/dev/zero

> Mr. Andrew <edited>
> NOC Support Team Lead
> ${poe}
&gt
&gt
&gt 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…

So…
My boss got fired today.
He was a good guy. I really liked working for him. He came up “through the ranks” as they say; he knew what it was like being a support tech, a team lead, knew what we do and how we do it. He was a good manager.
But I don’t disagree with the decision. He choose the wrong way to handle a grievance and it cost him his job. And it should have.
I’m still going to miss him. He was a good guy.

Me: Why does Plesk take so long to do everything?
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…

 already summed up this weekend, so I won’t bother here.

Just a few pics:

More can be found in my gallery.

First I get sarcastic email for actually suggesting we could help another department get something done, then when I get to work today, my supervisor, “W”, has to “talk to me” at some point.
When we both get a free moment to step outside and talk, it seems someone has informed W, and the boss, “J”, of an incident where I “screamed” at someone yesterday about not doing their job and I tried to tell them what to do. Apparently I’ve been trying to boss people around, giving orders to people from other departments, etc. Funny, I must have amnesia. I have absolutely no recollection of ever having “screamed” at anybody at work, ever. And I have never attempted to give orders to anyone from any other department or otherwise tell them what to do, unless they specifically asked. The person at whom I am supposed to have screamed was even named. I haven’t had anything other than perfectly polite conversations with this person since… well since the day she was hired. Including today. We had perfectly normal, polite conversations today, with no tension or anything.
Luckily my supervisor and my boss, know me better than that and just wanted to get my side of it, which was that I had absolutely no clue what that was about.
It would appear someone is out to stab me in the back. I have no idea why.

So as pointed out, today is free cone day.
The nearest B&J’s to me?
DFW airport, terminal D.
No, I don’t think I’m going to park at the airport to get a free cone.

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.)

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.

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 . Got home, played some DoD, now I crash.
I’ll post a more thorough update, with pictures, later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Make your own evil plan.

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!

I just sent this message to both Wal-Mart and Discount Tire Company

To Whom It May Concern,

You can guess which company will receive my business.

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>