The Vent and Rant Thread

[CRussel]

Ah, Hitch. I feel your pain, truly. As someone who deals with (l)users on a daily basis, I totally get it.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Ah, Hitch. I feel your pain, truly. As someone who deals with (l)users on a daily basis, I totally get it.

Five YEARS. Like...really?

The part that slays me is the "I'm not paying any more..." Hey. I'm not the one who made up a boxcar-full of edits, by god. Do we do text edits, by the client, for freebs? Hells, no, we do not. (We include ~20-30 minutes of free "edits"--which is only about 5 text edits, believe it or not, in our base price. And truthfully, I rarely invoice if they have <10. But 40? 50? 100? Oh, yes, we charge, nefarious capitalistic bastards that we are.)

Oish. Five years. Although, this only leaves one other book now, in our PM system, that old. We only have one other client that has had a book...uh...marinading, that long, with us.

FIVE. YEARS.

Spoiler:

Here's an unrelated ranty-thing: a user posting under an assumed name/psuedonym/avatar, at another forum, is accusing all the members there of "slandering" him. Yeah, yeah, already pointed out that slander is oral, not written, but here's the thing, legally--CAN you libel someone who is posting anonymously? Pseudonymously? Legally?

This person is insisting that he was "in publishing" for 27 years, and therefore, knows everything, positively everything, better than everyone (yes, everyone!) else. When he said he was being slandered...well, I couldn't really let THAT go, could I? Someone who was in publishing, for nearly three decades, doesn't know that slander and libel aren't the same thing? Hmmm...I'm smellin' limburger here. I believe that the besmirching of the good name of X, is a requisite element of the case. Thoughts? I think it's impossible to defame an anonymous or pseudonymous person. Or an imaginary one. Whichever.

Hitch

[poohbear_nc]

@Hitch -- whenever one of my 'fellow' employees brings me one of their problems to solve, and opens by saying "This occurred in January" -- My immediate response is "Of what year?"

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

@Hitch -- whenever one of my 'fellow' employees brings me one of their problems to solve, and opens by saying "This occurred in January" -- My immediate response is "Of what year?"

I feel SO much better. :-)

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

@Hitch -- whenever one of my 'fellow' employees brings me one of their problems to solve, and opens by saying "This occurred in January" -- My immediate response is "Of what year?"

And how many of them are from previous years?
______
Dennis

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Ah, Hitch. I feel your pain, truly. As someone who deals with (l)users on a daily basis, I totally get it.

Lusers

BOFH is epic.

Another luser rings.

"I need more space" he says

"Well, why don't you move to Texas?" I ask

"No, on my account, stupid."

Stupid? Uh-Oh..

"I'm terribly sorry" I say, in a polite manner equal to that of Jimmy Stewart in a Family Matinee "I didn't quite catch that. What was it that you said"

I smell the fear coming down the line at me, but it's too late, he's a goner and he knows it.

"Um, I said what I wanted was more space on my account, *please*"

"Sure, hang on"

I hear him gasp his relief even though he covered the mouthpeice.

"There, you've got plenty of space now"

"How much have I got"

Now this REALLY *PISSES* *ME* *OFF*! Not only do they want me to give them extra space, they want to check it, to correct me if I don't give them enough. They should be happy with what I give them *and that's it*

Back into Jimmy Stewart mode.

"Well, let's see, you have 4 Meg available"

"Wow! Eight Meg in total, thanks!" he says pleased with his bargaining power

"No" I interrupt, savouring this like a fine red, room temperature "4 Meg in total"

"Huh? I'd used 4 Meg already, How could I have 4 Meg Available?"

I say nothing. It'll come to him.

"aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggh hhhhH!"

I kill me; I really do.

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

And how many of them are from previous years?
______
Dennis

Sadly ... most of them ... the latest was a request to 'resurrect' an order placed in 2002 .....

[Freeshadow]

@Hitch

Case one: send additional billing for cloud storage.
Case two: write: "given your lack of understanding of basic legal concepts commonly known to publishers <copy of what you typed above> I assume a typo on your side meaning that you wanted to say you spent the last 27 years in pub, leeching."

;D

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Sadly ... most of them ... the latest was a request to 'resurrect' an order placed in 2002 .....

Ouch, answer: "I don't do romantic stuff at work - necromantic included."

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

Ouch, answer: "I don't do romantic stuff at work - necromantic included."

Or time travel ...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Sadly ... most of them ... the latest was a request to 'resurrect' an order placed in 2002 .....

I went through that. I was sysadmin and other things at a market research firm, and I'd get requests to resurrect jobs. We worked on a project basis, and the requests were generally because a client was coming back for another round and the boss wanted to see what we did last time.

"What was the job?"

"Well, the client was..."

"I don't know from clients. I have only the vaguest notion of who we are working for on what. What did we call the job on the system, and when was it done? What files am I looking for in what time period?"

And resurrecting the job meant finding the right backup tape and restoring it from backup, once I knew what to look for. I learned to loathe cpio and the backup tapes used because of the failure rate.

In a later period at the same employer, we used NetBackup and I was the NetBackup admin. There was a tape jukebox in the server room NetBackup backed up to, and tapes were sent offsite to a storage facility each day.

