Jumping the fence! After only a few months, I did just that. I wanted that power!! The ability to assign a login and an email account@ or, if I was feeling jovial, change a password or retrieve the login name...
Sep 30, 2022·edited Oct 1, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
Part of my job for the past fifteen years has been making firewall changes for various departments. Two of my goto:s for complaints when things aren't working have been "If you haven't explicitly requested it, it's not going to be allowed" and, on Fridays, "I'm good at a lot of things but telepathy isn't one of them". It's often the same people I have to say this to, and they always apologize and ask me to kindly open for this other random UDP port they'd forgotten that they'd needed.
A couple of months back, I had to request firewall openings from another team for a system I was setting up. Not being able to connect to it as planned, I complained and eventually, on a Friday afternoon, got a very courteous guy from Lithuania on a Teams call to help me figure things out. As he was investigating, I said "I've requested TCP port XXXX to be opened from this list of addresses, but I don't get a response on that port. Also the server doesn't respond to pings, and a traceroute fails at address X.X.X.X.". I swear I could feel the strain in the very fabric of the universe as he responded "We're good at a lot of things but telepathy isn't one of them". It was, after all, Friday.
For the record, it turned out they HAD indeed made a mistake in their policy, not allowing port XXXX all the way. But that doesn't change the fact that I hadn't requested either ICMP or the UDP ports needed for traceroute. I didn't much like the other side.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our machines, that are unable to give us what we once expected from our human lords. We, being total wazzocks, might once have wheedled and cajoled our master until given a resigned rolling of the eyes, a shift to being someone else's problem, or a size 14 boot up the arse. These new overlords know not of such things. They bombard us with messages that we care not to read. They refuse to help us in our need or put us out of our misery. They let us visit our wazzockry on others without let or hindrance. They hide our failings behind metrics and statistics that no-one examines. Our struttings and frettings are not heard as tomorrow creeps its petty pace to retirement. We are not born great and bloody well don't achieve greatness. Thus are our revels ended.
Retired, resigned, or maybe I just quietly quit… but I was THE IT guy in far too many ‘situations’ for way too many years… highly qualified for many of the tasks of maintaining complex systems I was mostly asked to ‘fix the flickering lightbulb twelve feet above a disused cube space’ or ‘find a network cable for a visiting vip’. Takes most of the fun out of actually ‘helping’.
Telling someone to ‘reboot and call back’ loses its charm after the forty or fifty-th time.
Best day of my life was being made redundant and having multiple VPs call my personal cell phone for ‘help logging in’.
User is in the USA and can’t dial into the office in the uk.
They ring through to the office and complain the modem in the laptop isn’t working and they need to do important work….
Basic troubleshooting is done and it looks like a cable / line problem. They someone asked the question how many phone lines are in their hotel room. The answer comes back just one, the question was how are you calling the office.
Followed by a pause and the message I will ring back if it still doesn’t work.
That wall thing reminded me of a friend some years ago who'd bought a new-build property.
Previously, he'd lived in a solid Victorian brick building - inside walls all brick, too.
His wife wanted a cork board in the kitchen. So, he told me he got out his trusty hammer drill, marked the wall, braced himself, and... ended up on the sofa in the sitting room.
I'm sure he had exaggerated (maybe not), but it was funny.
I remember one client complaining that half the text was missing from her website. It turned out not only that she refused to wear her glasses in the office, so had her screen magnification turned up to maximum, but had stabbed blindly at the monitor adjustments so the vertical scroll bar was somewhere in space about half an inch to the right of the bezel.
When I first had sat nav, back when it was new fangled - I used it to go between home and work on the grounds that I know the area, if something goes wrong I can still get home. I soon found out that while it does show a route, its not always the best route. I developed the habit of talking back to "her" about the choice of routes and think it means that I don't do as your dad did!
The same user called three times in a week because her headphones were not working. Three times putting them on solved the problem.
The beauty of IT support is asking people who are most of the time sociopathic (aka 'IT guys') to take care of disgruntled morons (aka 'users'). I wonder how there no more BOFH-like incidents in offices.
"Well, hang on, I wasn’t asking him to proofread the 2.5pt small print at the bottom of a vasectomy waiver."
Wish I'd written that....
"You will, Oscar, you will"
Jumping the fence! After only a few months, I did just that. I wanted that power!! The ability to assign a login and an email account@ or, if I was feeling jovial, change a password or retrieve the login name...
