Category Archives: Geek stuff

Geek stuff, Life in general

Tales from the trenches

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I told myself when I started the previous incarnation of this blog that I’d try to avoid talking about work at all. But quite frankly, sometimes the only way to vent about something or share a funny story with other people is to put it here, so there we go.

Let me tell you about yesterday’s experience.

Our service is just that: a service. Like any utility or subscription – electric, cable, what have you. If you pay your bills, your service stays on. If you don’t, it doesn’t. It’s very simple. For some reason, though, various people seem to think this is different. I haven’t quite figured out why that is, exactly. Is it because it’s all Internet-based, and thus doesn’t seem quite real, or that they have a strange notion that it costs us nothing to actually run it? No matter; this is half about people who can’t grasp the concept that this is a business and half about people being deadbeats.

We’ve always been fairly lax about suspension policies, which isn’t exactly what we’d like to do, but there always seems to be something other than searching through billing for nonpayers to be done. Toss in the last few years with everything that’s been going on, and it makes the situation worse. We’ve been addressing that, and being more aggressive about either getting people to pay their bills or getting them gone. Cost efficient, the beancounters like it, and it cleans up the billing system. Works. We understand that sometimes circumstances result in an invoice here or there being declined. Credit cards are stolen. People get sick. They have an issue. Believe me, we understand, and really, our clients know that if they have some temporary problem and let us know, we’re fine with it. However…

Periodically, we rerun failed invoices, as people will update their billing information so the processing can be completed. Yesterday, we did just that. We then received an email from someone telling us that only one of her accounts was set to payment by credit card, so why were there two invoices processed? Well, that would be because you had the current invoice as well as the previous invoice outstanding. This is a paraphrase of her response.

“I didn’t know there was another invoice too, and now this is going to cost me another $35 because there is no money in that account. Take it off the card and put it on Paypal with (other account).”

Let’s examine this, shall we? At the bottom of every invoice is a notation of any other open invoices that might exist, and the total due of those other invoices, so if you’re actually looking at anything that’s being sent to you – and since you’re asking about two processing notices, you appear to be – or if you simply log in to the billing system to look at your account, there is no reason for you not to know about this. The total charge here, for these two invoices, was a grand total of $12. If you don’t have $12 to pay for your service, and you’re habitually behind on invoices, perhaps you should rethink having that service. Beyond that, you’ve just told us to take it off the card and change it to payment by Paypal. That’s what the above means to us, and being the nice people we are, and even though we will incur an additional transaction fee, we void those two invoices. In the meantime, we’ve looked at the billing for the other two accounts you have, and lo and behold, you have half a dozen invoices open for one, and two on the other, which doesn’t make us inclined to do what we’ve just done for you so you can avoid whatever overdraft fees you have. So we ask you, nicely: when can we expect payment for these other accounts? This is the response we received, verbatim:

“Please stop with the tone – I’m doing what I can – go ahead and just park the (name) site and that won’t be an issue right?
(Other site) may get caught up on the 5th, the other one on the 20th.”

Let’s examine this, shall we? First of all, you’re lucky that the one account still exists at all, given that it’s so far behind, and that any of them are still up, period. Second, whatever “tone” you think there is in a simple question is a mystery, but guess what? This isn’t a charity, and being a bitch to us isn’t helping your case. Third (and this is rich), “doing what you can” and telling us on the 29th of a month that one account “may” get caught up in a week, and the other in three weeks is entirely insufficient. You know what all that gets you? Suspended.

And that’s what we did. Which, in turn, led to this same person telling us we were “petty and vindictive”, that she just made payment in December, and that she wanted the sites back on because having them down was “impacting a lot of people”. Wrong: this business is not a not-for-profit enterprise, and no matter how much of a unique snowflake you believe yourself to be, you are not above our policies. And yes, you made a payment in December. To pay not one, but six open invoices on one of the accounts, for June through November, which still leaves you with December and January invoices open and past due. As to the third: well, quite frankly, the impact to others is being caused by your failure to address your obligations. Perhaps they should have chosen someone more capable of dealing with keeping the account current to handle this.

