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Spazz posted:Is resignation an option when you just don't want to clean up someone else's mess? It's looking really attractive right now. I did this from a job a couple years ago. We were doing a project that was impossible for us to accomplish. The boss kept talking about how much money we'd make if we did it, but it was so far out of what we could do that it was impossible to finish. It would have required nights and weekends for months since were replacing a live set of emergency telephony equipment for several buildings. There was absolutely no way I was going to do that, and then maybe scratch out a 3% raise, and 1k in bonus, if the boss was feeling generous. I was so stressed and physical drained from working on the job my left eye developed a crazy stye. I talked to a recruiter, and in three days I had a job interview, and had a job offer a couple days later. I even took a personal day for the interview, and my boss was so upset I was taking a personal day he demanded I still come to work. I ended up going from the interview right to the client site and working all night. It was awful. When I quit he flipped out and asked me if I wasn't "man enough to to this project and make a bunch of money" I just laughed. Seriously, you kill yourself if you want. Two years later, the project still isn't done, and they are totally replacing everything they did a second time since it doesn't meet the client needs. So yes, resignation is totally a valid option. However as a poster mentioned earlier learn to just mentally punch out of the job and coast until you can find something else. Life is too short to be stuck in a job that just makes you miserable. Also, I'd gather that a job that makes you feel miserable is also underpaying you and under-valuing you, so if you bounce around a couple times you'll learn what the market is really like.
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Mar 26, 2015 10:00
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Agrikk posted:
I'd tell you a UDP joke, but I don't know if you'll get it.
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Mar 27, 2015 01:37
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Sheep posted:I had a similar thing happen. I got a call out of the blue with one of the office managers going "WE CAN'T PRINT WHY ISN'T THIS WORKING FIX IT". So we spend a good thirty minutes troubleshooting only for me to hear "should we just call the copier company guy? I have his number since he was here yesterday swapping the old copier with a new one" said in the background. So ... not only was it a leased copier, but they had replaced it with a totally different unit the day before and didn't bother to tell anyone. A complete waste of time all around. Troubleshoot is one of those skills that impossible to teach, I have no idea how you develop it. Before I was in IT, I was a jet mechanic and worked on aircraft radios and instruments, and I had to troubleshoot problems all the time. You learn to see inside a problem and figure out the moving parts and how hey are malfunctioning. I think that really equipment me for a career in IT. I run into this scenario all the time: my job is to manage and setup server environments for developers. I install a tomcat instance, and some servlets, and it's all working with the base config, they start, the logs are clean and it's all good. A few weeks later I get a call from the developers. Devs: The tomcat you installed isn't working. Fat Jony Ives: Ok, did it work when I first delivered it to you? Devs: Yes, but it stopped working last night Fat Jony Ives: What were you working on? Can you roll back your changes and see if it starts up? Devs: No, because we didn't do anything. It just stopped working. Fat Jony Ives: Wait, you've been working on that servlet for weeks, how can you "not have done anything" Devs: No, we did nothing. It's just not working. Fat Jony Ives: *does a find . -mtime -1* Yesterday you edited this XML file, what did you do? Devs: Oh, well we didn't do anything except totally change that file, how could that do it? Fat Jony Ives: *rolls back file and it starts*
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Mar 31, 2015 22:04
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Wrath of the Bitch King posted:The perfect solution for me has always been 2 days working from home and 3 days working from work. It prevents people from forgetting that you exist and maintains relationships with everyone you work with. Those innocuous lunches you take with a few work buddies to Chili's are more important in the long run than you realize. My previous job was 24/7 client support, we did sort of high end broadcast gear, so our callers were news stations trying to go live and having failed shots, so it was critical and sort of high stress. We had a guy that worked from home Friday to Monday, and covered weekends. He worked on the other side of country, so his time zone difference made it convenient. Anyways, he was impossible to work with. The boss had never met him, since he was remote when the boss was hired, was always trying to figure out a way to fire him. He'd always have his kid around while trying to work, and customers would complain about it all the time. He'd also go out and just have his laptop with him, and forward our support line to his cell phone. He was always calling me (I was his elevation path) for help with problems that "he couldn't solve" but I'd hear him be at a bar, a barbecue, or at the mall. So I'd get stuck working on weekends just because he didn't feel like taking a call or his laptop was dead, and he'd pretend that it was a hard problem. He was a complete jackass to work with. He'd maybe get three calls each weekend day, totalling one hour of work. He was supposed to do client maintenance all weekend, offline checks of systems and all that, but he never did. If you asked him to upgrade a system on a saturday he'd flip out because "you don't manage me, I'm too busy blah blah blah." Eventually the boss changed our phone system, and didn't give him access to forward calls to his cell. He flipped out. The boss asked him specifically why he needed to forward calls. His reason was that if he's on desk and needs to go to the toilet he can't be tied to the desk. The boss flipped out and said "if you are answering client calls while taking a poo poo you are fired. Next reason?" Then the guy stuttered for a few seconds. The boss then let him have it. "I know you are going out all weekend and doing whatever, you need to be at your desk all weekend" and so on and so forth.
