The UBER-LUSER from HELL who WOULD NOT DIE.
Ben Cantrick (alias Macky Stingray)
It's summer. Times are slow. Although I work in what amounts to a
cinder-block jail cell with no windows, I do at least have an old
DecStation and a Pentium (even if it does run '95) to play with. I also
get to (ab)use a PowerMac, so I can run Escape Velocity. The air-conditioning
that keeps the machine room cool seeps in through the floor of the office.
This is another benefit for me, having the 90-mile-an-hour metabolism I do.
(Some of my cow-orkers hate it, though.)
Even so, my shifts crawl along. In particular, one. It's a 12 hour shift
on Sunday night that starts at Noon goes until Midnight. Rough, but at least
calls are usually at a minimum. (The phones usually go dead after 6.)
But once in a while, the peace is broken by a luser. And not any ordinary
luser. No, this is not the luser who:
- Can't speak English
- Speaks English really badly
- Wants to "set up their Win95 e-mail account on the world wide web"
...or any other garden variety luser, no! This is the: UBER-LUSER from
HELL who WOULD NOT DIE!
[RING, RING]
Me: "Hello, CNS Advising."
ULfHwWND: "Hi. I'm um... trying to get my Macintosh to work?"
Me: "..."
ULfHwWND: "I don't know much about computers..."
Me: (rolling eyes, thinking "tell me something I don't know") "Well what
seems to be the problem?"
ULfHwWND: "It doesn't work..."
Me: (Lowering head to desk, just in case what I think is going to be
necessary turns out to be necessary.) "How does it not work? Is there an
error message? What happens?"
ULfHwWND: "When I download Netscape, nothing happens."
Me: (Covers mouthpiece of phone. Hits head on desk a few times. <Wham!
THUD! Whack!>) "Well, if you double-click on the installer, it'll start-"
ULfHwWND: "Double-click?"[1]
Me: (I elected to use the cinder-block wall this time... <WHAM! THUD!
WHACK!>) "If you click on an icon, and then choose OPEN from the FILE
menu, you can run a program. Now find the Netscape installer and run
it. Netscape will allow you to install it. Then you can run Netscape."
ULfHwWND: "How do I find Netscape?"
Me: (Thinking, "Oh lord, why art thou so cruel? Why dost thou inflict thy
worst lusers on my shift? Why?? WHY?") "If you go to the FILE menu and
choose FIND, you can search for stuff with a certain name."
ULfHwWND: "Okay, should I type in "Netscape" for the name?"
Me: ("No, you should type in "CLUE."") "Yes, that would be a good idea."
ULfHwWND: "It's showing me two things. Which one do I choose?"
Me: ("Does one read "Shoot Luser"?") "You're looking for the Netscape
Installer."
ULfHwWND: "But they both say "Netscape.""
Me: (<SOB! CHOKE!>) "Yes, that's because we searched for files with the
word "netscape" in the name. Now is there one called "Netscape
Installer"?"
ULfHwWND: "Letsee... hang on..."
Me: (Mentally screaming, "TWO ITEMS!! IT FOUND TWO F**KING ITEMS! WHO
TAUGHT YOU TO READ? HELLEN KELLER!?") "Double-click on the one that
says "Netscape Installer"..."[3]
ULfHwWND: "Okay. It's saying it wants to "unstuff" the files."
Me: (<Sigh of relief>) "Great. It's going to put Netscape on your hard
drive now."
ULfHwWND: "It says it's done unstuffing now."
Me: "Now just run Netscape, and you should be on your way."
ULfHwWND: "How do I find Netscape?"
Me: (Covers mouthpiece and breaks down crying.)
I'm not cut out for this job. Thank god I'm quitting at the end of
the summer. On the other hand, the job has taught me a valuable lesson.
There is no amount of money that anyone can pay me to be phone tech
support ever again...
-Ben
-----
[1] If I ever, EVER make a joke about having to teach people to double-
click again[2], LART me.
[2] I used to do so often. Now the mere thought rends my sanity...
[3] Oh sure, THIS time we have no trouble with the concept.
--
"BGC: Because some of us believe women over 14 are still sexy."
=--------- http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~cantrick/home.html -------------=
*Ben Cantrick, diehard BGC otaku and Priss fan. ---> THE BGC DUBS SUCK! <---*
*Mac? Ha. "When I want to spend 50% of my time fighting an OS, I'll use VMS."*
Vladimir Gabrielescu
In <bcn3tWAf...@csking.demon.co.uk> Chris King <ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> writes:
[snip]
>It can be - just wait for a user to scream "HEEEELLLLPPPP !" and wind
>them up. ("You DID take a backup, didn't you ?" etc) They're cheaper
>than pets, just as entertaining and you don't have to take 'em to the
>vets to have them neutered.
I am not convinced that not having to take them to the vet to have them
neutered is a good thing. I would really like to know why you think so
'cause I'm dont have clue.
Vlad
--
Vladimir Gabrielescu NBCS Student System Programmer 1-908-445-5545
vgab...@toolbox.rutgers.edu http://nbcs.rutgers.edu/~vgabriel/
"Standards are so critical to the computer industry that they invent new
ones every six weeks." Bob Church in a.s.r
Christopher M Cooney (CS)
Chris King (ch...@csking.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: It can be - just wait for a user to scream "HEEEELLLLPPPP !" and wind
: them up. ("You DID take a backup, didn't you ?" etc) They're cheaper
: than pets, just as entertaining and you don't have to take 'em to the
: vets to have them neutered.
otoh, maybe that last part isn't such a bad idea...
