Jul 27 2007
NASA takes swift action after report of astronaut drinking - CNN.com
Of all the people you have to tell “Don’t drink before coming to work”… astronauts???
NASA takes swift action after report of astronaut drinking - CNN.com
Jul 27 2007
Of all the people you have to tell “Don’t drink before coming to work”… astronauts???
NASA takes swift action after report of astronaut drinking - CNN.com
Sep 09 2006
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That is all.
May 10 2006
First, Happy (belated) Birthday to ![]()
Cool link posted by
Work has gotten no less hectic. E and I were running full speed today just to keep up. I’d get the Triage queue all, well, triaged, go to actually work ONE ticket, and there’d be 10, 15 new tickets in Triage again. Never did get time to touch the reload queue. Luckily it was exploding today.
And now that the Data Entry department is the Data Entry / Deploy dept, I have to teach them, in between my tickets, how to use Unix, how to install and license cPanel, Plesk, Direct Admin, how to configure multiple IP addresses in CentOS / Red Hat, Debian, FreeBSD, etc. Imagine trying to teach your basic secretary, who knows how to use Word and Excel, to be an entry-level Unix sys admin. In between getting tickets done yourself. No, I’m not complaining about them. They’re picking up on it pretty fast, but it does add to my work load. Loan (pronounced “Lawn”, not “Loan”. Apparently “loan” will get you slapped, or worse around Vietnamese speakers.) keeps apologizing for taking my time. I’m happy to show her, but it does get frustrating at times. Mostly because I’m out on the floor with the laptop trying to work a ticket and 10 Jabber messages (with their audible alerts) every minute breaks my concentration.
So, along the lines of
Agent Summary Report for May 01, 2006 to May 31, 2006
Agent Name Email Handled Avg. Response Time Avg. Time Logged In
Andrew ( Team Lead ) 231 3 hrs, 11 mins, 51 secs 2 hrs, 12 mins, 28 secs
D ( Team Lead ) 70 2 hrs, 49 mins, 17 secs 1 hr, 33 mins, 2 secs
J ( Team Lead ) 165 2 hrs, 15 mins, 50 secs 2 hrs, 34 mins, 55 secs
K ( Team Lead ) 242 3 hrs, 18 mins, 16 secs 1 hr, 48 mins, 42 secs
T ( Team Lead ) 36 4 hrs, 6 mins, 30 secs 2 hrs, 56 mins, 49 secs
Agent Averages 74 agents 6 hrs, 8 mins, 59 secs 2 hrs, 43 mins, 53 secs
System Averages (weighted) 6551 samples 3 hrs, 43 mins, 45 secs 2 hrs, 30 mins, 57 secs
Average Initial Handle Time Report for May 01, 2006 to May 31, 2006
Agent Name Samples Avg. Initial Response Time
Andrew ( Team Lead ) 109 1 hr, 8 mins, 54 secs
D ( Team Lead ) 38 3 hrs, 38 mins, 37 secs
J ( Team Lead ) 12 3 hrs, 1 min, 35 secs
K ( Team Lead ) 62 4 hrs, 34 mins, 29 secs
T ( Team Lead ) 10 6 hrs, 14 mins, 32 secs
Agent Average Initial Handle Time 68 agents
6 hrs, 48 mins, 32 secs
System Average Initial Handle Time (weighted) 3896 samples
3 hrs, 37 mins, 9 secs
The only one who comes close to my numbers is K, and his response times aren’t as good. He’s the master at shuffling tickets, trying to make his queues look good, but if you look at the real numbers, he’s not doing so hot. I don’t know why T’s stats are so poor. He’s been there longer than me, he’s been a Team Lead just as long as me and he’s almost as good a technician.
Anyway, I have an important meeting tomorrow. Wish me luck.
May 06 2006
This has been one heck of a week.
I’ve barely had time to breath, let alone keep up with LJ.
Monday was an OK day. It went down hill from there.
Everything’s been fine for me personally, work has just been hectic. I put in 17.3 hours of overtime this week.
