Tag Archives: assholes

Catching up

So I let the daily blogging thing go by the wayside. Winters – or, more accurately, waiting for spring to really get rolling – are a bit boring on the ranch. I probably should have been painting more, or working more on the neverending to-do list, but the fatigue factor really got to me. Now that I’m on some supplements to get my B levels back up, I feel a whole lot better, and more like my old self. Still not taking iron supps, though, and I’m definitely not eating any liver, so that’s still a work in progress.

But progress there is: all of the first round of flats, except two, have been transplanted: tomatoes and peppers, mostly. The other two flats have onions (plus one  lonely little datil pepper that isn’t going to make it, like the other dozen that never bothered to germinate) and herbs (plus artichokes to replace the ones zapped by the severe freeze we had). I’ve also sown shelling peas, snap (green) beans, peanuts, three kinds of cucumbers, okra, carrots, spinach, and sweet potatoes, along with various herbs and flowers for the bees. Out back in the chicken yard, where we had composted some things over the past year and where the chickens had scratched around, I put in lima beans (ugh), sunflowers, and corn. Yes, corn. It is my personal windmill here on the ranch, and I have another variety I’d like to put in somewhere, too.

Yesterday we got over an inch and a half of rain, as measured by our very own weather station. Before the rains started, I had transplanted out a flat, and gave it up when the big thunder started rolling across the sky. It was only around 10 AM that it started storming, but it lasted almost all day. Much needed rain, although we’re still very short of normal.

Today, more sweet potatoes put in, the other flats put out, as much newspaper and hay put down as my back could stand, and two more flats started and put under the lights in the barn: paisano tomatoes for sauce, sweet basil, purple basil, and two types of tobacco for mom. Got another canvas started, added to one of the earlier ones that is now dry, dealt with an asshole who thinks we should have known to remove his account when he never bothered to let us know, bitching about the invoice the system generated – hey, my superpower of ESP still has not kicked in from the radiation, and no others have appeared either. That’s a bummer.

Several trees my mom swore were dead were just a little dead, and are now upgraded to alive, leafing and budding out. The peas, cukes, and okra have all started to poke their heads up. The snap beans are probably a week or so away from beginning to flower. We’ve had asparagus spears popping up for the past couple of weeks. It’s time to start prepping the spots the beehives will be in: two in the rear, one up front.

Tonight: seafood feast by request, as my sister is visiting from Illinois. Another attempt to view Jupiter and its moons before it slips away beyond our viewing period as the days get longer. Starting another canvas while the others dry a bit. Starting the reworking of our tutorials for our users, since our control panel has changed since the first round. Doing end of quarter stuff for the business. Relaxing. Maybe.

Not another dime

Disgusting. There is simply no other word for it.

My letter to the Susan G Komen Foundation.

“I am disgusted by your craven act of defunding Planned Parenthood under the guise of the organization being “under investigation” when it is clear you have caved in to those who think womens’ bodies should be under the control of someone other than themselves. Breast cancer runs on my mother’s side: my grandmother died of breast cancer that spread to other parts of her body. Several of my aunts have battled the disease.

I have always supported the Komen foundation, either through direct donations, support for those doing the Race (and don’t get me started on your nonsensical watchdog tactics on “for the cure”), or through my company’s sponsorship of a site dedicated to generating donations to your organization (I am the owner).

No more.

Since you have decided that some of the most vulnerable members of our society are no longer worth the screenings and services that comprise more than 90% of Planned Parenthood’s services, I have decided that you are no longer worth one cent of my time or money.”

From now on, I’ll be donating directly to Planned Parenthood. I will not give to SGK, nor will I sponsor any walks for anyone (sorry).

The answer to the question

The question being: why do so many people get the hell out of tech? This is why.

User: Mail from (IP) is being blocked.

Us: What is the reject message?

User: It says at this link that (IP) is listed at (some obscure spam list).

Us: What is the reject message? The (IP) is not the mail server IP address, and is not what the outside world sees when mail is sent out. There is no indication in the mail logs of any rejects from (obscure spam list).

In between: we look through the logs on the server, and check out 54 different spam listings for the actual, server IP – the one the outside world sees – and find nothing at all. No one else on the same server reports any rejected mail anywhere.

User: It says at this other link that (IP) is listed at (some obscure spam list).

US: Once again, we need the actual reject message for the mail. The IP (IP) has nothing to do with mail delivery. Only the server IP is seen by the outside world when handing off mail. Places that are rejecting mail will do so with a reject message. That is what we need.

