Micro-blog
The micro-blog is an experiment in frequently updated 1-2 sentence posts updated as frequently as practical. Mostly this is just an excuse to avoid setting up a Twitter account. If you find this type of thing interesting, you're either a close, personal friend or a very strange person indeed.
January 25th 1:48pm
I had hoped that, as we came out of the high-season, the torrents of correspondence would abate somewhat but today proved me wrong.
Mondays are always a little hectic when panicky clients dump all their weekend fuck-ups in our lap at 9AM and want them solved by 9:01AM. You know the day will be a little extra special, with regards to fire-fighting, when you see a reseller asking you what "chmod 777" means.
Apparently it was a mite urgent since he just performed a recursive change on his entire server.
January 20th 9:40am
Today I sent a physical invoice for 0.38$ via the post.
Postal fee: 1.18$
Billing a known con-artist an insignificant amount that I know for a fact will not get paid: priceless.
The customer routinely "forgets" to pay until he racks up a huge outstanding amount. He then proceeds to negotiate himself out of it because we're complete morons who will believe anything and are deathly afraid of bad press. Chances are, we will have to send several reminders and deal with him multiple times on the phone over this.
This is company policy. We're doing this on purpose. People who complain about government inefficiency have never worked in the private sector.
January 13th 3:50pm
As a company, we're dumb enough to occasionally do favours for people in the interests of behaving like sensible human beings. Some times this policy can munch you in the posterior businesswise.
Case in point: by giving some initial freebies, we've now trained a guy from another company in the same building as us to just drop by the office any time he has any vaguely IT-related problem. We're constantly fixing his office printer, wi-fi access point, removing viruses from laptops, installing software etc. because we're the resident "computer guys."
Today he wanted us to perform some changes on his website which, unfortunately, we host. He was in a rush so it was important that we handled it sharpish. Sharpish and free, of course. Disregard the inconvenient fact that this is yet another service we don't even provide to paying customers.
Any time computers are involved, it's like you enter some sort of Twilight zone where normal social mores, business practices, expectations of privacy and even common decency suddenly no longer apply.
I can't waltz into a plumber's office like I own the place and demand he tar my roof for free since he's a "building guy." He's likely to lay some pipe where the sun doesn't shine if I can't outrun him, yet this is somehow perfectly acceptable to ask of someone who works with computers.
January 8th 3:20pm
Our old help-desk system was getting a little long in the tooth so, while I was away on vacation, we rolled out a new one with bells, whistles, kitchen sinks and shiny knobs. The new interface is intuitive, the system is stable and information is managed productively.
All was well and good in the world until I took a look at how employee performance was measured by default in the software.
I wonder if management realises that by making the number of resolved tickets the primary performance metric, they are theoretically providing me with a very strong incentive not to solve problems but to talk about them.
In fact, my performance score is now best served by preparing a solution to emerging problems and sitting on it until it causes enough customer complaints and correspondence for me to get noticed when I "pull out a rabbit" and solve the issue.
The quicker I solve problems, the worse my performance will appear and the worse I will look to my boss. You've got to admire the sheer awe-inspiring counter-productivity of bean-counter managers who actually use this type of performance measurement.
Good thing I work for people slightly more connected to reality.
January 5th 12:19pm
After a month-long hiatus wherein I sought refuge in Thailand to re-knit the threads of my sanity, I return to face the pitchfork-wielding hordes of ineptitude.
And what is this I see before me?
A customer explains that he's in a bit of a pickle because his website got hacked and he, in a fit of panic, sacked his webmaster because, Lord knows, we'd better blame someone quickly. Trouble is, he doesn't know the top end of a keyboard from a hippo's rear and now needs me to explain exactly what a website is.
I wonder when my visa refreshes.
December 2nd 2:30pm
In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction move, Somali pirates have established a cooperative in Haradheere where people can invest in pirate vessels for a share of any future booty or ransom. They've effectively reinvented a type of scheme that was often practised by the much romanticized Caribbean variant of pirate in the 1700s so all the Somalis are missing now are the peg-legs, parrots and Disney movie franchise.
Much as it annoys me that people are investing in armed robbery, acceptance of piracy has a long tradition from people not being subjected to it. Throughout western history, piracy has been conducted either with a wink and a nod from a government providing safe harbours or with outright support via letters of marque granting individual privateers the right to attack foreign shipping. The individual pirate may have been executed when captured by the other side but the system of sanctioned pillage and murder was hardly ever in question.
Certain groups even operated with officially recognized charters. The Dutch East India Company was granted the right to conduct acts of war, a monopoly on colonization and could mint their own coin. This was the world's first modern multinational corporation and the first to issue stock. The company widely engaged in the slave trade, extortion and piracy along with more legitimate activities. The proceeds thereof went to the stockholders.
Large multinationals to this day are roundly lauded when engaging in everything from false-flag operations to terrorism in the pursuit of profits as long as they invent new euphemisms and justifications for it. Given this historical precedent of acceptance from western nations, I'm wondering if the reason the Somali pirates are condemned so strongly is that there is no functional government or corporation to back them.
Perhaps the next step for the pirates should be a PR department and a Washington lobby group.
December 1st 3:49pm
There's hardly a company on the planet that doesn't overflow with gushing servility when they brag about how important each and every customer is to them. This is a kind of shared lie that even the densest customer realizes is absolute nonsense of the highest order.
At least that is what I thought before I started working in tech-support. Some people actually believe that their Kubrick-themed Wordpress blog will receive the same attention as the cluster of servers rented by a multi-million dollar off-shore exploratory-drilling company.
Imagine my delight, after receiving a tirade of insults by a jackass with delusions of grandeur, to find that the site he was supposedly "losing tons of money every minute of downtime" on was a Wordpress blog with Obama conspiracy theories. With an average of 20 visits per week, not including his own IP address, I remain somewhat sceptical.
