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What is it about Access that makes every problem look like a database-shaped hole? Today, I had a discussion with one of our project managers about how he wants to solve scheduling problems for his department (of around 10 people) using an ~*:AcCeSs DaTaBaSe:*~. He wants to let people add their own time estimates. He wants to pull information about projects and employees from our existing SQL databases. He wants to ignore the two other programs we’ve already go that do exactly the same thing. This is after he designed an ~*:AcCeSs DaTaBaSe:*~ for another project that is currently overdue about twice over. There were at least three major problems they had to consult me on. I made it clear before he started that Access was the wrong tool for the job, and that I wouldn’t and couldn’t support his little puppy when it poo poo the carpet.
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Nov 23, 2013 02:50
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dogstile posted:Ok, my raise isn't in a week, its in a month, no biggie, i'm not losing out on any money. What is pissing me off? Everyone in admin is passing tickets in my name because i'm helpful and my manager just gave me an extra two on top of what I had before. Usually I wouldn't mind if I had nothing to do but there are 2 guys with a single ticket to their name, why not pass them one of the 6 i've gotten in the past half an hour? I'm swamped as it is and its just crushed my motivation Raise delayed a month? Tickets delayed a month! (a man can dream, can't he?) evol262 posted:I prefer "none of your business since the market rate for this job is different than my last one", which is the truth anyway. My personal preference is "I've agreed not to disclose those numbers." Doesn't really matter to them WHO I've agreed with that they will not be disclosed. In fact, I just had a lovely conversation with my dog, Doctor Barkles, who agreed that I shouldn't disclose that information. Implying an NDA is much better than stating "there's an NDA", in case they decide to investigate further. Wizard of the Deep fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Jan 3, 2014 |
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Jan 3, 2014 18:29
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underlig posted:I never tell people when they do stuff that for me clearly shows that they don't give a gently caress about me. I never have and i really have no idea how to, the few time i've had to comment on something like this i've been so worked up that i start to stutter and sweat. "Hey, guys? I'm trying to work on [COMPLEX TASK] over here, but it looks like Conference Room Charlie is open. Would you guys mind moving over there?" Always try to bring the solution up when you have a problem.
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Feb 5, 2014 01:02
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Irritated Goat posted:Slightly off topic but lack of "competition" for Calendar and Contacts on the internet. If I want to keep a calendar I can sync to my phone\pc\tablet, I'm pretty stuck with Google Calendar. This wouldn't be an issue except Google turned off support for ActiveSync and so I have to jump through hoops to get any of this synced to my tablet. I could always give up my Gmail account I've had for years and go to Outlook.com but who wants to give up an e-mail address they've had and where everyone expects mail to come from? Set up Gmail to forward to your Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com account, and you can set up your Microsoft account to send as your Gmail address, if you want/need to.
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Feb 12, 2014 17:42
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Large corporate slap fights are the worst thing for the public
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Volmarias posted:Found your problem there hoss. There are many more instances with Access is the wrong tool. I'm really tempted to ban it in my office, after finally burning out some old equipment tracking application that someone wrote literally a decade ago.
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Mar 6, 2014 05:50
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Daylen Drazzi posted:~miliary poo poo~ Well that blows. If you're going south, now is absolutely the time to do it. You want to move in before it gets devil's-ballsack hot, which is within the next month or so.
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Mar 18, 2014 23:50
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QuiteEasilyDone posted:Basically, in my case I recognize that it's been a lovely situation all around for me and them. Right now they are setup with devices that are wholly inadequate for their needs, that scrape the bare minimum of their requirements. If I got more than a 2 day notice Start to Deliver with their actual requirements and not some 'just give them whatever' they probably wouldn't be up in our face about everything. I realize that the lack of planning on the administrations part is not my emergency, and I'm not treating it as such. However, I'm still going to work towards getting them more properly setup so long as it doesn't interrupt any of my current goals and priorities. I'd just redirect the interns back to their bosses. "What you got it was the paperwork told me to get you. If it's not sufficient for your tasks, you'll have to discuss that with your manager." Daylen Drazzi posted:Although I did have one executive drat near foaming-at-the-mouth mad when his ticket was jumped by another executive's ticket because his assistant brought me some cherry pie. After that, let's just say I had to share because the rest of the guys around me were demanding part of my spoils - our part of the facility smelled like a bakery, and the President and Vice-President would somehow find a reason to come by and check on us and snag a piece along the way. I'm also pretty sure they informally told the executives of the pie system. At a previous job, I had a couple of small departments that were demanding, but good-natured. Whenever they asked how to get things done as quickly as possible over a weekend, I told them to write up exactly what they needed, in as much detail as possible, in a note. Take that note, and tie it to a good bottle of rum. Leave the note (and rum) on my desk Friday afternoon. Their poo poo got done. Wizard of the Deep fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 05:09
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Don't ask for a unicorn my first week, and then act surprised when I can't deliver your loving unicorn.
