tomorrow, and if I get the job, I'm going to be out of here so fast I leave skid marks. Still going to put in two weeks as a courtesy, but screw this place. Our new CEO 10 months ago negotiated a contract terribly, we lost the contract because of things that were the client's fault but were negotiated to be our responsibility, and now since the company is in trouble, the rank and file techs are getting nickel and dimed.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:16
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ratbert90 posted:This; stop being a doormat dude. I'm not being a doormat. I told them that it took me 30 minutes to get information on the call, check road conditions because we were in the middle of a snowstorm, and get more information on the call from the critical team person who called me. They said "Well, did it really take 30 minutes? You're not supposed to round off," and I said that it actually took me 33 minutes, so if they really cared that much they could adjust it. It was ridiculous and petty, but obviously I didn't tell them that outright. They ended up saying that they were escalating it to my management, who would make the decision. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to ask my manager what the decision was on that. I just need to walk the line between being a doormat and being fired. Thankfully, I can probably get away with more right now than I could if we weren't drastically understaffed already. But I don't want to push it, we have third parties that can be called in that take some of our workload.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:47
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Well, they can say my first 15 miles of travel don't count (and another place I interviewed for was even worse), so I wouldn't be surprised if they can. fake edit: Well, googling around, since every day I do work before I travel and I'm carrying necessary tools, they might have to pay for it. I could always ask the legal counsel I'm paying $6 a pay period for. edit: We had a similar thing to that call center thing at the call center I worked for, except we had a few minutes flex either way. I'm not going to say who I work for yet out of paranoia, but as soon as I get an offer I'll say. I mean, if my boss read these forums, she could probably tell who I am, but I'm more worried about someone googling my company's name, seeing me talk poo poo, and then trying to find out who I am. Or am I being too paranoid? 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 18:07
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I don't have much saved up, I've been spending most of my money on paying down my credit card. I had a month off work late last year after having surgery, since I couldn't lift my toolbag for a month, and that elminiated most of what I had managed to save. Like I said, I have an interview tomorrow. It's for a lovely T1 helpdesk job, but it's 8-5, rather than 8-surprise, it will at least not be a pay cut, and it will give me some experience with remote support and administrating tickets rather than just responding to them. And I won't have to work out of my hatchback anymore. I'm also moving in less than a month, so I need to save money for move-in expenses. I'm in Colorado, but not in Boulder or Denver, so work is harder to find. I'd move to Boulder, but I've got things tying me here for now. Maybe in a couple years I can move to the promised land of 100-200 jobs being advertised for every day, but for now I've got to deal with more limited prospects.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:26
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Tab8715 posted:Wouldn't those expenses be tax-deductible? I get paid mileage, but only part of the federal standard. I can claim the rest on my taxes. Which will only amount to about 200 this year, but at least 800, if not 1000 next year.
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Mar 10, 2015 19:52
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There's an IT union?
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Mar 11, 2015 04:43
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Come to think of it, an IT union would be one of the few where striking would actually make an immediate difference. Or possibly just end up with everyone replaced by outsourced sysadmins and barely-qualified field techs being led by the hand. Could go either way. At least the companies wouldn't just be able to hire any unemployed man with a strong back as scabs, unlike coal mines.
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Mar 11, 2015 06:21
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:I need all union talk to stop. Okay, but in exchange we need a health plan that isn't an HDHP.
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Mar 11, 2015 18:50
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Bob Morales posted:Go in at 9 you mean. Buddy of mine retired a few years ago, he was a SUPPLY CLERK (ordered office supplies and delivered paper) and he made $24/hr. Crazy. I applied for a job a couple weeks ago. Local government, super cheap cost of living maybe 15 minutes outside of a town with super high cost of living and all the associated restaurants and a few decent stores. 1 year of experience, basic desktop service stuff. Started at 42,000, up to 50,000. Sent in an application, but I misunderstood the process and accidentally submitted it before attaching a cover letter. 