She further went on to claim that she had been asking for the three different billing system profiles to be put into one, and since it hadn’t been done, that was the reason she hadn’t paid. Au contraire: no such request had ever been made, but even if it had been and wasn’t done, leaping from there to the conclusion that it absolves someone of having to pay open invoices is absurd to say the least. It certainly has no basis in reality.

It also led to another rather amusing little game on her part. As we moved through helpdesk tickets, I came across one from someone asking how long an account upgrade would take. Not long, I replied. Just long enough for whoever caught the ticket to do it. The response to that was “Good. There is currently a problem with my account (name) and two others, because they were suspended and I think that’s unethical.”

I see. Apparently it’s unethical for us to expect to be paid, but opening a support ticket under a dummy name, using a freebie email account, and asking a bogus question in order to waste our time is entirely ethical.

In the end, because she continued to insist that we were wrong to suspend the sites, wrong that she had told us to take any charges off and recreate them, wrong to claim she was behind by two months (rather than one) on one account, and just plain wrong about anything else, we told her to move along. Others may live in bizarro world, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be dragged down into it as well.

All of this took away from the time I was spending tracing power cables in order to put together a plan for replacing certain power distribution units and moving some equipment off one buss to even the loads. I completed a bit of that work, but there is more yet to be done. Now that the current nasty, seemingly crazy person has been dealt with, though, maybe we’ll catch a break until the next one comes along and we can get some real work done for our real (paying) clients. I am not sure, though, that there will ever be enough time in the world to understand why peopl behave in the manner this person did. It strikes me as a rather odd way to move through life.

Geek stuff, Life in general

Lessons not learned (Or, why my dogs are smarter than some of our clients)

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I don’t mind helping people learn new things. During my college days, I used to tutor people in various subjects, and one of my instructors tried pretty hard to get me to change over to an education major. No thanks.

What I do mind, however, is people who refuse to even attempt to do anything for themselves, or who complain about things being “too technical” when they are not, or who insist that everything is – and this is a direct quote – “ridiculous” or that we must be “kidding”.

I can assure you that the only thing ridiculous when we deal with someone like you – is you. And no, we are most certainly not kidding about any of it.

Let me tell you a story.

We have two dogs now, both rescued from the pound. Great dogs. They have managed to learn a number of things in the course of the last year. One of the dogs will not push open a door. He was the one who was abused by whoever had him previously. The other dog will nose open anything at all, because he’s a goofy puppy. We have taught them to work together for certain situations. For instance, when they have to go outside, we open the door for them, let them out, and then leave the door not quite closed. The little dog does his business and then generally comes right back to the door while the goofy puppy runs around sticking his nose into things. Little dog whines a bit, as a signal, and goofy puppy, having learned that this is his job, comes running over to muscle open the door.

There is a gate to the side yard, and one afternoon, both dogs had gone out the gate. Goofy puppy had come pounding back inside, knocking open the door. I was in the middle of something and did not immediately close it. He ran off to another room. In the meantime, the wind had pushed the gate almost closed, so there was insufficient space for little dog to walk through. We all heard him calling because he could not get back in the gate. That includes goofy puppy, who came tearing around from the other room, flew through the open door, and who went over to the gate and knocked it open for little dog to enter.

Smart. Learned do a task after a couple of tries and subsequently performed that task without any issues at all.

If we could get some of our clients to do the same thing, it would be a miracle, because quite frankly, certain types do not have it in them. If we could get them to simply be less rude, that would work, too, but alas, all hopes we may have had for that have long since passed.

Want to know how to really irritate tech support – people, I might add, that you are contacting for assistance, not the other way around?

Be a jackass, for no reason, or when you are clearly wrong.

For instance, open a ticket with a subject line that does not seem all that incredibly urgent, with a first post that indicates nothing more than the subject does. The problem is solved. Then come back a day or so later, berating us because something was not working for two hours, and now you have to explain it to people. Here’s a tip: if something is an emergency, then say so. If whatever you’re opening a request for means some part of the site or server isn’t working, then perhaps you should indicate that, rather than just saying “abc isn’t working, please check it”, when “abc” isn’t required for the server itself to be operational. If you further bitch about the time it took because your subject line was so nondescript that a level one tech couldn’t really see anything wrong and had to bump it up, then perhaps you should use a tool that is readily available to you to have a higher up look at it immediately.