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Jun 13, 2014 17:46
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Logging tickets should be to record problems / resolutions and keep a record of communication. Logging time into tickets should be to bill clients or keep metrics on how much time is spent on each issue. The thing you're forgetting is you're imagining a sales-guy. He's trained and paid to lie. A timesheet like that wouldn't bother him at all, because it would be "Discussed economic possibilities with client", where "client" is his significant other/roommate, and "economic possibilities" are how much he's going to spend on booze this weekend. And he's a sales-guy. As long as he can show he's bringing in money (whether or not he actually is), nobody's going to ask for details anyway.
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Jun 20, 2014 17:25
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I usually get one or two phone calls a week from Indian recruiters who think I'll be perfect for a six-month contract doing desktop support in Bumblefuck, Wyoming or, even worse, migrating to Blackberry Enterprise Server in New Jersey. I let them stumble through mispronouncing my name a few times, then tell them I'm not interested. It's not even fun to mess with them any more. 
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Jul 22, 2014 14:56
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Collateral Damage posted:Who the heck migrates to BES in 2014? <heavy indian accent>Our Fortune Global One-Seven-Five Client!</heavy indian accent>
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Jul 23, 2014 01:30
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beepsandboops posted:Pissing me off: email signatures. At my last place we used signature-making and calendar-sharing as a kind of first-day "how well can you follow simple directions" test. We had nice, extensive documents explaining precisely how to do the entire thing. I'm still impressed we had a 75% success rate.
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Aug 2, 2014 04:57
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Swink posted:You know the feeling of dread you get when the thread is about to devolve into a useless semantic argument? I got that feeling. Outlook doesn't normally shrink the OST/PST files. So when an email is deleted, it's still taking up space in the file. I think there's a button to shrink the file down hidden in Outlook, but if it's an OST file, it'll probably be quicker to just delete and rebuild it.
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Aug 3, 2014 02:46
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After hearing all the phone conversations my coworkers and managers are having, I still haven't decided if my employer makes people miserable, or if they just have a knack for hiring miserable people.
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Aug 28, 2014 21:28
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Backslashchat: I just say "backslash, upper left to lower right" instinctively now. Avoids the confusion on the user's behalf, any keyboard differences, whatever.
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Sep 4, 2014 20:26
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I used to work at a place that uses a program called "Doors" to manage the key-card access system. It was pretty niche, but I imagine knowing the program will might pay decently enough. It ran on Windows servers, so 
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Sep 29, 2014 17:59
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My coworker, who frequently has EXACTLY the same information as me, if not more, always asks me how to do something, or how to fill out forms. I don't know, I'm guessing here too! You're literate, read the poo poo in front of your face. I need to staple the XKCD look/guess/Google to his forehead.
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Oct 7, 2014 13:37
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Coredump posted:If the company is going to hand out iPhones they should either charge the department for broken ones outside of life cycle replacements or buy good cases along with the phone. People are children when it comes to taking care of company equipment. The problem with buying them a nice case with the phone is the case doesn't do poo poo when the phone's at the bottom of a river because the exec took some clients out on his boat, and "accidentally" drops the phone overboard.
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Nov 7, 2014 14:19
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Che Delilas posted:No no, you don't answer "It's out of my scope." That could get you a talk from the management about "doing more than the bare minimum" since it's probably going to be interpreted as "it's not my job." You answer something like, "We're all over it, we're doing everything we can to fix this issue and we'll be sure and keep you updated." It doesn't matter that you can't do anything until Microsoft gets its poo poo together, your clients are going to feel better knowing that you aren't just ignoring their problem. "We're engaging all available third-party resources to ensure this situation is resolved as quickly as possible. If you'd like, I can explain the issue in greater detail, or I can return to integrating paradigms with telephony bridge and addressing the COM parity incompatibility with..." At this point, the customer's brain should have fully disengaged, so you can go back to refreshing the Azure status page.