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Apr 1, 2015 15:30
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Migishu posted:Welcome to the big boys club. Your membership T-shirt is in the mail All my users are super nice but English as a second language guys. They send super rude emails because they don't get the nuance. I read them and laugh and send them how to correct it for politeness.
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Apr 3, 2015 01:01
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Thanks Ants posted:Today's piss-off: an Office 365 migration that was performed hastily due to *~reasons~* relating to contracts and fallings out with providers, with a bunch of poo poo from an on-prem Exchange that had suffered from the shotgun approach to assigning permissions, and now I have the winning combination of an admin assistant with multiple delegated calendars, Outlook on Mac, and a WAN link performing to standards I can only describe as 'broken'. I mentioned a manager a few pages back that was a jerk. When the boss decided to fire him the plan was the following. Have him schedule and perform an exchange migration from an old 2k3 server to a new one. But let him do it all himself so it'd be a disaster so they could use it as an excuse to fire him. Then after he was gone I was supposed to go back and redo the migration right. Makes sense right? One of the other engineers was like "this is insane" and just did the migration himself. Super-NintendoUser fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 22:45
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Spazz posted:In the short term: Grab some unwanted text books/technical manuals and raise your monitors. Looking down like that will gently caress your neck up over time and can cause serious posture problems. I thought that reams of paper were the universally accepted method of monitor raising?
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Apr 13, 2015 16:58
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Tailored Sauce posted:Have any of you guys left your jobs because you felt morally compromised? That's the road I feel I'm going down. The job I mentioned before that I quit was a really terrible job stresswise, but one of the things that motivated me to quit was that we had a project that I didn't feel comfortable doing. It was a emergency paging system with some life safety applications. We were switching out an old analog system for a new VOIP based on, and I really felt like it was incredible dangerous and irresponsible. I voiced those concerns and was basically told "it's fine, we can guarantee uptime so it's ok" but I was actually configuring the servers and there wasn't any sort of high available component at all. Their idea was to just have two identical servers and if one died, just switch to the other one, but we had no clear plan how to switch, and the software didn't actually do it. It was a nightmare project that I worked on for nights and weekends for a couple months, and then when faced with another six months of it, I couldn't deal with it and found a new job.
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Apr 13, 2015 18:46
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Kazinsal posted:What the everloving gently caress is the point of a printer no one can find? How about a printer everyone can find? I once installed a VOIP PBX for a small brokerage firm that had all public IPs on everything. This included their eight PCs and two network printers.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:17
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Ynglaur posted:Sure thing. While we're busy doing jobs that aren't our own, here are my car keys. Please have my car pulled around at 5:00pm sharp. I have so many stories. Sorry to keep telling anecdotes, but one time a hedge fund I worked for called me at 6am. I happened to be at another client nearby. The elevator had broken so they couldn't get into their office. There was a door by the back entrance up the fire stairs, but it didn't open from the outside. The guy said "I don't care what you have to do, but we need to get into the office so we can trade!" I asked him why he called his IT guy of all people, and his answer was basically "you solve problems. so solve this one." I ended up getting a sludge hammer (there was construction going on in another floor) and beating their door down so they could enter the office. I made sure the owner was there, so when the alarm went off and the police arrived I wasn't arrested.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:25
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m.hache posted:You know, sometimes there are tasks outside of our job scope that are worth doing. I know, I used to have a screen shot of the ticket printed out. 1HR: Beat down fire door with sludge hammer. Collateral Damage posted:Hey, look, buddy. I'm an The ticket for that one was equally interesting: 4HR: Watched a video of a bag blowing around by a brick wall until I cried.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:35
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Current piss off thing: When my application specialists misconfigure a tomcat servlet and then ask me to fix it. When I ask them what they were doing before it broke the answer is always nothing. What are they doing all day? The servlet started up fine and logged no errors when I installed it and set it up for them three weeks ago, if they've done "nothing" then why did it suddenly crash? Oh, you changed the entire configuration? Did you happen to maybe check for an error in your config? Second piss off thing: When I my application specialists can't fix a problem, and I do a quick grep through their xml files for incorrect variables, and I find a handful of them. When I show them the errors, now I have to figure out what problem having those typos could cause. Why not just fix them? How am I supposed to know what having $REPOSITORY instead of $REPOSITORY1 will do, I'm not an application specialist, I just know there's a problem because in the log I see the servlet trying to connect to http://:9090/servlet instead of http://repository1ip:9090/servlet, and I can guess that's a problem. How do I prove this negative? Why am I standing at your cubicle for an hour while you argue amongst yourself about it? Just let me fix it. Third piss off thing: When my application specialists ask me to make a change to the environment variables on a server, I do, and I ask them to test it since it's 6:00pm and I want to go home. They assure me they don't need to test it and I can leave, and then at 7:00pm they call me and ask why "X is broken". Why didn't you test it before I left?
