Grumpy Techs

Yes, folks it’s time to “name that email”!  Here’s one that we received today which is sooooo totally related to work that I immediately took care of the enduser’s request!

XXXXX,

I received an email ice cream coupon from Ben & Jerry’s and I am unable to open it.  Is there anything I can do so that I am able to retrieve my birthday present from Ben & Jerry’s?  I don’t want to lose out on a free ice cream.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

XXXXX

So, based on the tone and idiocy of this email, can you guess what level this employee is?  You can?  You’re CORRECT!!!  This is an “associate VP” position!  That being said you can assuredly bet I *immediately* took care of this email by immediately deleting it and blocking the B&J domain at our spam filter level from accessing her inbox ever again.  Now she’ll just *have* to remember the ice cream *surprise* for herself on her birthday.

This is why I get the big bucks, folks.

Y’all remember this one?  Yeah, the mail server went down again today.  Fortunately, it’s a VM so I’m thinking of just taking it offline this evening, allocating more memory and CPU (although shortage of memory seems to be the problem) and seeing what it does.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t help the mass number of calls we get.

:::RING, RING, RING!!!:::

Me:  “this-is-GT-yes-I-know-the-mail-server-is-down”

Caller:  “Oh, I thought it was just me doing something dumb.”

Me:  “Well, that’s a matter of debate.  Thx for calling.  Gotta run.”

:::RING, RING, RING!!!:::

Me:  “this-is-GT-yes-I-know-the-mail-server-is-down”

Caller:  “Ummm, do you know the email server is down?”

Me:  ::crickets chirping::  “It is?  Gee, thx for letting me know.  Let me get back to fixing it.”

:::RING, RING, RING!!!:::

Me:  “this-is-GT-yes-I-know-the-mail-server-is-down”

Caller:  “Ummmm, Millenium is down.”

Me:  “Okay, I’ll have to get back to that after I fix the email server.”

Caller:  “Actually, I meant email.  Email is down.”

Me:  “Very helpful, thx.”

And the be all, end all kicker.   An email.  From a user.  Telling me that the email server is down.

Ummm, thx?

I had so much fun (did I?) writing the first “day in the life of” that I thought another one might be suitable considering the day I’m having thus far. This is a standing post for today, i.e. I’m writing just about everything that happened as they happened.

8:15am – I was actually having an enjoyable morning since the curmudgeon is out this morning. I got a call from the employee in charge of the “lockdown system.” This system basically locks all our doors in the threat of an emergency. Of course it’s never worked right; the door magnets don’t always sync up w/ the security software. Now, the curmudgeon relishs on keeping most of the information to himself. Redundancy and contingency just don’t exist here. That being said, I managed to bring the system back up by “guessing” the respective passwords and ensuring all the workstations were communicating with the server. Fortunately, the curmudgeon isn’t one for changing passwords and likes to use one or two for everything.

8:39am – I picked up the problematic laptop that one of the “big bosses” was having after pestering him for three days. The hard drive went bad so I’m replacing it. All of a sudden, I get a phone call from him asking me if I’ll back up his personal email on Outlook. Now, I’m sure we all know how to save a PST file but because we don’t use Exchange/Outlook for our business email, I told him that I’d do my best but no guarantees. The guy actually started crying and begging me to do what I can. I offered to bring him a Kleenex.

9:12am – I receive a “frantic” phonecall that the printers have “disappeared” from one’s computer. Wow, that must be some kind of miraculous occurrence. I’ve never heard of anything just “disappearing” from one’s desktop. I informed the caller that I’ll get to them just as soon as I can but that I’m working on a couple of other things at the moment. Apparently that wasn’t good enough because this person had *another* coworker call me to tell me of the first person’s plight. Needless to say, I told the second person in the time I just spent “wasting” with her and telling her what I told the first person is time I could have spent addressing the previous issues so congrats on being moved down even further in the queue. (Good thing my mid-year review is next month!) Fortunately, it was something as simple as the print spooler filling up with BS files so a quick purge and restart of the print server fixed that.

10:30am – Finally getting caught up on things when a coworker asked me if I have a tape measure he could use. I look around at all the IT gear and grinned at him. “I guess not,” he says before walking to the desk next to me and rummaging through our network tools. I *politely* suggested he contact the Maintenance department since they probably have…umm…TOOLS. “Oh, yeah, good idea.” :::sigh:::

The rest of the day – OMG, the rest of the day was boringly lame.  I bet if I rack my brain I’ll think of something dumbass-y.  Hmmm…..  Nope, nothing’s there.  On to tomorrow.