Part of my job for the past fifteen years has been making firewall changes for various departments. Two of my goto:s for complaints when things aren't working have been "If you haven't explicitly requested it, it's not going to be allowed" and, on Fridays, "I'm good at a lot of things but telepathy isn't one of them". It's often the same people I have to say this to, and they always apologize and ask me to kindly open for this other random UDP port they'd forgotten that they'd needed.
A couple of months back, I had to request firewall openings from another team for a system I was setting up. Not being able to connect to it as planned, I complained and eventually, on a Friday afternoon, got a very courteous guy from Lithuania on a Teams call to help me figure things out. As he was investigating, I said "I've requested TCP port XXXX to be opened from this list of addresses, but I don't get a response on that port. Also the server doesn't respond to pings, and a traceroute fails at address X.X.X.X.". I swear I could feel the strain in the very fabric of the universe as he responded "We're good at a lot of things but telepathy isn't one of them". It was, after all, Friday.
For the record, it turned out they HAD indeed made a mistake in their policy, not allowing port XXXX all the way. But that doesn't change the fact that I hadn't requested either ICMP or the UDP ports needed for traceroute. I didn't much like the other side.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our machines, that are unable to give us what we once expected from our human lords. We, being total wazzocks, might once have wheedled and cajoled our master until given a resigned rolling of the eyes, a shift to being someone else's problem, or a size 14 boot up the arse. These new overlords know not of such things. They bombard us with messages that we care not to read. They refuse to help us in our need or put us out of our misery. They let us visit our wazzockry on others without let or hindrance. They hide our failings behind metrics and statistics that no-one examines. Our struttings and frettings are not heard as tomorrow creeps its petty pace to retirement. We are not born great and bloody well don't achieve greatness. Thus are our revels ended.
…one of my children’s favourite jokes is, ‘I found out why your computer was broken… there was some ‘nut’ loose on the keyboard…’
Retired, resigned, or maybe I just quietly quit… but I was THE IT guy in far too many ‘situations’ for way too many years… highly qualified for many of the tasks of maintaining complex systems I was mostly asked to ‘fix the flickering lightbulb twelve feet above a disused cube space’ or ‘find a network cable for a visiting vip’. Takes most of the fun out of actually ‘helping’.
Telling someone to ‘reboot and call back’ loses its charm after the forty or fifty-th time.
Best day of my life was being made redundant and having multiple VPs call my personal cell phone for ‘help logging in’.
“Do you know my password?”
Yep! But I can’t tell you!
This was about 18 years ago.
User is in the USA and can’t dial into the office in the uk.
They ring through to the office and complain the modem in the laptop isn’t working and they need to do important work….
Basic troubleshooting is done and it looks like a cable / line problem. They someone asked the question how many phone lines are in their hotel room. The answer comes back just one, the question was how are you calling the office.
Followed by a pause and the message I will ring back if it still doesn’t work.
That wall thing reminded me of a friend some years ago who'd bought a new-build property.
Previously, he'd lived in a solid Victorian brick building - inside walls all brick, too.
His wife wanted a cork board in the kitchen. So, he told me he got out his trusty hammer drill, marked the wall, braced himself, and... ended up on the sofa in the sitting room.
I'm sure he had exaggerated (maybe not), but it was funny.
"one user who has forgotten how to scroll"
I remember one client complaining that half the text was missing from her website. It turned out not only that she refused to wear her glasses in the office, so had her screen magnification turned up to maximum, but had stabbed blindly at the monitor adjustments so the vertical scroll bar was somewhere in space about half an inch to the right of the bezel.
When I first had sat nav, back when it was new fangled - I used it to go between home and work on the grounds that I know the area, if something goes wrong I can still get home. I soon found out that while it does show a route, its not always the best route. I developed the habit of talking back to "her" about the choice of routes and think it means that I don't do as your dad did!
Nice finish with a little twist on the classic support shaggy dog story that ends with the luser boxing it all up and taking it back to the store...
The same user called three times in a week because her headphones were not working. Three times putting them on solved the problem.
The beauty of IT support is asking people who are most of the time sociopathic (aka 'IT guys') to take care of disgruntled morons (aka 'users'). I wonder how there no more BOFH-like incidents in offices.
Customer support. Show me a system without users and I’ll show you a system without problems…