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Apr 15, 2015 14:36
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Venusy posted:Found out why my supervisor wants to remove DHCP from our branches: the branches are not trusted to power in their own workstations. So each morning, a huge script - a mess of PowerShell, netsh, and regexes - runs to grab workstation names, IPs, and MACs from DHCP, output to CSV, then uses that to send the Wake-on-LAN magic packet. Same CSV is then used to turn them off at night. My old hedge fund had about 40 traders in a smallish office. Each trader had 2PCs at their desk, each PC powered atleast 2 30" monitors. Some of the desks had 6 30's. 4 monitors*40 traders=160 total monitors, in a space with insufficient cooling. They paid a guy to come in every night and power all the monitors off after the traders left and then to power them back on in the morning before they arrived. If they didn't, when they came in each morning the office was about 95 degrees.
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Apr 15, 2015 14:56
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:This kind of sounds like a problem that fixes itself when you tell everyone to stop being a dick and turn off their monitors because that's why it's so hot. 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. Let me also clarify that these guys were actually really nice, and treated me very well and respectfully. They paid a premium white glove service. From an IT perspective, it was a really good place to work.They'd give me projects with no budget restrictions just an understanding that they wanted it done, and done right. They also had a fully stocked galley kitchen, catered lunches and dinners, and would often take me and the other IT consultants out to really nice dinners when they celebrated milestones in the funds performances. Yes, these were the guys that asked me to beat down a door with a sledgehammer (lol misspelled before), and at $250/hour, I'd do it again in a second.
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Apr 15, 2015 15:31
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Spazz posted:Yup. When these guys are raking in millions for the company, they just want them as happy as possible or else they'll jump ship. I had a short term contract at a financial firm and one of their brokers created a several page report with numbers on how he would have increased efficiency if he had a second desktop with two monitors attached to it. He didn't want four monitors on one PC, he wanted two desktops and two monitors on each. He got what he wanted. When they'd hire a new guy I'd always end up in a meeting with him and the fund partners, where the new guy would ask for something ridiculous like a full rack blade server. One guy asked for just, and got it. A 16 bay top of the line HP blade server with just tricked out hardware and blades, I installed it and set it up for him, but since it was sort of "his" he changed all the administrator passwords and locked me out of it. About a year later they fired him since he was just a real prick. The managers had no idea what he was doing with the blade, and I just unplugged it and it sat dormant for a couple years. Eventually I pulled it out of the rack and they dumped it on eBay.
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Apr 15, 2015 16:28
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22 Eargesplitten posted:You make dealing with the capitalist devil sound very appealing. I honestly really enjoyed the job, it was nice to have a client that didn't care what something cost, and was willing to invest in doing everything right. Ynglaur posted:Serious Hardware / Software Crap › More poo poo that pisses you off: Forcible entry will cost you $250/hour This was not my first forcible entry job, nor was it my last. I've picked a few server rack locks with my handmade lock pick sets for clients, as well as opening up an alarm panel to fix a broken door lock relay when my company didn't pay the vendor for the install and they refused to give us service.
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Apr 15, 2015 19:11
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poo poo that pissed me off a few years ago: My company was a consultant worked for MAJOR TV NEWS STATION. We sent them a new product to demo, the server component was a server running Ubuntu that ran our application. The MAJOR TV NEWS STATIONS IT Director received the server, and flipped out. He sent me an email with the following text: quote:
I attempted to explain to him what Linux was and that just made him angry. He had no idea what Ubunutus was and refused to work with it. This guy is in charge of a MAJOR TV NEWS STATION's network.
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Apr 15, 2015 22:01
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Inspector_666 posted:At least they're bothering to give it its own enclosed area. I helped setup a server for a small sized data-recovery company in NYC. This was in the business office, not the lab, but they had the server rack, with maybe eight servers, right in the regular cubicle area. The rack was horribly noisy, and all the cables for power and network ran across a walking area with a piece of carpet over them. It was a daily occurrence that someone would trip over it. They also stacked a bunch of tall plants around it, to hopefully drown out the noise, but they fans on the servers would suck in the leaves and block themselves and the servers would die. It was a nightmare.