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Mar 11, 2015 22:25
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MJBuddy posted:I'm not saying a union won't increase your salary. I'm saying there's zero % chance I'd have my job if a union existed because they'd do what literally every union does and severely restrict entry into their market. I also work with people who are basically immune to being fired and basically just bail them out all day, so I'd rather not be responsible for bailing out more people. Or are you just trolling? Because if you unironically think that having the right to quit (and not be able to pay rent) is anywhere near equal to the right to fire somebody (and make them unable to pay rent), I don't have any adjectives I'm willing to use for you.
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Mar 12, 2015 03:56
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Eh, no problem. We all have lovely days/weeks/jobs (I'm in the last category). Today I went out to a customer site only to find that the customer is temporarily working at a site 45 minutes away, but dispatch had put her normal site's address in the ticket. It was an issue I've never seen before, with the user being denied access to some cloud storage that masquerades as a drive on the PC. I call our account-specific helpdesk twice, and their advice is to backup and re-image the computer. I say I'm pretty sure that isn't going to help, considering that it's not an actual drive and that nobody else at the site is having the same problem, even when using the same computer. They say "Well, that's all we've got, contact our supervisor for more help," and they don't give me a phone number, just an email. On a highest-priority call. I email the guy, but I didn't have a response by end of day, and after a while I just went home because by the time I could get to the city the user was working in and find the site that I'd never been to before, she would have been done for the day. I emailed my boss about it, told her exactly what was going on, if I catch any poo poo about not getting the call completed, I am throwing our helpdesk under the bus so hard. They speak English fairly well, but when I explained the situation, they completely misunderstood what I wanted. They thought I was asking if I needed to go to the site she was actually at, when I was asking what I needed to do to fix this problem I had never seen before. Because I'm not driving an extra 45 minutes each way when you can't even point me in the direction of documentation of how to fix the issue. We've got some of our helpdesks in-country and some outsourced, and the difference is just night and day. I think part of it is most of our on-shore helpdesk is people who got promoted out of my position, so they actually have some experience.
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Mar 12, 2015 05:15
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Yeah. User A can access the app via her normal computer, (computer B). She can't access it from the computer at her temporary location, computer A. User B can access his app from computer A. I was thinking it sounded like a profile permissions issue, possibly related to her not being set up properly to use that particular PC. I'll float the idea to the helpdesk supervisor, if I can get hold of him. If it is that, it's probably considered too complex to be done by me. The funny thing is, they apparently tried unsuccessfully to resolve the issue remotely before they dispatched me. Not sure what the hell I'm supposed to do about an issue like this, I think that's just their fallback plan for everything. What we were trying didn't work? Send out a tech, no matter how obviously non-hardware related it is, and no matter how much we hamstring them on software fixes.
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Mar 12, 2015 06:28
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Ynglaur posted:FFS why don't you throw out some GoT spoilers while you're at it. Spoilers: That character you like dies, pee pee, poo poo, it is a bad series.
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Mar 13, 2015 00:02
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The problem description field in our ticketing system is maybe 200 characters long. If you need more room, you can write a note with practically no limit on length (somewhere in the thousands). But instead of taking advantage of that feature, about half of the tickets I get, dispatch tries to write novellas in the problem description field, and they always get cut off before the problem is actually described. They take up all the space with the name of the customer, the hostname, where it is, and how long it's been happening. Half of those have their own fields, and they always take twice as much space as they need to for any of them. So about half the time I have to go to the customer site or call the customer site to get a description of what is happening, so I know what parts even need ordering. I either hear about the job I interviewed for today or next Friday, I'm really hoping I get it. The recruiter said she'd negotiate for me, but I'll even take the same pay rate just to get out of here. I think she's one of those recruiters that gets paid in proportion to the salary the employee gets, though, so she should have my back on this.
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Mar 13, 2015 18:55
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Computer nerds lacking social skills? Why I never!