The chairman of the board / COO jabbered me at work tonight about a couple of tickets to ask if I could look into them for him. One was a build ticket that was getting old. 2 were server reloads at our other data center. I was already behind on reloads. Not much I could do about the reloads at the other DC, since there was no one there who could do the reload then hook up a KVM for me to finish them off, and I’m a support tech, not a build tech. I had enough reloads to do as it is without dropping everything to go do a build.
He was very polite to me about it, but apparently he got on the phone and started screaming at Jack, the Dir. of Operations about not having anyone at the other DC and people at Savvis not knowing who was on duty.
I had to re-do half the work my one team member did tonight before he took off early to attend to a personal matter.
A customer orders a reload of a box with Debian Sarge, 300MB /boot, 1GB swap, the rest of the 80GB drive in /, 2.6 kernel. What did E load? Debian Sarge (he got that part right at least) with a 300MB primary partition, a extended partition with one “Win95/FAT32″ partition with a 2.4 kernel. What the hell was that? I can understand getting the wrong kernel, but how the hell do you manage to partition a drive with an extended partition with a FAT partition inside it, when you just needed to build 2 ext3 and 1 swap partition? It’s that kind of shit that’s been keeping our ticket queue load so high all week.
Oh, and I wont’ even get started on the 3rd shift team lead who’s idea of “verifying” customer data before marking a reload ticket as OK to proceed is quoting the customer’s initial ticket verbatim and adding the word “Acceptance”. Makes me feel real good about the next guy who asks for a reload and puts my IP address in their form by mistake.
Thank god, I found out from Jack today that this same 3rd shift lead is NOT being considered for the support manager position. I could tell he was trying to maneuver his way into the job, but I, for one, would walk out the door if he got it. Jack apparently realized he would have that kind of situation on his hands and told him no. I also will not be considered, but I wasn’t hold my hopes out much for that anyway.
May 04 2006
This is getting crazy.
Lost the Support Manager last week.
Worked an extra 5, 6 hours last night to help the Deploy department dig out of their backlog (while not making much headway on our own backlog.)
Today one of the Deploys up and quits with no warning. And boy did she burn her bridges behind her. I can still smell the smoke.
Worked 8 hours today struggling to catch up with our own backlog with no luck.
And here I am working on Deploy tickets again.
Someone tell me the overtime will be worth it?
>thud!<
Apr 29 2006
> Mr. Andrew <edited>
> NOC Support Team Lead
> ${poe}
>
>
> Please it could teach to me accurately what devor to make in these cases or to send me it edited rasp so that I know accurately I eat leaves it in a next error? This this occurring always that I make the copy of another user of some domain.
Uh… yeah… put down the crack pipe lady…
Apr 27 2006
Me:
Jason: Just to bother you.
Me: Yeah, I’m sure the devs over at SWsoft put in a “annoy andrew@${poe}” subroutine.
Jason: They accepted my ticket, so I’m sure they did…
Apr 26 2006
Just a few pics:
More can be found in my gallery.
Apr 25 2006
I always find it amusing when someone on WHT asks about someone who provides “better service than” my employer and someone responds “XXX is better than ${poe}”. “XXX is also located in Savvis, like ${poe}.”
Yeah. There’s a good reason. XXX is located in our cage. ![]()
(Edit: Lower in the thread, the owner of XXX even points out they are hosted by ${poe}, and have no trouble with us.)
Apr 25 2006
I just checked my email before popping into the shower.
Yesterday I sent an email out to the local site distribution list about a task that needs to get done, but isn’t “urgent”. As I said in the email, it was an opportunity for everyone to give the Network dept. a hand and get a time consuming, though not overly difficult, task completed and free up some resources.
Someone in another dept responded with “stop writing pointless emails” and telling me that I could be actually doing the work instead of sending “spam”. And he responded to my limited distribution email on a list with a much wider distribution, including all the executives at HQ.
The amount of disrespect is appalling.
Apr 24 2006
Got back in town from the DFW Ufie campout at Turner Falls, OK(which has got to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth. In Oklahoma. Who knew?) at about 3, went to see Silent Hill with Kristell and
I’ll post a more thorough update, with pictures, later.