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Apr 16, 2015 22:33
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Gothmog1065 posted:PIsses me off: Being guaranteed that you would be the person to get a spot, then not getting the spot. Don't loving set my expectations to fail. I have an anecdote along these lines. It's TL:DR, but It's interesting anyways. I worked at my previous job for one year. I get my yearly review, all stellar. I travelled all over the country dealing with upset clients, saving accounts that wanted to drop us. The week before my review, I saved a particularly important client, and got some praise for it. Fast forward one month. I get called into a meeting with my manager, and the newest guy on our team. The manager says that the two of us are the lowest reporting techs ticket wise. The manager tells us that the higher ups are concerned, and they are upset their highest paid and lowest paid guys are doing so badly. Right away the new guy (at his first tech job) flips out and gets super defensive. I was sort of mentoring him and training him, so it reflects badly on me. I calmly ask the boss to see some ticket stats and the boss tells me "shut up, you can't bullshit your way out of this one." I mention that for the past two months, I've been traveling four out of the eight weeks, to one client, and I took three weeks off to have wrist surgery, so my numbers for the past few months are going to be lower. He calls me a liar, and tells me he sees me reading tech blogs all day and reading "hacker life sites". I try to explain that I'm doing a lot of bash scripting and working with FFMPEG for a new project, and usually I have a few articles and how-tos up on one monitor while I work in the other. He flips out, tells me he's tired of my poo poo, and that I'm basically fired, but he's been pulling for me for weeks because he knows I can do more. I tell him this is quite a shock, since I was giving a written review just three weeks ago, that said I was doing fantastic. He tells me that means nothing, and I already have one foot out the door. I ask for some time to think about it and talk tomorrow. He tells me to go back to my desk and just try to work some tickets so I can get my numbers up and that maybe tomorrow he'll see. So I go back to my desk, dejected. I was hired as a senior tech, so I really only deal with escalations and serious network/linux related problems. Most of our calls are from users that just need to be told to plug the device in, or whatever. We also rolled out an iPhone app that required every user to call in and get it licensed, which was weird, but each license request took about 30 seconds, but required a ticket per iPhone. So, a company could call in with ten iPhones, and in 5 minutes the guy that got the call would get ten tickets. I have access to the ticketing system as an admin. I check the ticket database, and see that me and the the other guy have so few tickets, I can't speak for him, but my tickets are all multi-day long, serious network issue tickets. The other guys all have 30-40 tickets a day, "answer phone, client needed to know which jack to plug mic into", 30 tickets, "licensed thirty iPhones". I generated some reports, referencing everyones tickets, then the number of iPhone tickets, or tickets that were just "gave client info" tickets. The numbers then were clearly in my favor. I type my boss a really respectful email, apologizing for the situation and asking if we can sit down and make sure we define the expected goals he has for me, and make sure that I'm aligned with them. He doesn't respond. The next day, we all come in, and he gets called into the directors office and is fired. They call me in next and offer me his job. All good, right? Nope. So they tell me they want me to have a three month training period, since I don't have any real management experience. Fair enough. They also tell me to start reviewing my teams projects and get it all organized, and start having everyone check in with me for project status. Fine. The manager used to make us fill out and email him this insane Excel sheet every week with project updates. It was impossible to use, full of typos, dropdown that didn't work, it was a mess. So I sign us up for Trello, import all the projects to it, and it's all good. The directors love it, and ask if I have any other ideas. I suggest we start using a shared OneNote notebook to share client data (like our main office asked us to do months ago). We sign up for it, and start collaborating, it's all good. A few days later, a client calls in and asks for a guy I work with. He's out, so I send him an email asking him to call them back. He responds with an email, flipping out. "You are not my boss, who gave you the right to tell me what to do, you've been an rear end in a top hat since MANAGER was fired, this has to end." He copies everyone above is, like fifteen people. It's crazy. So I talk to the director about it, and he says "if you want to manage this team, you have to deal with things like this, so talk to him and work it out". Which makes no sense. Regardless, I sit down with the guy and ask him what's up. He restates that I'm not his boss, infact, he should be telling me what to do. I stop him, "what do you mean? You should be telling me what to do?" Turns out, the director told us both he wants us to take the manager job, but decided to sit back and see who did a better job, without telling either of us. Also he didn't really tell the team that the two of us were going to be taking over. It was crazy. We go back into the director's office, and ask him. The other guy basically says "I'm going to beat him and take this manager job". I respond "you can't be serious, you want us to compete? This is really unprofessional." The director tells us to work it out on our own. In the meantime, the team is suffering because no one is really in charge. The director says he originally wanted to promote me, but since they "laid off" the previous manager instead of firing him, their lawyers claimed that if they filled his position so quick, it'd leave them open for a lawsuit. Therefore, they had to back off their plans, but decided not to tell me so they could see how I did as a manager (with out telling the people I was supposed to manage). In the meantime, I guess the other guy was someone offered the same thing, I have no idea. So for a few weeks, I was acting like their manager, with out their knowledge, and they hated me, they just assumed I stepped up since I'm a prick or whatever. The next day, I get pulled into a meeting with the CEO. He apologizes to me for the nonsense, explains to me again that they don't want to get sued, so they need to back off plans to give me a promotion. He'd also like me to keep acting like their manager, but with no pay raise, or actual promotion. I tell him that's not really fair, if they want me to run this team, they need to give me the tools and incentives to make it happen. We've had two managers fired in six months, so why should I take this revolving door position? He tells me what he expects from the manager of this team, he wants to see him when he comes in at 8am, and see him when he leaves at 7pm. This job needs to be his life, since the PSG department is the life of the company. I tell him I'm not interested in that, especially for no pay raise and to be in charge of a team that hates me. I call my recruiter and get a new job, giving my notice with in the week. Everyone is shocked I'm quitting.