Canadian
Chris King <ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>I hate that when my users start using excuses for lame stupidity.
>Example: user puts an entire month's correspondence in a single file,
>takes no backups, corrupts file. Gets all shirty when told that recovery
>of said file is impossible due to user not clicking on her "network
>backup" icon for over four weeks. "I was too busy to do that" she said.
My favourite moment of my current job came on the day when the server crashed
and a day's data was lost (backups *not* done every day)[1]. I'm doing a
contract programming job in an office of 5 people. Our server is run by a
larger company in the same building.
So I got two wonderful experiences in one day. The first was having the junior
sysadmin type -- you know, the designated groveler -- come upstairs to explain
what happened to everyone. I felt sorry for the poor sap, having been the DG
on many occasions in the past, but hey, better him than me.
The second wonderful experience was setting up backups for my office and having
*everyone* in the office -- all 5 people -- treat my docs like the Word O The
Diety Of Your Choice. It was great. Nearly nine months later they still
backup religiously, and daily!
[1] I kept all *my* data local. Like an ex-sysadmin is going to trust a
sysadmin to look after his data.
--
Chris Foley (chr...@iceonline.com) DNRC POPE OF CAPITAL LETTERS, HPK
Abby Franquemont-Guillory
In article <4sg7i5$c...@ccshst05.uoguelph.ca>,
Josh Tiefenbach <jo...@scis.org> wrote:
>On 15 Jul 1996 17:41:02 -0500, Abby Franquemont-Guillory <abb...@tezcat.com> burbled:
>>
>>See, now what always gets me is when people tell you this angrily,
>>as if they were furious about the fact that they don't know much
>>about computers. You know, like this:
>>
>[snip]
>>Me: Okay, and can you describe that?
>>They: (angrily)Look, I already said I'm not a computer person.
>
>What kills me is the people who use the 'I'm not a (computer|technical) person'
>line as an excuse not to engage in basic reasoning.
>
><sigh>
Heh. The other night I was having a beer with a friend of mine, and
he happened to say, "You know, I think if I had Internet access, I'd
be that guy asking the questions that are so dumb they're impossible
to answer." I thought about this, and said, "Well, let's see. What
if we try an experiment to see how you would do on the questioning
end of a tech support call."
"Okay," he said, "sounds like a plan." So I asked him to look
directly in front of him. "You should see a beer, your cigarettes,
and your lighter," I told him. "Do you see those three things in
front of you?"
"Yes," he said.
"Okay," I told him. "Now, what I want you to do is reach out
and pick up your beer with your hand." He did so flawlessly. "Okay,"
I said, "you're doing great. Now, I want you to move the beer so it's
close to your mouth, and take a sip and swallow it." This, too, he
did with no problem. "Now put the beer down in the same place where
you picked it up from a minute ago," I directed him, and again, no
problem following directions there.
"Allright," I told him, "now we're going to get a little bit
more complicated. I want you to pick up your cigarettes. Now, open
the lid. Okay, take out a cigarette, and place the filter end in your
mouth. The filter end is the one which is not the tobacco end. Great.
Now, you can put down the pack of cigarettes, and pick up your
lighter...." We went all the way through, and he handled it fine.
"See," I told him, "If you were the impossible to deal with
guy, then when I told you to pick up your cigarettes, you would have
gotten angry, and told me that last time, I told you to pick up your
beer, and you wouldn't have wanted to have anything to do with the
idea that this time, we were doing something different from taking a
sip of beer... and it would really piss you off when I tried to
explain that part."
But anyway. My friend was convinced, and we had another beer.
--
Abby Franquemont-Guillory | abb...@tezcat.net -- ne...@tezcat.net
USENET News Administrator | http://www.tezcat.com/~abbyfg/index.html
Tezcatlipoca Incorporated | Still the Infamous Devil's Advocate!
PGP Key Fingerprint = F3 7A 6C D9 ED 44 A5 10 8B 97 EF 64 67 C7 98 0D
hillary gorman
Abby Franquemont-Guillory (abb...@tezcat.com) wrote:
:
: See, now what always gets me is when people tell you this angrily,
: about computers. You know, like this:
Oh god. Please.
Support ticket #1:
From: luserbeyo...@netaxs.com
To: sup...@netaxs.com
Subject: Your modems don't work
Hello. I am writing to you because your modem pool is BROKEN. I pay a lot
of money and I don't think it is acceptable that I only connect at 9600
or else your modems don't even ANSWER. When will this be fixed?
-Luser B.T. Pale
From: sup...@netaxs.com
To: luserbeyo...@netaxs.com
Subject: re: your modems don't work, Ticket #1
Hi. Well, sorry you're having trouble. I think you need to look at your
slip/ppp configs or your modem settings. Our modems will answer at 28.8
if your end is set up correctly. A ring-through could be caused by a
broken modem here or else you are calling the hunt that has more lines
than modems, and you are getting a ring-through because the hunt is busy.
If you tell me more about your setup, where you dial in, etc, perhaps I
can help you.
Support ticket #:
From: luserbeyo...@netaxs.com
To: sup...@netaxs.com
Subject: Your modems STILL don't work
Look. I am not going to start going into details about my settings when
YOU have the messed up modems! My configs worked fine til friday. I
didn't change anything!!! The FACT is your alleged 33.6 couriers won't
answer at more than 9600. Deal with it.
----
After about 10 more of these, in which I BEGGED the luser to just let me
know what KIND of software he had, I started forwarding everything to
Avi, who told the guy that it was definitely on HIS end, and that he
should send me the software settings to be checked or cancel his account.