Apr 19 2006
One of the Data Entry girls at work today is wearing a t-shirt that says “By reading this you are giving me brief control of your mind.”
I read it out loud and she grinned and nodded. I said “Hmm… so I’m staring at your tits and reading your chest… so yeah, I guess I have.”
She did a double take until she caught the joke.
Apr 19 2006
The best ticket subjects in the last 24 hours:
“spam box” (I think he meant “dialog box”, since the ticket had nothing to do with spam, but did mention a dialog box.)
The ever popular “hi there”, “no subject”, “Question” or other title that says nothing about what the customer needs or wants from us.
“I Need port 80″ (thought we had Port 80 firewalled and he needs it for his Shoutcast server. Yeah… we’re a web server hosting company. We get our jollies blocking the single most used port on all our servers…)
“I could not express my problem openly” … yeah… still trying to figure that one out. Reading the actual ticket content doesn’t help much either. He’s still tring to figure out how to express his problem “clearly”.
“please change kernel from i386 to amd64″, because of course, AMD makes Linux kernels…
“The server was rebooted ?” You’re asking us? Check your logs. We didn’t reboot it unless you asked us to.
Apr 19 2006
Walked into work today, entered the data center and started walking to the NOC only to discover they’ve extended the new cages that were being built yesterday. I started to walk around them to the pathway to the NOC, only to discover they extend to completely block the path. “Oh dear god! You’re sh**n’ me?!?” I exclaim loudly.
The electricians working on the PDUs by the wall were giving me awfully funny looks as I walked all the way around to the far side of the DC to get to the NOC.
Now, this isn’t just inconvenient. We have to walk from the NOC to our cages 50 times a day. Now we have to go the long way around these stupid cages. Some sales droid just looked at the floorplan and said “Oh, look! Empty space! I can sell that square footage to another customer!” but didn’t look closely enough to see that they were SERIOUSLY inconveniencing one of their biggest customers blocking the path between their NOC and their cages.
Idiots.
Apr 14 2006
Got home late tonight (no “Dear Customers / Coworkers” entries today. Too tired.) and was working on catching up on Nodwick and falling asleep at my computer. About 5 seconds before crawling into bed the cell phone starts playing the “You Got MONEY!” song (ie: a notice that I’ve received a text message. At this hour, on payday, that could only be the auto-deposit notification from BofA).
Now I’m wide awake and wondering how to spend it.
No, I’m not about to go out and spend my paycheck. I have bills to pay.
Apr 13 2006
Threatening to take all 40 of your servers to another provider every time we gave you exactly what you ordered is getting old. Really.
We thought you would have learned this lesson after the whole Windows server / unformatted second hard drive incident.
So is insisting that we pull miracles out of our ass like resize your /var partition, without any down time whatsoever.
When you fill out your order form and specify exactly how you want your drive partitioned do not, repeat do not waste our time and yours by “proving” “our” partition scheme is all wrong by sending us a link to a web page with the “recommended” partition scheme that is… exactly what you ordered and we delivered.
Please note: there is a factor of 10 difference between “1500MB” and “15GB”.
Note: if you’d just let us partition it with our normal default scheme (2GB swap, 100mb /boot, the rest in /) you wouldn’t have a “too small /var” problem.
Regards,
Your Overworked, cheesed off NOC tech
Dear Coworker number 1,
When you report to me, and I ask you to perform a simple task and you say “OK”, don’t let me catch you, 40 minutes later, warming a chair in front of someone else’s workstation. Don’t tell me you’re working on another task and will get to it when you’re done. That’s not what I told you to do. Don’t tell me you’re in the middle of the task I set you either, when it is physically impossible to perform that task sitting in that chair. Don’t argue with me about it. Just don’t. It makes you look like an idiot.