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Apr 27, 2015 17:28
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Manslaughter posted:Good thing you got out of there, it sounds like you were going to become the imminent vector of blame for that whole fiasco very shortly. The best part is that right after they fired the manager, the recruiter we both used, called me and said "They just fired MANAGER, he called me and told me that you were next. Do you need me to line up some interviews?" I had just been offered his job, the recruiter said that was odd, and that he'd line up some for me anyways. Fil5000 posted:How on earth did that director think that was going to play out. It was horrible. For a month, I had everyone reporting to me, and they had no idea why, and they were all chap-assed about it, with good reason.
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Apr 27, 2015 17:55
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evol262 posted:Nothing is ever guaranteed until you get an offer letter, and filling positions with external candidates instead of internal promotions is normal. Never expect to "get the spot" unless you change companies. The best part was that we used Microsoft Dynamics to do ticket tracking. The site was super slow, and it was never really setup well, so the ticket form had around 100 fields, and they were all completely baffling. They also didn't have a place to bill how long you took on the ticket, and the company only measured you by ticket numbers, no actually billed time or anything. Migishu posted:Burger joint we used to go to for lunch near work closed down. No one is in the mood for burgers anymore because they were the only decent place within walking distance. This is probably the main reason I like working in NYC. I worked for a bit in an office park, with just a Burger King nearby, and it was awful.
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Apr 27, 2015 20:00
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captkirk posted:The cafeteria is on of my company's claims to fame. $4 for a reasonable lunch sized portion of steak and mashed potatoes? Yes please. Volmarias posted:Free is even better. Yeah because food at the grocery store costs nothing. It's honesty hard to beat a $4 full meal even if you cook it yourself. One of the things I love love love about my new job is that there's no expectation to sit at your desk and eat. My last couple jobs were of the mindset to eat at your desk while you keep working. This job the guys take hour lunch, go for a walk around the city, grab a coffee, come back to work. It's wonderful.
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Apr 28, 2015 14:27
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Trastion posted:I used to go out to various restaurants for lunch every day as I work near a good variety and have an hour lunch. Lately I have been going Disc Golfing during my lunches instead. A Clif Bar and a water and my discs. I get exercise and work on my game and don't think about work at all. Plus I save about $10/day not going out to eat. Eh, I bike to and from the train, plus I walk two miles a day, so I don't need exercise. I typically get lunch out, it's hard to get small portions anywhere in NYC, so I have the leftovers the next day. This way I spend ten bucks every other day, and have a decent lunch.
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Apr 28, 2015 15:58
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22 Eargesplitten posted: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. My boss (the one from that story that was fired) was a HUGE tea party republican. One time I was just playing with a pocket knife I carry around, and he wheeled his chair over to give me an ear full about how Obama wants to put me in prison for having that, and my freedoms are being eroded blah blah. He talked for about fifteen minutes. Eventually he just started wheeling over to my cubicle two or three times a day to just rant about about the socialization of America. I would sort of egg him on to see how crazy he'd get, so I suppose it was my fault since he thought I was a listening ear. Or business was tangentially related to the news, so we had a bunch of TVs watching all the news channels. When the verdict in the Treyvon Martin case came out, he was talking about they were all animals, and that this is what Obama has caused, taking away all our freedoms. Seriously racist stuff. I made a comment that if riots broke out, I was just going to go to Best Buy and grab a new Macbook. He flipped out, gave me a formal warning and wrote me up for my "racist comment". I'm still confused about that one.