The guy wrote back with an "offer" to "keep the account at half price
through september, by which time hopefully" our modem problems would be
resolved. Avi told him that since the problem was NOT on our end, that
was a stupid idea. After another 10 emails back and forth, I FINALLY
found out that he was using MacPPP, he had set up another dialin number
by copying his original prefs, but he had left the port speed at 9600.
His final email to me said something like:
Thank you for pointing out my error with the port speed. I have changed
to 57,600 and now your modems work.
LUSER!!!!!!!
--
hillary gorman......................................hillary@netaxs.com
For Net Access questions, write to: <sup...@netaxs.com>
"believe me, it's ON THE LIST of things to do. now, where IS that list?"
Chris King
In article <4sehdu$h...@xochi.tezcat.com>, Abby Franquemont-Guillory
<abb...@tezcat.com> writes
>In article <4se53j$m...@peabody.colorado.edu>,
>Ben Cantrick (alias Macky Stingray) <cant...@rintintin.Colorado.EDU> wrote:
>See, now what always gets me is when people tell you this angrily,
>as if they were furious about the fact that they don't know much
>about computers. You know, like this:
>
>They: Um, it doesn't work. I think it's on your end.
Buggers always say that. It's never *THEIR* fault, it's always *OURS*,
even if they've made a complete bollix of their system !
>Me: In what way does what not work?
>They: Well, it's just, I mean, it doesn't work.
Try working out what "it" is in under four attempts, and you're a better
man than me...
>Me: Okay, what are you trying to do?
>They: The same thing I always do.
Yeah, like telepathy is part of my job specification.
>They: Do you know a lot about this kind of stuff?
>Me: Which stuff, sir?
>They: You know, computers, modems, the Internet, stuff like that.
I'd probably reply with:
FOOLISH MORTAL ! YOU DARE TO QUESTION MY KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE ?
DIE ! DIE ! DIE !
<click...>
[snip]
>They: (angrily)Look, I already said I'm not a computer person.
I hate that when my users start using excuses for lame stupidity.
Example: user puts an entire month's correspondence in a single file,
takes no backups, corrupts file. Gets all shirty when told that recovery
of said file is impossible due to user not clicking on her "network
backup" icon for over four weeks. "I was too busy to do that" she said.
>*sigh*
>
>> I'm not cut out for this job. Thank god I'm quitting at the end of
>>the summer. On the other hand, the job has taught me a valuable lesson.
>>There is no amount of money that anyone can pay me to be phone tech
>>support ever again...
>
>Hehehe. It can be better -- do phone tech support in the middle of
>disaster recovery. *grin*
It can be - just wait for a user to scream "HEEEELLLLPPPP !" and wind
them up. ("You DID take a backup, didn't you ?" etc) They're cheaper
than pets, just as entertaining and you don't have to take 'em to the
vets to have them neutered.
--
Chris King
ch...@csking.demon.co.uk
Turnpike evaluation. For information, see http://www.turnpike.com/
Josh Tiefenbach
>as if they were furious about the fact that they don't know much
>about computers. You know, like this:
>
>Me: Okay, and can you describe that?
What kills me is the people who use the 'I'm not a (computer|technical) person'
line as an excuse not to engage in basic reasoning.
<sigh>
>Hehehe. It can be better -- do phone tech support in the middle of
>disaster recovery. *grin*
I dont do phone support. I have enough problems with people sticking thier heads
over the partition and asking me questions. :)
--
"Perl is the language of choice for net abuse"
-- Larry Wall
"No, I'm not going to explain it. If you can't figure it out,
you didnt want to know anyways..."
-- Larry Wall
Tim Irvin
In article <4shgp9$c...@news.onramp.net>, medw...@onramp.net wrote:
> My peeve is "Mark, I know you're at lunch, but..."
Oh, God. A nickel for every time I was assaulted with a trivial
question every time I was stuffing my face with a chile verde
burrito from the roach coach, and I could retire.
> My reply is something along the lines of "Good, then you'll let me finish
> it uninterrupted." At which point I go back to my reading (which alternates
> between 'reading for fun" and "reading for knowledge" - which basically
> amounts to the same thing...).
This is what I *always* want to say, but I don't have the guts. I want
to be you when I grow up.
--
Tim Irvin, zig...@netgate.net :: Softball '96: 20G / 13-6-1 / .500, 1 HR
WWW: http://www.netgate.net/~ziggy29/
"Someone who wears a tie to WWDC (the major Mac developers show)...
needs to rebuild his desktop file and zap his parameter RAM."
-- Guy Kawasaki
Chris King
Mark Edwards <medw...@onramp.net> wrote
>My peeve is "Mark, I know you're at lunch, but..."
I got fed up of doing being called out over lunch, especially as it was
the same users who kept bugging me - one made the fatal mistake of
ringing me to say she needed to print urgently and that the printer was
jammed.
Unfortunately, this was from a "storyteller", you know, one of those
uber-lusers who sends you an e-mail the length of "War and Peace" just
to tell you she's lost an icon. It took her ten minutes of *MY LUNCH
HOUR* to explain the problem - anyone else would say "My printer's
jammed, can you take a look at it ?", but oh no, she had to tell me how
*urgent* this printout was, and that it was so *important* - no it
bloody well wasn't, I know her better than that.
I just disabled the queue, went downstairs, switched the printer off and
left note saying "back at 2.00" - by this time she'd wasted 15 minutes
of my time, so I came back 15 minutes late. Unfortunately, it was
important, but she got told off for bugging me during lunch - what a
tragic shame.