He's now on my list of people I will eventually get creative with once I finally snap.
November 30th 4:00pm
Hell hath no fury like a Mac user who has just realized she's made a tremendous blunder. The road from panic to denial to rage is short and quickly traversed for the technically illiterate.
Yet another of our less clued-in users was in a fit of hysteria today after having inadvertently deleted a mail account. She protested rather vocally that she would never do such a silly thing and that, obviously, there had to be something wrong with our service. When prompted to describe just what she did, she walked me through the exact process for deleting mail accounts.
I presume a warning pop-up regarding the destructive nature of a button marked "Delete Account" is not quite intuitive enough for the baby's-first-computer crowd.
November 25th 12:29pm
I love it when the past catches up with people. A customer involved with some kinky cam-shows on her own time had, apparently, been told in no uncertain terms by her boss to knock it off and take her website off-line.
Disregarding the (arguably illegal) douchebaggery displayed by her boss in this instance, imagine her surprise when she finds out about Google cache and web.archive.org
November 24th 2:37pm
It might be a small thing compared to ending world hunger and changing the self-destructive nature of the human condition but exclamation-mark fetishists and all-caps ass-hats should be taken out behind the shed and put out of my misery.
Email is a written medium. There's no need to shout; I see you. In fact, if you want me to care about your problem, you're far better off not acting like a 13 year old halo-playing child on a sugar-high.
November 18th 10:56am
A customer ranted and raved at some length today because someone on the Internet had the temerity to send him an unsolicited commercial mail. Apparently, spam was something of a novel concept for him and he wanted us to track the originator, press charges against people using supposedly "illegal marketing methods" and prevent this from ever happening to him again.
Welcome to the Internet.
When our customer service rep. effectively told him to go pound sand (in the nicest possible marketing-speak, of course) he took it about as calmly as someone sticking his private parts in a beehive. I can hear the police laughing at him already.
November 17th 3:43pm
Anonymity does funny things to people. I doubt a man in his 50s who claims to be a civil engineer with "25 years of experience with web development" would make physical, legal and public relations related threats in person.
But on the interwebz he is one of many under the impression that they have free license to be total fuckwads.
Apparently, we now have one of these holy warriors on a mission to destroy us. He's doing his level best to invent all sorts of outlandish stories in order to tarnish the Google results when searching for our company. I love web 2.0
November 16th 10:23am
Nothing hammers home what day it is more than trying to convince a customer that the name of the protocol is actually FTP, not FPT. Apparently I'm just a "dumb tech-support nerd" and not "a highly successful web architect" like her and should shut my mouth about things I do not understand.
It ended with me conceding the point for the sake of preserving my sanity and mentioning that she might want to submit a change to the Wikipedia entry for the File Transfer Protocol in order to set the record straight.
Mac-using web-developers. Think different, indeed.
November 13th 8:33am
Friday the 13th. This'll be fun.
November 6th 12:58pm
If you're an inexperienced user, I have a simple rule for you to follow when things go wrong. It's what I'll begin to refer to as "the office-plant rule"
To wit: Instead of flying into a fit of panic when your computer does something unexpected, take a cue from the office greenery and simply do nothing. While you're doing nothing, at least you're not making it worse.
Most instances of serious, irrecoverable damage I see, are the results of bungled repair-jobs by panicky end-users. Instead of working the problem they overreact and cause far more damage than the initial fault.
Don't mistake activity for competence. Doing the wrong thing is, in many cases, worse than sitting in a corner and enjoying the sun.
November 4th 12:47pm
I've just spent 20 minutes of my life, trying to convince a user that, even though he has the correct password for a service, it does actually matter where he types his password.
I wonder if he expects his house key to work in every lock on the planet.
November 3rd 2:18pm
While checking the referer fields in our web logs today, I found a blog post from a ranting customer detailing the myriad ways our hosting services were "utter crap" because his website had been down for several days.
This may come as a shock but services tend to go down when you cancel them. A quick dig in our internal database yielded several mails where he, between disparaging remarks about our genetic heritage and alleged sexual preferences, informed us that the service was to be cancelled with some urgency. In one, he even submitted a copy of his driver's license as verification.
Future, potential, customers doing a Google query will only see his angry rant, however, not the reason for the supposed "server crash."
I love the democratization of public discourse but remember that the frothy-mouthed lunatics get as much of a voice as you do.
November 2nd 11:42am
Several blogs on my daily reading list seem to have rediscovered the animated GIF recently. I hope this is an isolated phenomenon but I smell a new meme developing.
Much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, please allow me to point out that the usage of animated GIFs has (thank Shiva) been trending downward for some time now.
Let's let sleeping zombies lie and not engage in computer necromancy here. Please use a proper file format for this type of thing and not a cheap hack from 1989.
October 30th 4:35pm
I got an interesting lesson in office politics today when I was dumb enough to agree to a proposal from management.
The proposed change was sound and made perfect sense but management tends toward selective schizophrenia so, before I knew it, the tide had turned and I was now a dumbass for agreeing to a change that would surely doom the company, kill babies, bring down the wrath of the Almighty and bring us to the brink of bankruptcy in that order.
Lesson learned: one must neither agree nor disagree with management. If you commit to anything, you'll eventually be holding a grenade with a missing pin.
And people wonder why corporate life dulls the soul and kills creativity.
October 28th 2:23pm
I wonder if I'm starting to flirt with burn-out. Normally, I'm perfectly able to keep more balls in the air than an all-male acrobatics troupe but lately I've started coming down with what feels like job-related Alzheimer's disease. I find myself more and more frequently forgetting details and small things that are not immediately important unless I write them down.
I had a witty comment I was planning to make in this context but, ironically, I forgot what it was.