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Apr 29, 2015 14:45
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Five seconds ago me and a coworker were discussing if we believe in aliens, and I made the comment that if you believe in God and angels you are admitting you believe in extraterrestrial life. We were having an interesting rational and reasonable conversation about that, when another coworker just got in the middle and said "this is not office appropriate, so stop."
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Apr 29, 2015 16:00
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:He's not wrong. The conversation wasn't like "hey let me read the bible to you" we were discussing how you'd define life on another planet. Could we agree on a definition of "life" does it have to just be sentient? Could there be life out there that we just can't possible relate to since it's so far out of our understanding? vibur posted:On the other hand, if you're not involved in the conversation to begin with, you need to mind your own loving business. Yeah, this.
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Apr 29, 2015 19:04
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Religion, politics and bathroom habits are all basically the same thing, and none of them need to be discussed in random company.
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Sickening posted:I work for a small company and I don't allow this either. In 2015 it is very hard for even small companies to not be able to have company credit cards. If they don't they choose not to, not because they can't. The two jobs ago, when I was a working for a small consulting company (seven people), they had us expense everything. We didn't get paid back for months. It was awful. I'd fly all over the country and get hotels, meals, and the flights, all on my own. They routinely owned me thousands of dollars. Eventually I'd refuse to expense a trip unless they gave me a check for the cost before I bought everything. One of our engineers had to go to London on his own dime, last minute for two weeks. They owed him $10k for months. He was furious. When I quit, they owed me around three grand. I eventually got it, about three months later, but they nickel and dimed a bunch out of it, saying they weren't valid expenses. I had worked the weekend between the two weeks notice I given, I came in on Saturday to assist them in transitioning a project I was working on as a courtesy. I expensed my tolls and parking coming into NYC. They didn't pay it since I have a monthly train pass, and I could have taken the train. Except this was right after Sandy, so the trains were running a really delayed schedule, and it'd have taken me maybe 2 hours each way, versus 30 minutes driving. The passive aggressive accounts guy sent me a snotty email saying no one asked me to drive, so they weren't going to pay the $100 bucks I expensed. It was BS. Each time I had the funds to cover the bills, so I didn't have interest. I probably expensed maybe 20k a year. But I made it work for me, I got a really good reward card, and turned that into several really nice free vacations.
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Apr 30, 2015 15:01
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OAquinas posted:More common than you'd like to think. I managed to break most people in the company of this by implementing a 3-day retention policy on deleted items, but those special snowflake exempt legal/C levels... Oh, man, deleted items as a filing system always amused me. Here's a great stories: Me: Hey, you can't save 500GB of music on your work computer, in your shared folders, it's replicated to our DR site, and it's not something we want on our system. Office Manager: OK, give me day to delete it Me: Ok, I'll check back with you in a few days. Later Me: Hey, your Office Manager saved half a terabyte of music on her work PC. I told her to delete it. Hedge Fund Manager: We told her to stop that, just go delete it right now. Me: Wait, are you sure? Hedge Fund Manager: Yes, go delete it right now. Tell her to talk to me if she's upset. Me: Sure thing. Later: Office Manager: HEY SIR FAT JONY IVES where is all my music? Me: Go talk to your manager. Office Manager: You don't have the right to delete my stuff blah blah blah Hedge Fund Manager: 
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Apr 30, 2015 19:15
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poo poo not pissing me off: I've been assigned to project at LARGE-EURO-BANK for the past few months, today I was reassigned to LARGE-AMERICAN-BANK. The old bank is on a sustainability kick, and gives you a plastic reusable cup when you get onboarded, but they don't have any paper cups anywhere. This new bank just has cups everywhere. I feel like Caligula with all these cups. Its beautiful.