>My reply is something along the lines of "Good, then you'll let me finish
>it uninterrupted." At which point I go back to my reading (which alternates
>between 'reading for fun" and "reading for knowledge" - which basically
>amounts to the same thing...).
If I locked the door, logged out of e-mail and took the phone off the
hook, they'd just stick messages under the door. Being on the 1st floor,
they're unlikely to tap on the window...
Chris
Chris King
Vladimir Gabrielescu <vgab...@lochaber.rutgers.edu> writes
>>them up. ("You DID take a backup, didn't you ?" etc) They're cheaper
>>than pets, just as entertaining and you don't have to take 'em to the
>>vets to have them neutered.
>
>neutered is a good thing. I would really like to know why you think so
>'cause I'm dont have clue.
It's not worth wasting good money on vet's fees on a creature that's all
suicidal - would you take your pet lemming for its shots ? :)
If you have to neuter your users, any competant vet should be able to do
it. But an incompetant one could be more fun.
--
Chris King
ch...@csking.demon.co.uk
Turnpike evaluation. For Turnpike information, mailto:in...@turnpike.com
Mark Brady
Chris King wrote:
>
> If I locked the door, logged out of e-mail and took the phone off the
> hook, they'd just stick messages under the door. Being on the 1st floor,
> they're unlikely to tap on the window...
I tried that and they will slip notes under the door. The real lusers will
tape them to the front of your door and wonder why you don't notice them
until you walk back into your office. My luserboss would just bang on my
door and shout "I know you're in there but I have this little problem."
Of course, they never tell me when the system goes down or something burns
up (1) but then that's Danstar's second law (2).
(1) Muffin fan but I wanted the second law to be footnoted as (2)
(2) Danstar's Second Law - The amount of complaining is inversely proportional
to the seriousness of the problem.
--
Mark Brady <recovering sysadmin>
CONNECT! Corporation
14700 North Airport Drive, Suite 100
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 (602) 951-6226 Fax: (602) 596-6950
Visit http://www.connectcorp.com for Quick, Java applet caching software
Chris King
aaron sommer <aaron_...@herringn.com> writes
>In article <bcn3tWAf...@csking.demon.co.uk>, Chris King
><ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> Try working out what "it" is in under four attempts, and you're a better
>> man than me...
>
>
>Ms. Luser calls, asking how to make a Netscape plugin work. She's irate
>and annoyed, and I gather she's been trying to do it herself for the
>last half-hour. I decide to just go up there, do it myself, and let her
>feel stupid as I do it in 30 seconds or less.
My users say "sorry" a lot when they call me out. It seems that my
predecessor was pretty nasty to them, and declared all problems to be
impossible if not solvable instantly.
He was also pretty inept. When I prepared his machine for use elsewhere,
I noticed that Windows was set up for the Norwegian keyboard...
>Turns out that she's downloaded it and it was automatically decompressed.
>She's still dinking around with the compressed file, of course, completely
>ignoring the file named "Shockwave Plugin Installer" directly below it.
Oh no, that was too obvious for her.
I keep telling people to read the Message Of The Day, but they keep
banging a key to go past it. Well, that's not going to be the case much
longer, 'cos I've knocked up a piece of Visual Basic to display the MOTD
and prevent them doing anything for 30 seconds. Other apps load in the
background, but they can't dismiss the MOTD or switch away from it for
that time.
>Restart, install, restart, luser instantly launches netscape before I do
>anything. Lo and behold, Netscape 1.1N launches. Luser promptly turns to
>me and asks "when will it do something?"
WHAT ?! She downloads a plug-in, then expects Netscape to do something
just like that ?! She wants LARTing for even thinking that.
>Turns out there were 3 copies of Netscape on the machine. Luser hadn't
>bothered to delete the old ones or update the alias pointing at the app.
Only 3 ? But how many aborted installations littered her disk ?
David P. Murphy
mnm...@swva.net (Mike Mills) writes:
><grin>
>
>SOMETIMES the boss DOES back you up!
my boss _always_ backs me up. even when i've screwed up.
which is why i'm still here after three years.
ok
dpm
--
David P. Murphy mailto:mur...@connor.datametrics.com (work)
systems programmer mailto:d...@access.digex.net (personal)
http://www.access.digex.net/~dpm
COGITO ERGO DISCLAIMUM ftp://ftp.access.digex.net/pub/access/dpm
Dan Mallison II
hil...@netaxs.com writes:
> Abby Franquemont-Guillory (abb...@tezcat.com) wrote:
>
pitiful luser story snipped...
>
> --
> hillary gorman......................................hillary@netaxs.com
> For Net Access questions, write to: <sup...@netaxs.com>
> "believe me, it's ON THE LIST of things to do. now, where IS that list?"
To be included "on the list", and always at the TOP is:
Find previous list.(1)
Dan II
1) Usually in shirt pocket AFTER the wash is done.(2)
2) ARGH!(3)
3) But only because personal stuff is usually on the list also.
--
Howard D. Mallison II
Computer Operations Technician
UVa Medical Center Computing
hd...@galen.med.virginia.edu
electel t`iln'rve litser
Chris King posted this to alt.sysadmin.recovery. For shame, Chris King!:
: If you have to neuter your users, any competant vet should be able to do
: it. But an incompetant one could be more fun.