Current Mood:  grumpy

Believe it or not, dear readers, things have been pretty quiet on the GT front lately.  I’m not gonna just write random posts for the sheer purpose of ensuring y’all get a post every day.  That would be lame.  I’d rather post something funny or mind numbing when it comes up.  That being said, here are a few little things that happened recently y’all might enjoy.

After finishing converting the 2k3 Microsloth domain to 2k8 and feeling pretty good about myself, I decided to enjoy a bit of “downtime” by logging into our content filter and checking out where people are heading.  I was disappointed to find many of them are simply shopping or watching YouTube videos of Susan Boyle or whatever.  Yeah, pretty lame.  I was hoping to find a cool porn site or something useful.  So, I dug a little deeper and found out that a certain group of individuals who share a single account (fortunately, only three of them so it’s easy to pin down) were visiting a bunch of “questionable” websites very late at night (yes, we’re a 24/7 organization here).  Well, after bookmarking a few meaty choices, I decided to have a little fun.

I called the group’s supervisor and showed her the records.  Of course, she was mortified but I suggested we have a little fun with this group of employees.  We rigged her Crapple so that she could log in to their Crapple (they do shift work so it’s a shared computer) remotely without their knowing.  I showed her how to create “subliminal messages” via the Textpad feature so the next time they logged on and started playing around, she could send them little love notes.

Last night, one of the employees came on and started poking around the ‘Net.  The supervisor immediately saw this and waited to set the hook.  As soon as the employee hit one of the “sites,” the supervisor took over the computer and started in.  Now, the funny thing is that we had also rigged the computer to grab audio and video from the built-in webcam.  This is what we got:

Supervisor (via the computer, of course):  Send this note – “Does your mother know what you’re doing?”

Employee:  :::surfing the ‘Net::: “O. M. G.  W. T. F.???”  :::looks around nervously:::

Supervisor: “Thaaaat’s right.  W. T. F. indeed.  Again, does your mother know what you’re doing?  And, you know, I *could* be God.”

Employee:  :::nervous laughter:::  “Ummm…I…Ummmmm…”

Supervisor: “I would suggest that you no longer visit these sites.  In fact, I suggest you receive counseling or even go to confession if you’re Catholic which I happen to know you are because, after all, I’m God.”

Employee::: “Ummmm….okaaaaieeeee.”  Powers down the computer.

The supervisor shared this with me and was rolling on the floor.  I thought it was cute, of course, but, hey whatever floats her boat.  She’s under the impression that said employee probably won’t be using the computer much anymore.

Here endeth the lesson.

I was resting on my laurels this morning, thinking I’d enjoy a bit of light reading before coming in to work when my cell phone started screaming at me.

Caller:  “The server’s down.”

Me: :::sweet and innocent voice::: “Why, good morning!  Which server’s down please?”

Caller:  “The email server, you idiot.  Geez, how many servers do we have???”

Me: :::juuuuust a tad annoyed, especially since I’m not on the clock yet and, also, because I wasn’t notified that the server was down by the monitoring system::: “Thanks very much for that information, I’ll go ahead and look into it.”

Caller:  “You better because I have a very important email I need to send out!” (Yeah, probably to his wife.  Now, this is at 7am, mind you, and this particular person reaaaally doesn’t need to be sending “important emails” at 7am.)

:::clickety-click-click-CLIIIIICK::: Well, what do we know?  The server’s actually fine.  For some reason, however, this person’s account is locked.  Gee, I wonder how that happened?  It’s not like *I* locked the account because I’m too ignorant to remember the password.  But since I was greeted with such compassion and kindness this morning, I thought I’d give this individual a little present.

Me: “Hi there.  The server’s back up.  Looks like it suffered a meltdown but I managed to save the day!  Just call me the ‘white horse’!”  (Actually, that’s an inside joke.  I should share that story sometime.)  “The only thing is that your mailbox became corrupt in the process of bringing the server back up so I’ll need a bit of time to finesse the database and get your mailbox restored.”

Caller: “Ummm…what do you mean, ‘corrupt’??  How long will it take to fix??”

Me: “Probably looking at a couple of hours.  I’ll be sure to look into it as soon as I get in to the office.”

Caller:  “Why can’t you begin fixing it now?  Aren’t you on call 24/7 for emergencies??” (Note, dear readers, “emergencies” is the keyword.)

Me: ::jovially:: “Oh, my, you’re absolutely right!  How silly that I forgot that!  I’ll go ahead and start working on your mailbox now!  I’ll send you an email when it’s complete.”

Caller: “That’s great, thx.  I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

Dumbass.