Guaranteed, a luser would tell me that "Oops! They just accidentally deleted an important file, and could I get it back from backup?" just after I'd handed the tapes over to the courier from the offsite storage facility. "I just sent the tapes offsite. I won't be able to get them back and do the restore for you till tomorrow. Sorry..."

I got around the problem for a while by deliberately holding the tapes a day before sending them offsite, but then the auditors came through, and I got told that no, I couldn't hold the tapes a day. They had to go offsite every morning after the nightly backup.

NetBackup could backup to disk, and then from disk to tape. Doing so would have been a vast improvement because I could send the tapes offsite as required, but still be able to catch the oops moments by restoring the copy on disk. My boss agreed it was desirable, but didn't have a server with adequate disk space to implement it and wouldn't be getting it in any near term time frame. Available budget was committed elsewhere.

A chunk of what I did as sysadmin was setting things up to make it less likely lusers could shoot themselves in the foot like that. I was only partially successful.
______
Dennis

[poohbear_nc]

And resurrecting the job meant finding the right backup tape and restoring it from backup, once I knew what to look for. I learned to loathe cpio and the backup tapes used because of the failure rate.

Arghhhh! I too remember those cpio nightmares ... and loathed the backup tapes .... and those slooooooooooow tape drives I was burdened with .....

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Arghhhh! I too remember those cpio nightmares ... and loathed the backup tapes .... and those slooooooooooow tape drives I was burdened with .....

The problem was less cpio, and more the tapes and tape drive.

But I was dealing with a setup built cheap, and paying the price.

When we got the opportunity to upgrade hardware, I said "Instead of supporting one call center, the new setup is supposed to support four. You will spend the money and get industrial strength hardware so we are less likely to have 400 or so users sitting on their hands because we went down."

My boss agreed, but that was in part because the money for the industrial strength hardware wouldn't be coming out of his budget. I wound up supporting Sun servers running Solaris instead of a PC clone running SCO Open Server, and reliability soared.

The major failure after that change had my irony meter pegging offscale. I'd just sat down to dinner when the night supervisors called to tell me they couldn't log in. That was odd, because I could do so from home via SSH. I decided I'd better go see what the issue was. (I lived in walking distance of the office.)

I got there to find everyone sitting on their hands. Not only was the Sun box down - so was the Novell server supporting another set of functions. I brought them back up and watched goggle eyed as the big mutha APC UPS glitched and put them down again.

Okay. Unplug them from the APC and find other places to plug them in, take the APC out of service for repair, bring the systems back up, do the cleanup, and get everyone back online. I got home to interrupted dinner around 10pm.

At 2am, my phone rang. It was the night lead supervisor. She was trying to do her production reports, and couldn't get to the NT server where those reports resided. I blinked sleep from my eyes, suggested a couple of things she could try, and said if that didn't work, leave a note on my desk and I'd send the reports for her in the morning. At 2:30am, the phone rang again. It was the night supervisor, who just wanted to tell me she was able to send the reports and I didn't have to worry. Er, leave a note on my desk?

The next day I was at a meeting because we were being acquired and merged, and one of the other participants was the SVP who had hired me. He asked how I was and I said "Tired!", and explained why. When I got to the calls at 2am and 2:30am, his eyes got very big and he said "Why was she calling you at those hours over something that trivial?" "Larry, it's because she don't know it's trivial. She's trying to do her job, and dot the Is and cross the Ts. I respect that, which is why she's still alive. She needs to be told by her boss that it is trivial, and I've already had that conversation with him."

She was later released by the company, and my "reading between the lines" take was that the real reason was being too stupid to do the job as required. I concurred.
______
Dennis

[CRussel]

Tape is evil. Absolutely evil. And cpio is the devil's tool.

@Hitch: yes, 5 years is perhaps slightly longer than absolutely necessary.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Tarana

First, so sorry for your loss Dennis. It is sometimes crushing to learn the death of a loved one, however far away in time and distance. Finding out via the internet is often harder because you have nobody to respond to - the funeral is long over. Contacting the family? For what? Just be assured that there are others with similar experiences, and I think you are doing the right thing - listening to something to memorialize your feelings and remembrances rather than doing something to forget.

While I met the family, it was decades ago, and the one I wouldn't mind contacting was Amy's younger sister Kathy, who visited Amy in NYC at one point. Amy said she liked me a lot, and I wouldn't mind learning how her life had progressed. It was a family of over-achievers, and I suspect the answer was very well. I was impressed by her, and wished her the best.

Other folks who knew both of us at the time are scattered and I'm mostly out of touch. I did get to be the bearer of bad news for another old friend who knew her back when. He wanted to marry her. I considered that unlikely, if for no other reason than her family being Roman Catholic and him being a Jew. (Amy was very lapsed Catholic whose personal spirituality was pagan. The family would accept him as her friend, but would be unlikely to accept the idea of marrying him.) He said "I wanted to marry her!" I said "So did I." I didn't try to tell him that at one point, she and I were everything but married.

And the last thing I want to do is forget. The memories are all I have left.
______
Dennis