Fsck the vet. Get a sword and do it yourself. That's what *I* do. :)
Cheaper, easier, and even more fun!! };)
--
electel the exhausted of alt.sysadmin.recovery./apk.general
(ele...@junior.wariat.org) [http://junior.wariat.org/~electel/]
"damnit, i told you to type my name all lowercase! *LARTLARTLART*"
irc == Kemorlytas / electel / treind (DALnet/Undernet/LISC)
- its da new and improved crappy 5 line sig that sucks a lot! -
Mark Edwards
Abby Franquemont-Guillory <abb...@tezcat.com> burbled:
>>Hehehe. It can be better -- do phone tech support in the middle of
>>disaster recovery. *grin*
jtie...@uoguelph.ca (Josh Tiefenbach) wrote:
>I dont do phone support. I have enough problems with people sticking thier heads
>over the partition and asking me questions. :)
My peeve is "Mark, I know you're at lunch, but..."
My reply is something along the lines of "Good, then you'll let me finish
it uninterrupted." At which point I go back to my reading (which alternates
between 'reading for fun" and "reading for knowledge" - which basically
amounts to the same thing...).
Mark Edwards
-----------------
Any email, judged by me, to be of a commercial nature, will be reviewed
and billed at a rate of $500 per item.
Timothy Hunt
In article <4sg7i5$c...@ccshst05.uoguelph.ca>,
Josh Tiefenbach <jo...@scis.org> wrote:
>
>I dont do phone support. I have enough problems with people sticking thier heads
>over the partition and asking me questions. :)
bizarre. You people with multiple heads, sticking them over partitions.
Do you sit on a disk or something?
Timothy
--
I said the above. No-one else.
Jason A. Wells
>Heh. I think I'm going to call the liquor store and tell them that "my beer
>is broken. I didn't change anything, and the last beer I had was just fine.
>What did you guys do to the beer?."
>They'd probably figure I was drunk and just hang up on me. Waitaminute...
SUPPORT: OK, can you see the can of beer in front of you?
LUSER: I think so, what does it look like?
SUPPORT: Well, it's a metal object, somewhat in the shape of a cylinder.
LUSER: What? I don't see anything like that here..
SUPPORT: Sir, are you drinking your beer from cans or bottles?
LUSER: I don't know..
SUPPORT: Is the beer held in a glass or aluminum container?
LUSER: Look, all I want to do is drink my beer..
SUPPORT: Please, sir, just answer the fscking question!
LUSER: I don't see why I have to know all this technical stuff
when I just want a beer..
>===========================================================================
>Eric L. Pederson | er...@winternet.com
>System Administrator and Troublemaker | er...@geeks.org
>===========================================================================
>"If operating systems are weapons, Solaris is a world-war-two German
>railway gun with a cracked breech block" - Charlie Stross
--jason
--
_O_ _O_
| Jason A. Wells (jaw...@crl.com) -==(UDIC)==- |
Alistair Young
In <4se53j$m...@peabody.colorado.edu>, cant...@rintintin.Colorado.EDU
> I'm not cut out for this job. Thank god I'm quitting at the end of
>the summer.
Congratulations! You lasted longer than me.
I had a temporary job, when I was a student, doing actual-turn-up-
on-the-spot tech support. I kept the job for, let me see now, two and a
half days. [1]
> On the other hand, the job has taught me a valuable lesson.
>There is no amount of money that anyone can pay me to be phone tech
>support ever again...
After that experience, there's no amount of money that anyone can pay me
to be *any* kind of tech support ever again...
Alistair
[1] They fired me for giving a clue forcibly to an uberluser. The kind
who has half a clue, but the wrong half. [2] Not that I took it too
badly, as I soon discovered it was much easier to extract money
from gullible American tourists, of whom that town had an
inexhaustible supply, than to do any kind of real work.
[2] As in "knows enough to try to write scripts to do X, but not enough
to believe you when you tell him that X can't be done"
--
Alistair Young - Arkane Systems Software Development & PC Consultancy
e-mail: ava...@arkane.demon.co.uk http://www.bofh.net/~sloth
sl...@bofh.net Phone/Fax: +44 (1833) 638233 (24 hr.)
sl...@jurai.net Sysimperator, dominus regis deusque machinarum.
The opinions above ARE my company's, because I OWN it! [Team OS/2]
No quote here until this fscking Perl script works.
Chris King
Mark Brady <mark....@connectcorp.com> writes
>Chris King wrote:
>>
>> If I locked the door, logged out of e-mail and took the phone off the
>> hook, they'd just stick messages under the door. Being on the 1st floor,
>> they're unlikely to tap on the window...
>
>I tried that and they will slip notes under the door. The real lusers will
>tape them to the front of your door and wonder why you don't notice them
>until you walk back into your office.
The best way to stop them putting things under the door is to have a
good, solid draught excluder up against the door. All the notes stay in
the corridor, and hopefully get lost/blown away by draughts etc. The
only problem is that your co-conspirators can't stamp food flat and
shove it under the door, if for some reason you want to barricade
yourself in the room for extended periods :)
>My luserboss would just bang on my
>door and shout "I know you're in there but I have this little problem."
>Of course, they never tell me when the system goes down or something
>burns up (1) but then that's Danstar's second law (2).
>
>(1) Muffin fan but I wanted the second law to be footnoted as (2)
>(2) Danstar's Second Law - The amount of complaining is inversely proportional
> to the seriousness of the problem.
It's always a little problem when handed to you by your boss, until you
realise how much work it's going to entail. Then the problem suddenly
blows up in you face.
As for Danstar's 2nd law, if they're really wingeing about something,
they're either trying to avoid work, or trying to make your life a
misery by passing work on to you.