User: (Copying us on a whine to his webmaster): Interesting “customer support”. Find me another host, I’m not spending another dime with these rude people, and I don’t care if the server is blocked or not.

Us: Asking for specific information is rude? We’re trying to investigate an issue you claim exists when we can’t find any indication there is one. We asked for the reject message, and got another listing that has no bearing on this issue. Clearly, further explanation was required about what we needed, and that’s what we did. Since you haven’t provided a reject message and we can’t find any evidence mail is being rejected to anywhere from that server, we’re considering the issue closed.

User: Close this ticket. Your customer support is amazing.

Brilliant riposte. You really got us with that one. Thanks for wasting our time chasing down a nonissue. Guess mail from that server really isn’t being rejected anywhere after all.

And that is why people eventually leave the tech field. The insistence of problems where there are none and the refusal to follow the simplest of instructions combine over time to form a thousand little stabs into the soul of the tech that has to deal with your asshattery.

Tip from tech support number whatever

If you refuse to listen to us after asking how to solve a problem, then bitch at us because “our” application – which is not “ours”, genius, something the giant COPYRIGHT notice at the bottom of the application clearly states – is broken because you can’t use a singular function you’d like us to believe you’ve used before but clearly have not since otherwise we wouldn’t have had to tell you how to get into it in the first place, tell us about some hugely convoluted series of steps you took to get around the problem instead of the single step we gave you, and then tell us our support is “poor” because you didn’t like our answer and chose not to do what we told you to based on our much higher level of experience with the application in question….

…don’t expect a lot of sympathy from us. If you then follow it up with a snide comment about how you “hope [we] have other skills” because in your esteemed opinion we shouldn’t be in the business of giving valid answers to technical issues….

…you’re not even going to receive a response to that bullshit.

Know why? There are other clients who will actually take the advice we’re giving them based on our being in tech support forever, because unlike you, we know what the fuck we’re talking about and those others know that when we say “do xyz”, doing xyz will solve their issue.

But hey, you know everything anyway, so why are you asking us for help in the first place?

How to piss off tech support, part infinity

When you are contacting us for support, because you’re working on a site for one of our clients, here are some tips on how to piss off the very people you’re asking for help.

Open a ticket saying you can’t upload to an application you’ve installed. Don’t include any other information. We love trying to figure out what the hell you’ve done to break something that’s been working just fine, and love even more rechecking ownership of and permissions on files, and tracking back through the logs.

While we’re working on that, open yet another ticket saying the site is entirely down. When we look at it, the site is in fact down, because it can’t establish a database connection. That seems odd, since the site has been working just fine. Until…

After we tell you the problem is the configuration file and the credentials the file is trying to use to connect are incorrect, tell us you haven’t changed anything. Except, oh, you changed the password for the main account user.

When we repair the configuration file to use valid and proper credentials, and then tell you that if you change little, minor things like, oh, PASSWORDS, you need to update configuration files that use those passwords, ask us how you’re supposed to change the file without FTP or control panel access. This will surely make us ask you what the hell you’re talking about because you just told us you were in the control panel and changed the password, and this has nothing to do with us correcting a database configuration file. Ergo, you should be able to do whatever it is you need to do, since presumably you were just in the control panel doing whatever it is you were doing.

An HOUR later, complain that you still can’t access FTP or the control panel. Since both are working fine, and the site is working just fine because we repaired things, this will make us even happier as we go hunting through the logs only to find you locked yourself out – and locked out the actual client as well, since you’re at their location – by continually attempting to log in with an incorrect password. A password that you changed from the control panel. A password that you should know. You kept trying to log in with an obviously incorrect password instead of stopping and just contacting us, which triggered the firewall.

When we tell you what you’ve done – without pointing out the definition of futility, I might add – and then tell you we unblocked your IP and reset the password, respond with a request to rest the password to “changeme”. Nothing delights us like easily guessed, massively insecure passwords.

And finally, when we tell you that we’re not resetting the password to that, give us a snotty “Fine.” followed by a haughty “I want it on the record” that you find our response insufficient and too slow. This despite the fact that the entirety of the issue, start to finish, was created by you, and it took you an HOUR to respond to something we managed to reply to in exactly seven minutes.

All of this will certainly ensure that we put you at the top of the douchebag list, and further will ensure that we let the client know – because they also contacted us about the site being down – exactly why everything was a mess. There was insufficiency going on here, that is certain. It is equally certain that it had nothing whatsoever to do with us.