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May 6, 2015 19:42
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Dick Trauma posted:I wrote a Filemaker DB that holds all my hardware and software. Each software license can be linked to a machine so I can open a machine's entry in the db and see all the software attached to it, then click on the software and be taken to the entry in the software table. Dick Trauma posted:I wrote a Filemaker DB that holds all my hardware and software. Dick Trauma posted:I wrote a Filemaker DB Dick Trauma posted:Filemaker 
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May 6, 2015 20:21
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My peeve is when my parents ask me for tech advice, I give it to them, they don't follow it, and then get upset at me when I don't want to help them with whatever to did. My mom wanted a cell phone, she's completely tech illiterate, so I told her to get an iPad. She ended up getting some anoi elf Android tablet, and when she attempted to factory default it, it just wiped the entire SDCard, and bricked itself. My bro spent HOURS trying to fix it, but if she had listened, it would have all been avoided. Later, she wanted a cellphone, she was looking at the Galaxy S3 for whatever reason, maybe it was cheaper, but I told them "no, get an iPhone." They were miffed about the cost difference, so I offered to buy her the iPhone with the understanding that they won't need to call me for support with it. My dad flipped out, like a maniac, that I wouldn't help mom with her phone if she didn't buy an iPhone. He was livid. It was completely ridiculous. I tried to explain to him that she wouldn't need help with the iPhone because it's clearly the easiest to use. The best anecdote is that one time a guy called me, not even someone I'm close too, and said "Hey, someone gave me a computer, but I don't know the password, how do I get the password?" He barely even said hello, just launched into this. I responded, I'm not sure, what does the computer look like? Is it Windows? Apple? He said he wasn't sure. I ask what do you see on the screen? He replied "Nepis" "Nepis?" "Nepis, yes" "What is Nepis?" I say. "is that on the screen, on the case, where?" "No idea, it just says 'Nepis'. How do I get the password?" "Sorry, I'm not familiar with Nepis. I don't know. Maybe take it to Best Buy or something and they can reinstall Nepis. I'm not sure how to do that." That was the end of it. One thing that came out of it is that now I use "Nepis" to refer to something that I have no understanding of.
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May 8, 2015 17:11
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Yeah I was pretty apoplectic (god what a word). I was the do everything guy as I mentioned, but it was a pretty small organization. The higher ups decided to grow it into a full IT department, so as a first step they hired an IT manager. I was like, look I know I'm 27 (at the time), but I'm your only IT guy, that makes me the manager. When it turned out I was wrong about that, it was time to move on. Not to pee in your wheaties or anything, but just because you are the most senior IT guy at a company doesn't make you a manager. This is no reflection on you at all, since I have no idea if you'd make a good manager or not. When I was a consultant, the company of ten people promoted the most senior engineer to be manager of the team (basically promoted to be over a team of me and one junior computer janitor) and while the guy was my best friend, he was an awful manager. He didn't know how to delegate, document, or actually project manager. He tried being a "cool friend manager" but ended up just being awful at it and causing me more work, since I just had to pick up the engineering work he didn't do now that he was promoted.
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May 8, 2015 20:24
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:"I work with Linux at the office, I have no idea how to fix a windows machine, but Joe over at Joe Blowe's computer can, here's his number." I have a wife and two kids, so I don't have time to CJ peoples stuff, but I have a friend that is single and enjoys doing it, so I just give them his number. Usually they pay him liquor or baked goods so everyone wins.
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May 9, 2015 00:15
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Fellatio del Toro posted:I do spend half my time reading these threads trying to figure out if people here are my coworkers. I set up a content filter at my last job. I had it set up to not block anything but just log the sites visited. SAF was by far the top one. The company had maybe 30/people in the office. I'm pretty sure it was just me refreshing every two seconds.
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May 13, 2015 05:05
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Sheep posted:Charter decided that instead of contacting us to see why the bills weren't being paid (they were) they'd just cut our internet connection. Had to fax them copies of the checks to prove that yes we paid them. We had a couple clients in the same building. One ordered a new PRI. Verizon owned the building copper so they came out to do the riser and drop off the line at the dmarc on the customers floor. During g their work the other client had a PRI go dead. I figure Verizon is messing with the risers so I find and grab the tech doing the work. All the riser runs to the floor they needed were full so they decided to cut a riser going higher up and reuse it for that floor. They figured they'd just put in a repair order and fix the other later. Somehow they didn't realize it was used. The guy pretty much said "lol whoops" They didn't fix it for weeks and weeks. Such is the life of one that works with telcos. In my new job I dont know what I'm happier to not work with, Windows desktops or Telcos. Both are side by side at the podium of things that make me want to shoot myself.