Chris King
Mike Mills <mnm...@swva.net> writes
>Chris King <ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>>>There is no amount of money that anyone can pay me to be phone tech
>>>>support ever again...
>>>
>>>disaster recovery. *grin*
>>
>>them up. ("You DID take a backup, didn't you ?" etc) They're cheaper
>
>company that sold specialized software to the steel industry
>(Structural Software, Inc.), I got a call from a lady who worked at
>one site - She told me I had to fix the problem because of our
>contract. Well, I knew about that, that was my job, and I certainly
>didn't need her to reiterate it.
Oh dear, an officious, bureaucratic luser. The worst sort to deal with.
If people won't cut me any slack due to overdue pettiness, they get the
same treatment dished out when they want something from me.
>So I dialed into her site (Norton CloseUp - 1990), and logged into our
>tech support account on their server.
>
>Then I realized that she had been playing with rights and basically
>stripped all my rights away. I could do NOTHING to help. When I
>mentioned this, I was told that I "didn't need access to fix it".
That's like asking a mechanic to fix your car and taking away his tool
kit. (She probably thinks they can strip down an engine with their bare
hands) Hadn't she thought about disabling the account between support
calls, or was that too much for her to cope with ?!
[Bobbit]
>SOMETIMES the boss DOES back you up!
My current one is great on that score. He's very supportive, even though
the entire team is over-worked and under-valued.
It's nice to know I'm working for a human being (for once).
My previous boss was a grade-A uber-bastard, and I don't care if he is
reading this. He repeatedly undervalued my work, questioned my integrity
and made several threats to sack me. It gave me great pleasure to slam
my resignation notice on his desk and tell him where to stuff his
miserable job. He's since been dismissed for driving away several other
staff, one of whom was told she wasn't working hard enough even though
she was doing 50-60 hour weeks and coming in at weekends.
--
Chris King
ch...@csking.demon.co.uk
Turnpike evaluation. For information, see http://www.turnpike.com/
KeA
Chris King (ch...@csking.demon.co.uk) wrote:
[SNIP]
: It can be - just wait for a user to scream "HEEEELLLLPPPP !" and wind
: them up. ("You DID take a backup, didn't you ?" etc) They're cheaper
: than pets, just as entertaining and you don't have to take 'em to the
: vets to have them neutered.
HEUREKA! That's it, we can't kill them, but neuter them all, and the
lusers will hopefully die out, but WWF would probably come up with a
program for their survival...
--
From the desk of k...@penti.sit.fi
http://www.sit.fi/~kea (And I'am not proud of it)
Remember: Down, not across!
Joe Bork
Chris King <ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> wrote:
[snip]
>
>If I locked the door, logged out of e-mail and took the phone off the
>hook, they'd just stick messages under the door. Being on the 1st floor,
>they're unlikely to tap on the window...
>
You know, I was just going to ask you what was so hard about knocking on a
1st floor window, when I noticed your UK address. Ah, yes, that explains it
all. Just out of idle curiosity (is there any other kind?), what is the
floor on the ground level called? I'd guess the "ground floor," but that
would be too obvious. I dunno, I always conjure up this mental picture of
these buildings floting about 8 feet above the ground... ("Oh yes, I work on
the first floor, but nobody can reach me...")
Ah, well, idle babblings. I just found out that I'm to be responsible for
maintaining a NetWare 4.1 network, as well as training a "new guy" to do the
day-to-day sysadmin stuff. I've never used NW4.1. It's going to be a long
week.
--Bork
Fan Li TAI
While cycling on the InfoBahn on 18 Jul 1996 01:16:14 GMT, I saw <ent...@monopoly.cs.umn.edu> scrawling <4sk38u$n...@epx.cis.umn.edu> in alt.sysadmin.recovery:
>Joe Bork <jb...@junior.wariat.org> wrote:
>
>>You know, I was just going to ask you what was so hard about knocking on a
>>1st floor window, when I noticed your UK address. Ah, yes, that explains it
>
>
>I work on the 1st floor of the computer science building, but we have no
>windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
>Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
>I have never seen this anywhere else.
Happens all the time back home. It's called "mezzanine". People
who build shophouses for sale do it all the time, call it "4 1/2 floors"
to escape govt regulations about 5 storey shoplots needing lift/elevator/
things to move you up and down. People who buy the shoplot would then
pay an independent contractor to cover it up and make it 5 storeys.
Ground floor, mezzanine, then 1st floor. Makes great sense... :)
-Tai
David Hobson
jb...@junior.wariat.org (Joe Bork) wrote:
> all. Just out of idle curiosity (is there any other kind?), what is the
> floor on the ground level called?
> I'd guess the "ground floor," but that would be too obvious.
No, really, it is! Also you can have 'ground level' and '0' [1] [2]
Ooops. That could almost be construed as useful.
> as well as training a "new guy" to do the day-to-day sysadmin stuff
Bets on how long you'll get by without him calling you for a 'problem' ?
David
[1] Sometimes on lift panels instead of G.
[2] How the hell do you represent underground floors if not by -1, -2, -3... ?
--
David Hobson
Tim Irvin
In article <4sgnai$o...@netaxs.com>, hil...@netaxs.com (hillary gorman) wrote:
[snip]
> His final email to me said something like:
>
> Thank you for pointing out my error with the port speed. I have changed
> to 57,600 and now your modems work.
>
> LUSER!!!!!!!
Kill. I mean, really... *kill*.
Sometimes I think our users are clueless, as all sysadmins do, but at
least I'm not at a university or an ISP. That would have to be BOFH
Hell for anyone who tires of dealing with clueless lusers.