Or let’s say you want to give someone access to a portion of your site, without giving them your login details. If we give you a step by step on how to create login details for that person and then tell you exactly how to go about accessing the site with that information, and you respond with “It’s not letting me login” with exactly zero further information: you are not helping. If you further bitch and moan about the very precise, very clearly laid out information you are subsequently provided in the course of half a dozen back and forths because you simply were doing it wrong, asking us if we are “kidding”: you are being a jackass. No, we’re not kidding. Neither are we interested in spending boatloads of time telling you exactly how to do something that is not recommended in the first place. That is why we gave you the exact link that you need to use. All you needed to do was cut and paste it. Instead, you’re berating the people who resolved your issue. Do you think that will make us more or less inclined to think you are anything other than a rude moron?

Or, let’s take you, user who hasn’t been able to check his mail for “two weeks”. Who is also emailing us using an address from which you have already said you cannot receive mail. It would behoove you to use some alternate email address to contact us, just as it would behoove you not to let 43,000 (well, technically, 42,749) pieces of mail pile up in the main account that you never check but yet left active anyway despite recommendations that you not do this. We will be polite. We will suggest that you use, or provide, some other email address when you contact us and that you reset the main account not to collect mail. If you write back to us, telling us that you provided otheraddress@somewhere.com to contact you: we can read. Had you provided it, we would have used it. You did not. Therefore, you look even more foolish to us because you can’t read your own original request – which is embedded at the bottom of our response to you, something you received when we cleared out a little room to work in the mailbox.

And finally, if you act indignant, order us to “look into” why your site is deactivated, and we find that you have several invoices outstanding, have ignored the notices from the billing system itself, have ignored the requests that the billing department has sent you about your overdue account, and have not bothered to pay any of those invoices even after we’ve suspended your site: you are being a deadbeat. But I must say that I sometimes get some wry amusement out of the fact that suddenly the situation is rather urgent to you when you seemed to feel no particular urgency previously although you were warned that your account would in fact be suspended. And on this same topic, the reason we are not as lenient as we used to be is precisely because of the people who like to say “we will address all open invoices by specific date” and then do exactly nothing about paying their invoices. That includes you, Miss “I’ll pay all invoices by Friday” who not only didn’t pay a dime but also moved your accounts elsewhere. You, particularly, will be held up as a prime example of why there simply won’t be any exceptions any longer. Congratulations. You are the winning jackass for this round.

Geek stuff

Embracing your inner geek

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Some days, that’s what it feels like. Especially days where you put seven servers online at once, bringing your total to thirteen in the past six days. And when you have to do the year end inventory audit plus trace wires to make sure everything is labeled properly. Your inner geek can surely make your back hurt. And to make it even better – so that your brain hurts just as much – there is bound to be at least one asshat in the helpdesk telling you that they’re “seriously considering a hosting change” because their mail is delayed. And you look at the delivery attempts, only to find their mailbox is full. And you have to tell them this without just replying with a couple of choice words about that “serious consideration”.

Geek stuff

Just once

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Just once, for a day, or perhaps two, I’d like to sit people down in our seats and have them try to do the job we do. That includes the hundred little things a day behind the scenes that keeps intact their ability to get the latest forwarded LOLOMGBBQ!!!111!1 emails as well as keeps up the servers and the network. I’m well aware that the Internet now affords people an even easier ability and a larger stage to comment on things about which they know nothing – and make it appear that something rather complicated can be reduced to something that appears to be very simple. It’s still vastly irritating to respond to snarky comments masquerading as questions.

Geek stuff

So you want to be a geek

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Generally, being a geek is not a bad job, even with the snotty people or those who are intentionally obtuse (for instance, those who ignore, three times, the very direct statement “You do not have to make any changes.”). For the most part, people are happy that you’re there, and glad that you know how to repair whatever has gone horribly awry in their technical lives. They are pleasant, civil, and just regular human beings.