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Nov 19, 2014 14:06
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Daylen Drazzi posted:If she has a signed offer letter and it's written somewhere about a start date she might have that company over a barrel. If it were me I'd start calling to see what it was worth for the problem to go away. If she has a signed offer letter and an agreed-upon start date, I'm sure some local employment lawyers would love to take the calls she should be making tomorrow morning.
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Nov 26, 2014 01:01
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Not pissing me off: http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/ Markov chains trained by H.P. Lovecraft and the Puppet Documentation. “At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I was a sysadmin by trade”
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Dec 5, 2014 23:05
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My coworker, supposedly a skilled system administrator, is on his fourth call to reset his password. This week.
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Dec 10, 2014 14:22
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My coworker has confused me for 1Password, and expects me to keep his login information straight for him. BRB, having a giant key tattooed on my face.
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Dec 16, 2014 14:28
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Our piece of poo poo company got bought by another piece of poo poo company. The company who sold, as one final cash grab for the executives, has sold all of our corporate emails to various vendors, sales, training, etc. I now get 10 a day of this nonsense. Time to have a perfect excuse "oh, I didn't see your email, must have gotten buried in the spam!"
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Dec 16, 2014 18:14
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Westie posted:poo poo pissing me off tonight: very, very over-eager recruiters. That's still better than the 200+ emails I've gotten from Indian recruiters offering me three month contracts managing Windows 2000 servers in Bumblefuck, Nebraska.
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Dec 16, 2014 22:09
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Roargasm posted:Invoke-Command -command {$wmi_query} -computerName (Get-ADComputer -filter * -searchBase "ou=$your,dc=$pool" | Select-Object -expand Name) The big problem with Invoke-Command is, from what I can see, you have to have the remote computer set up to support it. Since it's a configuration setting that has to be positively changed and deployed, it's probably not. Get-WMIobject only requires that some standard ports are accessible, and you're using an account that has admin access on the remote host. Also, you can easily pipe everything GWMI outputs to Export-CSV, and go from there. Also, you might want to check the processor/OS bitiness, which you can also do with GWMI. No point putting 8gb of RAM in a machine that will only see 4gb of it. ("GWMI" is a built-in alias for "Get-WMIObject". You can see all the aliases with "Get-Alias", or its alias, "gal". Many of the old DOS commands and common Un*x commands are pre-populated, like DIR (get-childitem) and MAN (get-help).) (Also, Powershell is depreciating gwmi for get-ciminstance, but I've had much better results overall with gwmi)
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Jan 15, 2015 02:00
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What's better than an old, creaky Remedy system? An old, creaky Remedy system where half your tickets come in, and a newer, slightly less creaky Remedy system (still woefully out of date, mind you) where the other half comes in! "Wait, is this ticket in Blue Remedy or Yellow Remedy?" I haven't found the point where the drinking makes the pain stop.
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Jan 19, 2015 18:34
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Gyshall posted:also one of my new clients I was working at yesterday has a 2003 domain controller with 256 gigs of ram and a pentium 3 oh god. And also a windows 2000 workstation running their most important LOB program too If this is a typo or not, either way it's amazing.
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Jan 22, 2015 16:11
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Our administrative passwords are stored in a special vault that has 3.5-factor authentication: To use this vault, you have to meet the following qualifications: 1. Thing(s) you know: Two different passwords 2. Thing you have: RSA token 3. Thing you are: a complete idiot (to be using this solution)
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Jan 25, 2015 00:36
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evol262 posted:"If we add more factors, it's more secure!" Oh yea, you can only access it from the internal network, so if you're not in a corporate location, you have to connect over a VPN, which requires a completely different username, password, and RSA token. It pulls a random admin account from a pool that have the access rights you should have, for the server group you need to administrate. And the randomly generated passwords are only good for up to six hours.
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Jan 25, 2015 02:36
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dogstile posted:Yeah i'm not seeing a problem with that, that sounds fantastic. The biggest problem is it's still a web interface. It's slow and the design cues were taken straight from an AOL CD offering 40 FREE HOURS A MONTH! It seriously takes half a dozen full page loads to actually get a password. When it works properly. In once instance, it took me almost half an hour to get an account last week.
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Jan 25, 2015 21:34
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Cavepimp posted:poo poo pissing me off: my "sysadmin" that appears incapable of doing anything unless I give him explicit instruction, nearly down to the exact steps. Oh, and the fact that he does half of it wrong anyway. Counterpoint: Don't tell me "I need reports on two dozen servers ASAP!" and then go radio-silent when I respond "Which reports? Which servers?" Then, when you finally get back to me, no, twenty minutes is not a realistic turn-around time. Especially not at 4:52.