--
Tim Irvin, HP-UX Miracle Worker and Oracle Guy
Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, Sunnyvale, California
e-mail: ir...@lmsc.lockheed.com voice: (408) 742-0440
************ all standard disclaimers apply ************
Kate Wrightson
In article <4sj2au$7...@crl11.crl.com>, Jason A. Wells <jaw...@crl.com> wrote:
>
>SUPPORT: OK, can you see the can of beer in front of you?
>LUSER: I think so, what does it look like?
>SUPPORT: Well, it's a metal object, somewhat in the shape of a cylinder.
>LUSER: What? I don't see anything like that here..
>SUPPORT: Sir, are you drinking your beer from cans or bottles?
>LUSER: I don't know..
>SUPPORT: Is the beer held in a glass or aluminum container?
>LUSER: Look, all I want to do is drink my beer..
>SUPPORT: Please, sir, just answer the fscking question!
>LUSER: I don't see why I have to know all this technical stuff
> when I just want a beer..
Recently, the Cheery Helpmeet <tm> and I were in our local homebrew
supply store and overheard the following (which I'd forgotten til this
thread popped up):
CUSTOMER: Ah wanna brew mah own beer.
STORE GUY: Okay. You'll need this handy beginner supply kit and this
kit for a basic light ale. [Note: a Bass clone.]
CUSTOMER: Ah don't want nothing too complicated.
STORE GUY: It isn't. Can you boil water and open a can?
CUSTOMER: Yep.
STORE GUY: Okay, then we'll get you going. Do you have empty bottles at
home?
CUSTOMER: Bottles? Cain't ah just put it in cans?
STORE GUY: Not unless you have a commercial canning factory at home.
CUSTOMER: Oh. What's them funny little green things you just put there?
STORE GUY: Hops, for flavor.
CUSTOMER: Ah don't want beer with flavor like one of them pussy
Heinekens, Ah want to make Bud at home!
By this point, we were ROFL. The guy stormed out of there angry, with
his motorcycle-gang-lady with him, muttering that this was too damn
complicated and he'd just suck it up and pay for the damn Budweiser.
-kate, I swear I love Georgia sometimes (and then we went home and saw
the TV ad for RVs where a guy shoots a watermelon with a sawed-off shotgun)
--
___________________________________________________________________________
ka...@rigel.econ.uga.edu|Join the Million Geek March! http://march.tico.com
blaze.cba.uga.edu/~kate|I don't speak for UGA, group-mentors, or the Cabal.
Ernie Dunbar
Chris King (ch...@csking.demon.co.uk) wrote:
[snip]
: >Me: Okay, what are you trying to do?
: >They: The same thing I always do.
: Yeah, like telepathy is part of my job specification.
<sarcasm>
No. It's obvious that they have a far more superior intellect than we do.
Very obviously they normally communicate through telepathy, and have
trouble "coming down to our level" and communicating through the inferior
notion of verbal speech; Which, as we all know, is for the philistines
and cretins.
</sarcasm>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do I look like someone who cares | covered in hope, and vasoline
what God thinks?" | still i can't fix this broken machine
-- out of Hellraiser Bloodlines | -- NIN "gave up"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I will proofread your commercial e-mail for $100 a page.
Roy Hooper
In article <ba918...@nazca.dircon.co.uk>,
David Hobson <Da...@nazca.dircon.co.uk> wrote:
>[2] How the hell do you represent underground floors if not by -1, -2, -3... ?
B1 B2 B3 B4
U1 U2 U3 U4
P1 P2 P3 P4
Take your pick.
--
Roy Hooper rho...@freenet.carleton.ca
System Administrator, "Mom! I let my mind wander and
National Capital Freenet it didn't come back!" - Bill Waterson
erik seielstad
Chris King (ch...@csking.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: My users say "sorry" a lot when they call me out. It seems that my
: predecessor was pretty nasty to them, and declared all problems to be
: impossible if not solvable instantly.
nope - that standard luser procedure. Get somebody to come do it
for them, and offer shallow "appologies" for causing such trouble.
: I keep telling people to read the Message Of The Day, but they keep
: banging a key to go past it. Well, that's not going to be the case much
: longer, 'cos I've knocked up a piece of Visual Basic to display the MOTD
: and prevent them doing anything for 30 seconds. Other apps load in the
: background, but they can't dismiss the MOTD or switch away from it for
: that time.
I'll clue you in - it won't work. They'll still ignore the message
- they'll turn on their machine, go get a cup of coffee, and come back
and click that MOTD off the screen without reading it. In fact - I'm
willing to bet that the same luser will go to the boss and say they
need a new machine because their new 100 Mhz Pentium takes too long to
boot.
-erik
--
--
er...@acs.brockport.edu | SUNY College at Brockport,
Systems Programmer/Analyst | Brockport, NY 14420-2982
Brennan Reverend Bas Underwood
In article <4sjm6v$6...@inet-server.sit.fi>, KeA <k...@penti.sit.fi> wrote:
>HEUREKA! That's it, we can't kill them, but neuter them all, and the
>lusers will hopefully die out, but WWF would probably come up with a
>program for their survival...
The World Wrestling Federation?
I can hear it now... "Gotta save the Lusers, ooh YEAH!"
--Brennan
--
bre...@rt66.com | static char msg[]="Bill Gates is the Anti-christ.";
| Add this message to every program you write! I do!