Some days, though, can be trying. If you’re thinking of a life in geekdom, let me give you one of those days.

Yesterday ended for me around 2 AM this morning, because my todo list is always rather ambitious and far exceeds the number of hours available in any given day. I signed off, went to bed, and tried to sleep, only to be awakened at around 4:30 AM by our remote server monitor, telling me that there was a vast and wideranging problem and that the servers were not accessible. Crawled out of bed, contacted the NOC, to find that my suspicions were correct: one of the master breakers had tripped, and taken down one of the buss lines, including the circuit where our router was located – for those of you who don’t entirely understand that, it means that although not all of our equipment had lost power, it was in fact entirely inaccessible since our gateway was affected by the abrupt loss of power.

The standby electrician was notified, and in the meantime I had the NOC guys reset the breaker to get things back up. This was done pretty quickly, and things came right back up with very little fuss. With the exception of three servers that suddenly decided their drives needed to be checked. And the exception of one server whose primary drive killed itself due to a power surge.

While we were awaiting the arrival of the electrician to replace the breaker with a spare, I headed to the NOC to address the three recalcitrant machines and the dying server. When I got there, the electrician was there, and unfortunately, they were not able to do the swap without taking out our circuit, so down it went again, for a minute or two for the swap. When things came back up, I took care of the three servers that needed disk checks, started on the one whose primary drive had failed due to the uncontrolled reboot, and discovered that another server’s primary drive didn’t like the bounces and decided to keel over, too. So, I took care of that one as well. Four and a half hours later, I left the NOC, to return to the HQ to finish the restores on the two servers that had their drives replaced – including the one where the primary drive was a mammoth 500G SATA2 drive that will certainly be going back to the manufacturer for a warranty replace as the server is only about two months old and the drive should be within the year they give.

Back at the HQ, I checked in with the staff and began the restores. By 5:30 PM, all the restores had been completed and all the little miscellaneous (non service impacting) issues had been addressed. While those restores were going on, I started on the next batch of kernel updates on about 120 machines, answered helpdesk tickets, had some coffee, and took a break just now to type up this post. My day will probably end once again around 2 AM tomorrow morning.

Most days are not like this, thankfully. But almost every geek will have one (or more) just like it. Keep that in mind when you’re pining away for a career change, and pick something simpler. Lion taming. Stunt work. Eating fire. Something like that.

Cancer, Geek stuff, Life in general

Hi, stranger

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“Where are yooooouuuuuu?” asks one of my loyal, even if slightly deranged, handful of readers.

Well.

I’ve been busy with work-related stuff, trying to get some things done for the end of the year. I’ve also been dealing with a couple of the absolutely, without a doubt, unquestionably dumbest, rudest people I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. Let’s face it, if you call me by something other than my own name, when my name is in the dozens of ticket responses you’ve received, including the very one you’re quoting, then you are indeed a rude jackass. If you also can’t read plain English and suggest that we’re lying about something, you’re just ratcheting down our already low opinion of you. By the way: if your domain expires, and you don’t notice the fact that it doesn’t go anywhere for three entire months, don’t whine to us about how important it was to you, and that you were “busy” getting married and working. I’ve been dealing with cancer-related crap for over two years now, and I’m guessing that my employees, the state, and the feds wouldn’t accept that as an excuse if I neglected to pay them or file paperwork because I was “busy”.

In any case, I finally unloaded the camera the other day, and was shocked to discover about 500 pictures on the thing. That’s a lot of review and selective editing to be done. First, though, the goal is to complete the rollout of our gift to our clients before Santa shoves his butt down the chimney (what? no chimney?) so I can move on to other things. And since it’s just me on the job today – everyone else is at the football game or off having other fun – and since it’s quiet, I’m hoping to use today to bang out quite a number of things on my todo list, if only to see if there’s any hope of shrinking that before the new year rolls around.

Hope everyone is well and enjoying their holiday. Be safe, be well, be happy.