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May 13, 2015 05:11
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Sheep posted:I once had a Bell subsidiary tech and a TWC tech get into a yelling match in front of me because the Bell tech started ripping equipment servicing TWC's fiber loop for the area off the wall without checking asset tags first. Both companies are dumb for just assuming they could leave their equipment running in our office with us paying the electricity bill in perpetuity for them though. Ha. This isn't a telco tech story, but it's good anyways. Once my client in the same building as my office called me on their cellphone to tell me everything was down. Now, usually when a user says "everything is down" it's because Google doesn't load quick enough, so I sort of blow it off, but this guy was serious. "No, get the @)(#*$)@#(*$ up here, EVERYTHING IS DOWN". So I get in the elevator and rush upstairs. I get on to the trading floor and everyone's PCs are just full of errors and red flashing market feeds. They just look at me. I run to the server closet, and look, and all the T1 smart jacks are dark, not red, or in alert, but off. I just stand in the closet, I have absolutely no idea what to do. The only internet line that is working is a cable internet line that is a 4th backup. They have about four PRIs, maybe 15 or 20 P2P T1's for trading data, and a bunch of fiber handoffs. All dead. I'm stupefied. I really have no idea what is going on. The other guy I work with shows up, and he's like "holy poo poo. I'm going downstairs to check the building telco room." We gets there, and finds a building maintenance guy standing knee deep in water, with a portable band saw staring at the cut off end of the building main water pipe that is spraying like a firehose all over the building telco rack. The guy doesn't speak any english, but he's just look at it, then at us, and then at the pipe. The building also had a cell antenna on the roof, so fortunately, Verizon and Sprint detected the problem and quickly arrived and replaced everything with in a day or two. A couple weeks later the guy did it again, but this time he wrapped the telco rack with plastic first, so spraying on it wouldn't kill it. The problem was that the bottom was open so if filled up with water from the bottom and died again.
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May 13, 2015 14:30
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JohnCompany posted:
I wish I had a picture. He was just dumb founded standing there. It was a surreal moment.
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May 13, 2015 14:40
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Mogomra posted:This is crazy. This is the craziest thing I've ever heard. Did they move the telecommunications room after this, or is the whole building going down every time there's a plumbing issue? So the building in NYC was owned by a family, and it was completely not up to code anywhere. The manager had his cousins sort of living there, in vacant offices, and working as maintenance people. It was crazy. I don't know why he was cutting the water main, but I do know he was trying to remodel the building and get it up to code since they were being fined a bunch. They did not move the telco room, and in fact it went down a few other times for other reasons. The building put a huge lock on the telco room door, but since the doorway wasn't square you could just sort of tilt the door towards the hinges and the locks would let go. I have some other insane building stories from them. My clear favorite is: We rented a 20x10 room in the sub-basement to use as a "datacenter" (please kill me). We rented space to clients to host services down there. It was a complete disaster on so many levels. One was that there was no ventilation or anything down there. We complained to the building manager and they put some portable A/Cs down there. They vented them out into the ceiling to above the tiles. However that was just a closed space with no where for the hot air to go. So eventually it just filled up with hot air, eventually a couple tiles deformed and fell out, so the room just had two A/C in it running full blast, basically heaters making steam. Our exchange server goes offline, and I run down there, and find one of the A/Cs had melted into a deformed neb-cubist version of an A/C, but it was still running, the fan was jammed up so it was just sitting there hot and burning. It was ridiculous. The building was like "what, there's no vents down there so deal with it." Funny thing was the common area the room opened up was properly A/C, so I just went to a hardware store, and bought a vent, punched a hole in the wall into the common space, and vented the hot air out there. Some how our salesman referred to that as our "high availability colocation facility" when selling rack space on it to clients with a straight face.
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May 13, 2015 15:30
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Inspector_666 posted:I want to know why they cut through the building main while water was flowing through it twice. I honestly don't know. Best I can guess is the line was shutoff from the street, but he didn't account for a 12 story building height's worth of water pressure sitting upstream in the pipes. The guy didn't speak english, and the building managers were an organized Turkish crime family, so when we asked, they told us nothing.
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May 13, 2015 15:31
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 17:34 |
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Bob Morales posted:This is an actual document that we send out every month. This is an actual thing that 72 year old owner of the company spends his time monitoring. This is an actual thing he flips the gently caress out over. This is an actual thing I get pulled into meetings to talk about. I want to work there. Insane and unorganized file shares are one of my least favorite things. We have three file servers here, named COMPANYNas, COMPANYNYNas, SharedNas. Everyone has a share on it called "Software" and then folders of all sorts of nonsense. There's also a Windows share, that has a software folder in it, that has some other software in it, so if you want of find some software you have to look in all these places \\COMPANYNas\Software \\COMPANYNas\Software\Windows \\COMPANYNas\Software\MicrosoftWindows \\COMPANYNas\Windows\ \\COMPANYNas\Windows\Software \\COMPANYNYNas\Software \\COMPANYNYNas\Software\Windows \\COMPANYNYNas\Software\MicrosoftWindows \\COMPANYNYNas\Windows\ \\COMPANYNYNas\Windows\Softwareok in all these places \\SharedNas\Software \\SharedNas\Software\Windows \\SharedNas\Software\MicrosoftWindows \\SharedNas\Windows\ \\SharedNas\Windows\Software Each one has a random selection of software in it. It's a nightmare.
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May 15, 2015 15:14
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