Don’t jabber me 20 minutes later to say “by the way, I’m going home on time tonight, for once”, then go home having completed exactly 1 server of the 12 that need doing. Your coworker who who worked on the same task and got 4 done in 1/2 the time is putting you to shame (and didn’t leave until they were all done). If you had started when I asked you to, the two of you would have gotten all 12 done.
You’re a good guy and a good tech. Don’t turn into a dick the first time I actually ask you to do something. I did, after all, ask nicely.
Leaving that many un-resolved tickets in the queue at the end of the shift reflects badly on everyone on our shift.
Regards,
Your seriously ticked off supervisor.
Dear Coworker number 2,
If you have suddenly decided you have a problem with me, talk to me about it. Don’t start sending me weird jabbers implying I’m lazy. Don’t start trying to give me orders when I’m technically senior to you. Don’t ask me why I get away with giving orders when 1) it’s my job and 2) you work in a different department and I’ve never given you any order to do anything.
Regards,
Your perplexed coworker.
Apr 12 2006
Got an email from the Dir of Operations today that he wanted to have all preformance reviews done by the 15th, but some of us “still have not turned in our self evaluations”.
Except the only self evaluation form we were ever sent we were later told not to use.
Now I’m told I do have to fill it out and send it to him.
I’m wondering if I should do it “straight”, or with some personality.
List objectives you met or exceeded during this performance review period.
1. Got hired.
List objectives which you did not meet during this performance review period.
1. Get promoted to TSG
List your key strengths
1. I breath.
2. I don’t smoke crack.
List skills you need to develop further.
1. The ability to not want to choke the living crap out of the next customer who tells me he’s taking his business elsewhere when we tell him we won’t do things we said we won’t do in the freaking contract.
2. The ability to not want to choke the living crap out of the next coworker who tries to blame me for his screwups.
List your primary goals and objectives for the next performance review period
1. Get a job that pays a real salaray.
Apr 11 2006
Your objective is simple: Soul Accumulation
Your motive is a little bit more complex: Mom never loved me
Stage One:
To begin your plan, you must first Traumatize a Rock Star. This will cause the world to sit up and take notice, stunned by your arrival. Who is this Evil Genius? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good as an Intelligence Transferred into a Computer?
Stage Two:
Next, you will Desecrate the Statue of Liberty. This will cause countless hordes of Computer Programmers to flock to you, begging to do your every bidding. Your name will become synonymous with the Spice Girls, as lesser men whisper your name in terror.
Stage Three:
Finally, you will Activate your Opening of the Seven Seals, bringing about the Apocalypse. This will all be done from a Abandoned Church, an excellent choice if we might say. These three deeds will herald the end, and the citizens of this planet will have no choice but to elect you their new god.
Trust us, it’ll all come together in the end.
Apr 11 2006
Please, please, PLEASE open a new ticket to ask us to look at your existing trouble ticket. We LOVE being told how DOUBLE-PLUS IMPORTANT your ticket is and will we please get to it right away!
Also, be sure to tell us all about how you’re going to take your 40 servers to another provider because we didn’t format your secondary hard drive. Really, we know EXACTLY how you want it partitioned and formatted. I mean, it might take you all of 30 seconds to right-click on “My Computer” select “manage” and partition and format your drive yourself! Gee, and in 5 minutes, you might have to click the “OK” button when it’s done formatting! GOSH! How much work we’re making you do! Shame on us! Shame on us for not making you READ THE F’ING CONTRACT!
Apr 09 2006
I just sent this message to both Wal-Mart and Discount Tire Company
To Whom It May Concern,
I am addressing this both to WalMart and Discount Tire Company.
This letter is about customer service done wrong and customer service done RIGHT.
On Thurs, 7 April, I needed to have my tire fixed. The valve stem was leaking. I had “fixed” it with a can of fix-a-flat, but that is only a temporary measure. I stopped by WalMart store 880 at 2:00 in the afternoon to see if they could do it. I had to be at work by 3:00. I was informed that it was unlikely they could have me in and out in that time, as there were other customers ahead of me. Fair enough. I inquired how late the auto service dept was open and was told 7:00.