Geek stuff

Heading into the stretch

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I decided, rather on the spur of the moment, to convert the blog to WordPress. The thought has been brewing in my head for a bit now, even before the conversion to Movable Type 4. After dealing with the back end of MT in the latest version and trying to find certain options that should be readily apparent (but aren’t), and after converting someone else’s blog this evening from MT to WP, I decided to go ahead and – as the ads say – just do it.

This is not to say that everything is exactly the way I want it. There is still some tweaking to be done. But it certainly is easier to manage this, and there is no rebuilding after doing one little thing, only to find that you’ve screwed up and need to redo something, then having to rebuild yet again. There are a few things I like about MT, but the aggravation factor with WP is less, os it wins. I get enough aggravation from dealing with work.

I promise you this: Monday will bring about a post on Thanksgiving. With pictures.

Geek stuff, Life in general

Slowly but surely

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We’re making our way toward Thanksgiving day pictures, really. With tons of images to sort and resize, and rolling out our upgrade gifts to our clients (and let me tell you how much it warms my cockles to have some idiot bitch about how long it takes to get through hundreds of servers to give them something for FREE), there simply are not enough hours in the day to get everything done so I can whittle down my to-do list. We’ll get there.

Geek stuff

‘Tis the season

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I will never, in my entire life, understand why people have to be such blazing assholes – for no reason whatsoever. Bitching to us about your billing, because you moved some site elsewhere “months ago”? Be nice if you actually contacted us to tell us this, since we don’t communicate via ESP around here. Complaining that there is an error on your page, and it couldn’t possible be your (homegrown) code, and then demanding that we fix a server where nothing has changed one iota, shown quite clearly by the information page for that server – except that very code you wrote, which shows timestamps the day before you contacted us? A pretty fair indicator that you broke something in your “couldn’t possibly be my code”, since it was working before and isn’t working now (and we won’t even go into your leeching of other peoples’ bandwidth by including their images in your site). Telling us you requested 1.5 months ago that a certain account be removed from your profile and telling us to correct this immediately? Not so, according to the ticket history – which, by the way, you can easily access to review at any time – wherein you said that you would be removing it, and you’ve made zero requests that we hold your hand through that process. Acting like a total jackhole and demanding a response to a request and telling us that you’re going to “switch hosts” if you don’t get an answer today? Number one, perhaps you should ensure that we actually received that request (we didn’t, according to the mail logs) and number two, perhaps you should ensure that the request is supposed to implemented today (it wasn’t, according to the actual tech person who cleaned up the mess you caused by your virtual stomping of feet). And of course, there’s always my favorite, someone bitching about not getting an email that was sent two nanoseconds ago, or even better, was not received when the sender merely had the passing thought of sending that email: if all you have to do with your time is constantly refresh your site or your mailbox, looking for that latest “l0l” comment on your magnificent and oh-so-interesting blog, or some stupid piece of forwarded chain mail crap, then you definitely need a hobby. In the real world. Moaning about the lack of an instantaneous response in the dead of night/morning here, our time, when there is one person on duty (me) and said person has had to go the NOC to fix yet another issue with your server, which is chronically overloaded? Not going to win you any points with a tired and cranky admin who continually tells you the very same thing over and over again, which you conveniently ignore in favor of whining about the fact that we fixed the problem you made before answering the inevitable jackass ticket that we knew would be awaiting us on the return. Whining about something that you “can’t do (again)”, making it sound as if there is some horrible, ongoing problem? It would help if there was a first report of that problem – or indeed, if there was a ticket from you anywhere in the past six months with a request for anything whatsoever, or a ticket from before that containing a request that your password be reset because you forgot it.

Fortunately for us, the vast majority of the people we deal with day in and day out are normal, polite people. Normal people who simply ask their questions, get their answers, and move on. Without the gnashing of teeth about how terribly tragic their suffering is and complaining that we “just don’t care”. Yeah, that would be why I’m on call 24/7/365 and why I work approximately a million hours a day (ok, more like 16-18 hours) around here. Because quite clearly, we “just don’t care” about anything. Tell that to the people who venture elsewhere and then wind up back on our doorstep because of the “caring” they’ve received at other places.