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Mar 14, 2015 06:00
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incoherent posted:You should tell them you only like indie-approved metal, like mastodon and any any band that doesn't fit those parameters you're not interested in. Because I told a metalhead that once, and he stuttered a bit and went on about a band that wasn't like it at all. Then I asked him if he liked earth and sort of walked away. I like Earth's stuff, as long as Dio or Ozzie were singing  I used to listen to so much loving metal. Not so much anymore. I have made it to all of Agalloch's Colorado shows, and I plan on going to this next one even though it's probably going to be a rehash of the last one, since they haven't put out any new material. gently caress Mastodon. Baroness was better anyway.
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Mar 16, 2015 06:50
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stuxracer posted:It was a cool vacation I guess since flying back and forth was more expensive than the hotel stay and I can work remote. Hotel laundry was pro. Each pair of socks, underwear, etc. all wrapped in tissue paper and in boxes. That sounds cool, but on the other hand I always hate going overnight to places. I would probably be in the worst mood having to stay for multiple days.
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Mar 18, 2015 04:12
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We have a terrible sharepoint site for our procedural documentation. In general, about 10% of the searches I do bring up the document I'm looking for. Even the majority of the time, if I copy and paste the title of a document that someone provides for me, it doesn't show up. And now I'm getting in trouble for not following the right steps in de-installing a printer for an obscure account, when I was following the only piece of documentation I could find on it.
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Mar 18, 2015 16:11
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Oh, no. I'm not one of the sharepoint admins (although I wouldn't be surprised if you're right). I'm just one of the people that has to use it every other day or so. And given how under-manned we have been on a consistent basis, and how nobody in the company has gotten a raise in 4-5 years, I'm guessing the sharepoint admins are too busy or too underpaid to fix it.
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Mar 18, 2015 16:49
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flosofl posted:Yeah are FSTs were NOT happy. Every time one failed, the techs had to fill out form as part of the RCA. They generated a couple hundred in about a month until HP (who had been in twice weekly meetings with us to figure it out) finally opened a call with, "Uh... we think we know what's happening..." I would too. That's one thing I'm not going to miss at all from this job (out of several). Having to spend the night in little towns in the middle of nowhere 1-3 hours away from home. And it's not like you can ever have a relaxed evening in a nice hotel or something, either. The nicest hotel I've stayed in was a Holiday Inn Express, and you can't really be relaxed because you have to work until midnight at least and then get up to start work again before 8 in the morning. At least tonight's after-hours call was close enough to home that I could drive back, rather than spending the night.
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Mar 23, 2015 07:42
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BaseballPCHiker posted:I cannot deal with my company anymore. poo poo, crap, feces, and more poo poo just keeps getting dumped on my team. Had a meeting with one of the new interim bosses. Got a scolding for not having one helpdesk guy in the room at all times. I brought up that just last Wednesday I was told that having my team ask for tickets and not immediately respond to drop-ins and remoting into computers was deemed to impersonal. That because of our insistence on tickets we were deemed not "customer service" oriented enough and that we needed to get up with the user walk to their desk and take a look at the problem right then and there. Interim boss managed to stammer out something about having to walk a fine line before asking why morale seemed so low. These people are clueless and I cant get out of here soon enough. You are applying for other jobs, right? 420  every day.
