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The cranky thread


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Re: The cranky thread

 

We were out at a Thai place in St. Paul, only people in the entire restaurant, when the kitchen staff came running out and turned the TV on less than 10 minutes after it happened. Just stood there in shock. Heading home, first eyewitness report I heard was someone talking about how they turned off right before the bridge collapsed and they watched a blue minivan right in front of them screech to a halt and dangle over the broken bridge. What was I driving as I listened to that?

 

A blue minivan, with my kids in it. Have taken them across that bridge lots of times. Very scary stuff. The only good news is there are surprisingly few reported fatalities--I'd figure that a bridge collapsing 64 feet loaded with cars would have a much higher immediate death total. There's still a bunch of missing that could wind up as fatalities, but at least there isn't the sudden shock of corpses like I'd suspect.

 

Wow.

 

Just...Wow. I used to live not too far from that bridge, many years ago.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

One of the walls of my office is shared with a file-storage room. They have moved the files out and are now removing the file lockers. This causes large crashes at irregular intervals.

Sounds like my work. I work on the other side of the warehouse, where people are constantly throwing down very large boxes filled with very heavy things, so they don't have to carry it down a ladder. I hear a startling crash so often, I'm almost used to it.

 

Almost.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

Sounds like my work. I work on the other side of the warehouse, where people are constantly throwing down very large boxes filled with very heavy things, so they don't have to carry it down a ladder. I hear a startling crash so often, I'm almost used to it.

 

Almost.

 

Well, if you were used to it it wouldn't be startling anymore. ;)

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  • 4 weeks later...

Re: The cranky thread

 

Today, the day started with a phone call to a man who called the hotline last night because his hard-drive crashed. He's working with clients, so getting him a loaner laptop is High Priority. I get back from lunch, and find a laptop sitting on my desk that needs to be configured for a new hire starting on Tuesday, so its High Priority. Less than a hour later, a man comes in with a dead laptop - so we need to move the hard drive into a different machine before he leaves for the day, so this is (you guessed it!) High Priority.

This is in adidtion to the other laptops I'm configuring which are also due on Tuesday, only because they were given to me more than 2-days before the due date, they aren't High Priority... but they still need to be finished. Only I can't finish them unitl HR gets the info into the company directory, which means I will have 3 machines to finish tomorrow. Excepting, of course, any more High Priority units that get to cut in line because the hiring managers were too stupid to follow proceedure so we actually have enough time to do all of this without blowing a gasket.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

Today, the day started with a phone call to a man who called the hotline last night because his hard-drive crashed. He's working with clients, so getting him a loaner laptop is High Priority. I get back from lunch, and find a laptop sitting on my desk that needs to be configured for a new hire starting on Tuesday, so its High Priority. Less than a hour later, a man comes in with a dead laptop - so we need to move the hard drive into a different machine before he leaves for the day, so this is (you guessed it!) High Priority.

This is in adidtion to the other laptops I'm configuring which are also due on Tuesday, only because they were given to me more than 2-days before the due date, they aren't High Priority... but they still need to be finished. Only I can't finish them unitl HR gets the info into the company directory, which means I will have 3 machines to finish tomorrow. Excepting, of course, any more High Priority units that get to cut in line because the hiring managers were too stupid to follow proceedure so we actually have enough time to do all of this without blowing a gasket.

 

Ah, times where you really wish you could say "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part". Well, say it and remain employeed that is...

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Re: The cranky thread

 

Ah' date=' times where you really wish you could say "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part". Well, say it and remain employeed that is...[/quote']

 

You know, after reading your post, it occured to me that since I own the business, poor planning on the part of my employees does constitute an emergency on my part.

 

Oh, well.:)

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Re: The cranky thread

 

You know' date=' after reading your post, it occured to me that since I own the business, poor planning on the part of my employees [b']does[/b] constitute an emergency on my part.

 

Oh, well.:)

 

Or at least it CAN. :)

 

My brother, when he was running his ISP in Denver, had an opportunity to use that line on a customer. And being the mostly tactless person he at least used to be, he took it.

 

The customer paged the system emergency pager on Easter Sunday. This pager was for notifying the staff at the ISP that servers were down, or something at that level. It was expressly NOT for getting customer service. My brother answered the page, asking what the system emergency was. The woman explained that she had recently signed up for an account, and had paid to have a technician set her computer up to use the account that day, but needed to get the technician in touch with someone on the ISP end to answer whatever questions the technician had. My brother explained that she would have to call back tomorrow as the office was closed, and reminded her that the system emergency pager was only for use in case of systemwide emergencies, such as the servers or modem pools being down. Her response was that it was an emergency, as she was paying someone to set her computer up and they needed the help right now. So he responded with the previously mentioned line and then hung up on her.

 

Not the best customer service in the world, but he must have been doing something right, as his ISP stayed in business doing pretty well until he merged with another ISP that had more money than sense.

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Re: The cranky thread

 

Ya know, when the movers-and-shakers decide they want to impliment a new policy that involves technology, common sense dictates that one should run things by the tech department before implimenting the policy.

 

Recently, they decided that all laptops must be encrypted before being deployed. However, there are many problems:

1) The encryption process adds at least 4 hours of prep time to each laptop

2) Until today, only one man was able to actually able to do the encryption

3) Attempts to encrypt laptops today failed because (unknown to us) it will not work on hard drives with hidden partitions

4) Removing hidden partitions without blowing away data on the drive required installing new software

5) even after doing that, the encryption would not run on those laptops, so they need to be re-imaged anyway

6) Even after removing the partion on other drives the encryption had not been loaded on, there were STILL problems.

 

Result: We now have 7 laptops that are late in being deployed because this policy was stupidly implimented before testing was done, more will follow if we don't get the bugs worked out, and working on *this* is slowing down all the other work we also need to be doing.

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