I came back during my lunch hour and arrived at 6:30, the repair to my car taking perhaps 5 minutes to complete. There was no “greeter” in site. Two seperate Walmart associates told me they would fetch the “greeter” for me, but no “greeter” ever appeared. All other employees did their very best to pretend I wasn’t there for the next 20 minutes. My roommate happened to have brought his truck in for an oil change at the same time and informed me that the “greeter” was at the counter inside. I walked in just as the “greeter” walked away. He took one look at me as he walked away but said nothing. I waited, but he did not return. Finally I spoke to the young woman behind the counter, who informed me that another associate who had just walked up could help me. This person lead me out to the service area, grabbed a PDA-like device, then asked how she could help me. I informed her of my needs and that I had to be back at work by 7:30. To her credit she managed to avoid laughing in my face, but only just. She informed me that it would be closer to 8:30 before they could get my car in.
Thoroughly disgusted, I left, seeking out a Pep Boys down the street. Before I got to Pep Boys, I passed a Discount Tire Company (the location at 3516 W. Airport Freeway, Irving, TX 75062) and pulled in. Their bay doors were closed, but as it was a windy day and the doors were facing into the wind, and there were both employees and customers on the sales floor, I stopped anyway. The entrance to the sales floor nearest my car was locked, so I walked around only to discover the store had closed at 6:00. As I was walking back to my car, an employee, already in street clothes, opened the door nearest and asked if he could help me. I told him what I needed but that I understood they had closed an hour earlier. He invited me to step inside, then spoke for a moment with the manager. He then told me to pull my car around to the first bay door.
When I pulled my car around the door was open and an employee waiting for me. He lifted my car up, removed the wheel, broke the bead on the tire, replaced my valve stem, rebeaded and inflated the tire, mounted the wheel back on my car and properly torqued my log bolts. I tipped him, then stepped into the show room to ask what I owed the store. The manager informed me that they were happy to help me and just come back some time to buy some tires.
I had already planned on purchasing a new tire or two some time in the next two weeks.
You can guess which company will receive my business.
Apr 03 2006
A while back I sent an email to the site-wide distribution list letting people know I’d bought a bunch of clipboards and put them in the supply cabinet, so STOP STEALING MINE!
Since then, my clipboard hasn’t been stolen once. The ones I put in the supply cabinet got snapped up within 5 minutes.
However, when I come to work today, while the clipboard was sitting on my desk… everything clipped TO it had been swiped. Not like we were out of pens or paper in the supply cabinet. They just don’t have the kind of pens I buy for myself. And someone was too lazy to walk the 5 feet from my desk to the supply cabinet to get their own pad of paper.
<sigh>
Dec 10 2005
1. Go here.
2. Pass it on.
1.~How did you meet
arwenoid? Went to Silzz and Squiz’ wedding
2.~What would you do if you had never met
joedecker? Be less interested in photography
3.~What do you honestly think of
lrc? A true geek
4.~Would or did
tvleavitt and
densaer go out? No, but they might
5.~Have you ever liked
hubs? As a friend
6.~If
needo died tomorrow, what is one thing that you would need him/her to know? ?
7.~Would
misseianna and
gothchip make a good couple? Actually, probably yes
8.~Describe
el_gecko in 3 words: don’t know well
9.~Do you think
magn0lia is hot? Not really
10.~Would
needo and
dconnect make a lovely couple? No
11.~What do you think of when you see
densaer? Sadness at a lost friendship
12.~Tell me something humiliating about
gothchip: Don’t know anything
13.~Do you know any of
karmasunra’s family members? Yes
14.~What’s
drkmiss’s favorite color? Black
15.~On a scale of 1-10 how cute is
hopeforyou? 8
16.~What would you do if
sinboy just professed their undying love for you? Be flattered
17.~What language does
tvleavitt speak? English
18.~Who is
haela going out with? Her husband
19.~Is
phoenixparkle a boy or a girl? All woman
20.~Would
chuck_lynn and
sinboy make a good couple? No
21.~Who do you think
vulpine137 would be great with from this list? Misseianna
22.~When was the last time you talked to
magn0lia? At least 3 years
23.~What is
hubs’s favorite band? No idea
24.~Does
misseianna have any siblings? No idea
25.~Would you ever date
karmasunra? Yes
26.~Would you ever date
el_gecko? No
27.~Is
vulpine137 single? Yes
28.~What is
drkmiss’s last name? Millard
29.~What is
chuck_lynn’s middle name? No idea
30~What is
lrc’s fantasy? A big ass computer
31.~Where does
phoenixparkle live? Davis, CA
32.~Would you make out with
arwenoid? Yeah, probably
33.~Are
joedecker and
karmasunra best friends? No
34.~Does
el_gecko like
drkmiss? They don’t know eachother
35.~How did you meet
chuck_lynn? She came to Dallas
36.~Is
magn0lia older than you? Yes
37.~Is
dconnect the sexiest person alive? No
Sep 14 2005
Wow. It’s been a long time since I posted here. Over 2 months.