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Mar 23, 2015 21:02
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Jeoh posted:I announced I'm quitting a month ago. This is from like halfway down the last page, but my soon-to-be-former company is in a similar position. At least with our location. Halfway through December, we had six people. One lead on the lead on-call rotation, one specialist on a particular account on that account's rotation, and four generalist techs on our rotation. The four of us were in an on-call rotation. It started Wednesday and ended Tuesday, whoever just ended their on-call rotation gets Wednesday off. So you'd end up working nine days straight. Not great, but I don't really see how a 24/7 on-call rotation can do much better without swapping people out multiple times a week. We had a person on Tues-Sat for a while, but I guess they decided we didn't need that anymore at some point. One of the generalists leaves at the end of December. Possibly because they took our vans away, his personal vehicle was a beat-up old Jeep, and we have sites over 150 miles away. So we're down to five people, and at least I was already working constant overtime. We also stop getting the Wednesday after our on-call ends off. So we work one five day week, then one twelve-day. Which is pretty rough, but I figure it will get back to normal once we get a new hire. Then near the end of January, still no new hire, and another generalist puts in his two weeks. I don't think much of it for the first few days, since I just started school and I'm busy. Then I realize that means there will only be two generalists left, and we'll be alternating weekends. I start looking for a new job right at the beginning of February. This is when I find out that there was no posting out for a new tech. So there was no new hire coming to bring us back to a reasonable on-call rotation. Near the beginning of March, our specialist quits. He had been covering more and more of our normal calls since we were short-handed. There's another specialist an hour away from here, I assume he was picking up the special account calls that our guy couldn't. I'm also not sure, but as far as I know there were only two specialists in our region, and there was an on-call rotation for them when there were two. So these guys might have been working 12 day weeks for much longer than I was. I never really paid attention to their on-call, though, so there could have been more people. This is when they put out a posting for a new technician. Only when we're down by half. After that, we were down to half strength. Thankfully, there are third party companies we contract some tickets out to, otherwise we would all be working 80 hour weeks. I've still done 50 hours for the past three weeks, though. And after next Sunday, I'm gone. There will be two people servicing an area that can take four hours to drive across. I don't what they're going to have to do to get this service area back up to a staffing point where people aren't just going to get burnt out and quit. But that's not my problem, my problem is doing well at this new job so they decide to convert me to FTE and I can negotiate a raise.
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Mar 28, 2015 16:53
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Syano posted:Im trying to find the holy grail of easy to make/tastes better than Mcdonalds coffee. I have a Keurig because there is nothing simpler than popping a k cup into the thing and hitting brew. I hate the wastefulness of it though and I also dont think it tastes great. Ive tried a french press but the cleanup of a press is just too much work when Im trying to get out the door in the morning or get back to my desk to work in the afternoon. Is an Aeropress a healthy mix between the two? I don't know about at work, but I always just left the press at home until I came back from work and cleaned it then.
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Mar 31, 2015 16:18
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Well that explains why Sams Club and Costco call it a Membership desk. I'd never thought about it before.
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Apr 1, 2015 02:45
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Che Delilas posted:You have to actually pay for a membership in those stores to be allowed to shop there, so there's that too. If they didn't require a membership, they would just have called it a Customer Service desk. I was saying that's why they don't call it a Member Service desk. Or maybe not, maybe the adolescent jokes never crossed their mind, and it focus grouped better or something.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:46
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Prosthetic_Mind posted:Recruiters can be really lovely. Out of college I had one call me up and try to get me to move to another state for a part time helpdesk job. Yeah, my recruiter for this new job has had me covered pretty well. I don't have much experience, but as far as I can tell, a sign of whether a recruiter is any good is whether they give you details about who you're interviewing with and send interview tips. Maybe for less junior positions the interview tips thing isn't going to hold, because they assume that if you've gotten that far up the food chain you know how to interview. On the other hand, I've gotten maybe five calls for what I can only assume is the same position over the past eight months. They must be having a really hard time finding people to run cable for datacenters in Cheyenne.
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Apr 4, 2015 07:53
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Depends on how soon he gets out of there.
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Apr 10, 2015 07:08
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Phoneposting, so no source, but I'm pretty sure sitting upright is bad for your back. 135 degrees is supposed to be healthier. I know my back feels better after hours of leaning back than sitting at 90 degrees. Doesn't have to do with monitor height, just that illustration.
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Apr 13, 2015 21:42
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Technically, sitting for most of your day in any position is bad for you, if you want to be like that.