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Jan 29, 2015 01:31
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RangerAce posted:The potentially bad part of this is that now they're trained that when someone says "Get yo' poo poo" they don't have to worry too much because the IT guy always has a backup just in case, anyway. Turn it around, and use a situation like this to your advantage. Give them a suitably hard time about saying they were good, and tell them that you'll see what you can recover. Now you use this situation to manage expectations. If you "spend" the time right now trying to pull the data back, when there's real data loss later, people will (rightly) believe you did everything you could to pull off a miracle. If you just pull the data out of your rear end right now, during a real emergency people will be absolutely crawling up your rear end because you haven't gotten the critical financial data back now now now because it's month-end.
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Feb 27, 2015 02:12
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Eh, no problem. We all have lovely days/weeks/jobs (I'm in the last category). I can't help your dumb helpdesk, but the issue you're seeing sounds like a profile issue. If I'm reading this right, you've got the following: 1. User 1 on Computer A can't connect to App a. 2. User 1 on Computer A can connect to App b. 3. User 2 on Computer A can connect to App a and b. If that's true, then check to see if User 1 can access App a on Computer B, just to confirm that it's an issue with the local computer and not her account within App a. If it IS localized to Computer A, then you have two options: 1. Uninstall and reinstall the cloud-drive app. 2. Recreate her Windows profile. Step back, and eliminate whatever variables you can.
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Mar 12, 2015 06:12
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HardDisk posted:That must be why my local hacker club was really insistent on having If you haven't had to climb through a drop-ceiling to get into a server room that's locked with a key that can't get there before your maintenance window closes, you haven't been in this industry long enough 
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Mar 20, 2015 21:54
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Seriously, get in good with reception and secretaries, and that's a good quarter of your battle right there. Need the CEO to sign something? Don't go directly to him/her, ask the admin assistant to get it signed. That poo poo gets done. Likewise, front desk/reception can bump you up to the head of the line for letting you know when UPS/FedEx get in, or if someone's ordered too much catering. Those same people will be the best for office gossip, so you'll get first heads-up when someone is leaving (voluntarily or not), or when someone is having tech problems but hasn't brought it up to you/your department. If they're upper-level (or have the ear of someone who is), showing up unexpectedly for fifteen minutes can save you a world of trouble down the line.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:32
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted: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 think you can strengthen your troubleshooting skills. Before you can really fix something that's broken, you have to know what it looks like when it's working. That means having a general idea about how all the individual pieces work together. That doesn't mean you have to know "this outlet puts out 120 volts at 15 amps, with a +/-2 volt variance over a thirty second window, which travels over this 12 gauge copper/aluminum alloy sheathed in recycled Chilean rubber into an Antec 900 watt 90% efficient green power supply...", it means you have to know "okay, power comes from the wall, through the UPS, to the power supply." From that basic understanding of the individual pieces and their roles, you can ask specific questions: "Is there a light on the back of the power supply, and is it on?" "Is the UPS beeping? How old is it?" "Does this outlet actually work?" "Are all the relevant cords securely plugged in?" Once you have a strong grip on the fundamentals, you start to get a better idea of 1) what the most common failure points are and 2) what the easiest things to check are. Thinking systematically absolutely is a skill, and one you can work on. So, teaching someone else how to do it means you start from how things work, not how they're currently broken. In the same way, if someone non-technical comes to me and says "implement this solutions for me", I usually step back and say "What are you trying to achieve? What's the end result you actually need?" A lot of times, people will arrive at a conclusion because they can only see one option, when there may be other, better ones. My job, at the end of the day, is to grease the wheels of my company. If someone hands me a stick of butter, sure, that will work, but it's certainly not the best option when I've got WD40 or Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Gear Grease in my back pocket.
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Mar 31, 2015 23:06
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If you're in a conference call, and not talking, and also not muting yourself, you're an rear end in a top hat. Mute yourself, rear end in a top hat. We don't need to hear how deep you can put your headset up your butt.
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Apr 7, 2015 14:14
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On the bright side, I was able to get the resulting hospital visit covered under workers' comp 
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Apr 7, 2015 18:04
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Manslaughter posted:Want to print this and hang it on my wall. Gonna learn needlepoint so I can make it all artistic and flowery and poo poo.
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Apr 21, 2015 15:22
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