Well, at least this time I have some good news:
(With apologies to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the entire civil rights movement for co-opting that expression…)
Employed at last! Employed at last! Thank God Almighty, employed at last!
It’s no where near as senior a position as I used to have in the industry, and no where near the pay, but $X > 0. With full benefits from day one.
Jun 30 2005
I know readers are probably getting tired of hearing about iTunes by now, but there’s one or two more features I forgot to mention (for those considering getting into podcasting).
With the addition of podcast support in iTunes, you can now read the show notes for each episode, in iTunes. I gripped already that, though iTunes has an integrated browser, you can’t click the links within show notes.
However, the nifty thing is it also puts the show notes on your iPod, so you can read them while listening to the show.
Jun 30 2005
Now that I’ve been playing around with it for a couple of hours and actually using it to listen to a few podcasts, subscribed to a bunch, etc, I have more, more educated, thoughts.
Jun 29 2005
Apple just released iTunes 4.9, which has podcasting support built in. Now you can subscribe to and download podcasts through the iTunes music store interface.
If you own an iPod, be sure to also grab the iPod updater software 2005-06-26, which which installs the needed functions on your iPod.
This is why I got an iPod in the first place. Now it all comes together.
Thoughts on iTunes 4.9 so far:
[Edit: Dave Slusher at Evil Genius Chronicles posts about Apple linking to his podcasts' Bittorrent feed rather than his alternate direct MP3 feed, but not including Bittorrent support. I was afraid of that. I hadn't actually added his podcast into my subscriptions yet (hadn't gotten that far down the list) but I had a feeling I would run into that. I didn't know he had a direct MP3 feed, so I'm glad I actually looked at his text blog today and saw his comments. Now when I get that far I'll know to bypass the Apple music store entry for his podcast and use the Advanced menu to add his alternate feed.
Also, Dave, you mention that your iTunes is scheduled to download every day at 8:00 PM and you can't change it, and ask if everyone else is the same. No, mine says 7:00 PM. But then, I'm in CDT. If you're in EDT, then we'd still be firing at the same time.]
Jun 27 2005
Martin (
He’ll be stopping in New Orleans tonight, then tomorrow he stays the night at my place.
Just got off the phone with him. He’s currently in Tallahasse.
Jun 27 2005
Due to a combination of problems with my RSS aggregator, being out of town and general laziness, I haven’t read my friend’s LJ entries in about 3 weeks. I apologize if I’ve missed anything important. I’m slowly going through them over the next few days, but I probably won’t go all the way back 3 weeks on all friends LJs. If there’s something particularly important you want me to see, let me know.
Jun 23 2005
In Taos, N.M., helping repair some of the homes on the Taos Pueblo.
[NOTE: If you're using Firefox and the pictures don't load, blame Yahoo. They're service just doesn't work with Firefox. Since they're not my photos, I don't control where they got posted.]
Jun 08 2005
CNN.com - Actress Anne Bancroft dies - Jun 8, 2005
Like David Gulliver, Keeping the Faith is one of my favorite movies. I loved her character. I will watch it again tomorrow.