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Apr 13, 2015 22:02
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:You've never worked at a hedge fund, I take it. You don't tell a room full of 35 year old trust fund babies that each make 500k/year to turn off their monitors. You hire someone to come in and do it for them. When I supported their training floor, I had to be in at 730am, and go through a checklist of items before any of them came in to verify everything was good. First item on the list: turn on all the TVs and set them to CNNMoney and Bloomberg TV. If this was not done, there was an angry email sent to my manager. You make dealing with the capitalist devil sound very appealing.
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Apr 15, 2015 17:36
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Bob Morales posted:retard old guy configured a server and since he can't type or spell he called it MBSEVER Why has your company not severed?
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Apr 15, 2015 21:38
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I mean, on one hand, it sucks not being able to trust your company to have your back. On the other hand, it's nice not to have to give a poo poo about the company's success. gently caress stock options. Pissing me off: people who type in all caps. Motherfucker, I don't care how old you are, you aren't older than a typewriter, and you aren't so busy that you have an excuse for every single response being three words or less when I am asking questions to help you. If I didn't know I'd get in trouble, it would be tempting to respond in similarly obtuse language to people like this. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Apr 27, 2015 |
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Apr 27, 2015 18:36
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Pissing me off: Am I the only one that was told never to discuss politics or religion at work? I'm bringing in headphones tomorrow, I've heard enough about the riots and Obama.
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Apr 29, 2015 01:55
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At my first job, someone was saying how if black people could call white people cracker, white people should be able to use the n word. I disagreed, and the next day I got pulled into the manager's office with my supervisor and her supervisor. Someone had told them that I said I was better than everyone else because I was white. My supervisor's supervisor was black. I explained that what I had actually said was that being a straight white man in America gave me every advantage in the world, through no merit or effort of my own. I was told I shouldn't get involved with conversations like that, but at least I defused a situation that probably would have ended up with me getting written up by HR. I should have told them how the conversation started, but I didn't have any proof it was the woman who wanted to say the n word who reported me.
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Apr 29, 2015 15:56
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If only more lawyers did it. 
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May 1, 2015 03:50
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Exit Strategy posted:Man, this 9-5 support shift suuuuuuure is exciting. Can you spend the rest of the time studying for certs to help you ?edit: Collateral Damage posted:My favorite are the HP array controller cache batteries which technically aren't hot swappable, but I've never had a problem doing it that way. Since the little fuckers have a MTBF of less than a year it would severely affect Thankfully, I had a company phone that I had no compunctions about using the hotspot to browse the forums while I was waiting. On the other hand, the company's estimated time to task said it should take no more than an hour and a half, so I had to write up why it took me longer. The third and last time I did it, thankfully closer to home, the store's helpdesk forgot to call me back for an hour and a half. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 17:10 on May 17, 2015 |
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May 17, 2015 16:51
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my uptime
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Ursine Asylum posted:If they go by Joe Smith and their given names are all Joseph, how is that any better? We do preferred names for our SSO IDs and directories, and there are a lot of nicknames that have absolutely nothing to do with their real name. I know, because it's T1's job to make accounts. It would be nice to be able to script it, but scripts are disabled on our computers. Actually, I should check that again since I wasn't made an AD admin until after I tried.
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May 17, 2015 23:05
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Wibla posted:I can almost see you going at the innards of a laptop with a dremel to improve airflow Ny friend picked up a $100 gaming laptop off craigslist that was clogged with so much dust it would shut down after a half hour. He opened it up, cleaned it out, and dremeled out some fake airflow vents so they actually worked. Now he uses it daily.
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May 18, 2015 13:57
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I'm also not sure a USB port can push 75w. Maybe a powered USB port, but I've never seen one on a laptop.
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May 18, 2015 16:42
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Not pissing me off: a user actually being able to help himself. I just had a user add a printer by IP with me doing nothing but giving him the IP off of Meraki.
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May 18, 2015 20:14
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