Stan Kalisch III
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
On 16 Jul 1996, hillary gorman wrote:
> Abby Franquemont-Guillory (abb...@tezcat.com) wrote:
> :
> : See, now what always gets me is when people tell you this angrily,
> : as if they were furious about the fact that they don't know much
> : about computers. You know, like this:
>
> Oh god. Please.
>
> Support ticket #1:
> From: luserbeyo...@netaxs.com
> To: sup...@netaxs.com
> Subject: Your modems don't work
>
> Hello. I am writing to you because your modem pool is BROKEN. I pay a lot
> of money and I don't think it is acceptable that I only connect at 9600
> or else your modems don't even ANSWER. When will this be fixed?
>
> -Luser B.T. Pale
<...>
[some of incredible saga deleted]
> Support ticket #:
> From: luserbeyo...@netaxs.com
> To: sup...@netaxs.com
> Subject: Your modems STILL don't work
>
> Look. I am not going to start going into details about my settings when
> YOU have the messed up modems! My configs worked fine til friday. I
> didn't change anything!!! The FACT is your alleged 33.6 couriers won't
> answer at more than 9600. Deal with it.
>
> ----
>
> After about 10 more of these, in which I BEGGED the luser to just let me
> know what KIND of software he had, I started forwarding everything to
> Avi, who told the guy that it was definitely on HIS end, and that he
> should send me the software settings to be checked or cancel his account.
> The guy wrote back with an "offer" to "keep the account at half price
> through september, by which time hopefully" our modem problems would be
> resolved. Avi told him that since the problem was NOT on our end, that
> was a stupid idea. After another 10 emails back and forth, I FINALLY
> found out that he was using MacPPP, he had set up another dialin number
> by copying his original prefs, but he had left the port speed at 9600.
>
> His final email to me said something like:
>
> Thank you for pointing out my error with the port speed. I have changed
> to 57,600 and now your modems work.
>
> LUSER!!!!!!!
And I felt like a luser just for screwing up cancellation messages... ;-)
Stan
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Brandon Hume
Josh Tiefenbach (jtie...@uoguelph.ca) wrote:
: I dont do phone support. I have enough problems with people sticking thier heads
: over the partition and asking me questions. :)
That is, of course, why you keep a broom handy next to your desk. Its
just like the game with the gophers popping out of the panel. "Hey...
*WHACK*"
--
Brandon Hume
- hu...@ra.isisnet.com: Technical Support/System administration
- Finger for Geek codes, PGP, /dev/zero, yadda yadda.
Joe Bork
David Hobson <Da...@nazca.dircon.co.uk> wrote:
>> as well as training a "new guy" to do the day-to-day sysadmin stuff
>
>Bets on how long you'll get by without him calling you for a 'problem' ?
>
Not too long, I'm afraid. He's a cow-orker. I have hope for him, though.
I opened up the Netware 4.1 box just before I left work work, and when I
came back, he was sitting in my chair[1] reading the installation manual.
After some selective questions on my part, it appears that he has a
reasonable grasp of the information as well. It may not be as bad as I had
first imagined..
--Bork
[1] which would normally irritate me a lot, but I made an exception
Bridget Kromhout
Joe Bork <jb...@junior.wariat.org> wrote:
>You know, I was just going to ask you what was so hard about knocking on a
>1st floor window, when I noticed your UK address. Ah, yes, that explains it
</hiding>
I work on the 1st floor of the computer science building, but we have no
windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
I have never seen this anywhere else.
<hiding>
--
bridget ~ ent...@acm.cs.umn.edu ~ http://acm.cs.umn.edu/~entropi
Sean B Purdy
Recently, the esteemed Chris King, ch...@csking.demon.co.uk, imparted:
~ In article <4sehdu$h...@xochi.tezcat.com>, Abby Franquemont-Guillory
~ <abb...@tezcat.com> writes
~ >Hehehe. It can be better -- do phone tech support in the middle of
~ >disaster recovery. *grin*
~ It can be - just wait for a user to scream "HEEEELLLLPPPP !" and wind
~ them up. ("You DID take a backup, didn't you ?" etc) They're cheaper
~ than pets, just as entertaining and you don't have to take 'em to the
~ vets to have them neutered.
Therein lies the nub, as they say. Can't we bump up the radiation on
those PC thingies so that they're all infertilised[1] the minute they
come within 6ft of their computer?
[1] Oh all right, "made infertile" [2]
[2] OK, so we might have to wear lead underpants, but it's a small price
and all that....
Sean
--
Sean B Purdy, system administrator se...@fastnet.co.uk
Article marked as unread
Henry W Miller
Ernie Dunbar (gr...@vortex.netbistro.com) wrote:
: Abby Franquemont-Guillory (abb...@tezcat.com) wrote:
: : > I'm not cut out for this job. Thank god I'm quitting at the end of
: : >the summer. On the other hand, the job has taught me a valuable lesson.
: : >There is no amount of money that anyone can pay me to be phone tech
: : >support ever again...
: Nobody likes tech support. Some people are just better at it than others.
: I am that someone. However, I'm going to school starting this fall to
: learn to program (this job told me I can do it, and that it's pretty cool)
: so's I can be a Sysadmin. (or something)
: : Hehehe. It can be better -- do phone tech support in the middle of
: : disaster recovery. *grin*
: Disaster as in "the shit has hit the fan, all routers between here and
: california are down, and the primary server is on fire," or disaster as in
: "This is Tim Robbins[1] of the Weather channel, and I'm here where
: Hurricane Andrew is going to hit the coast of Florida..."
No, disaster as in the goverment is gonna shut us down in 4 hours if YOUR box
isn't working, and the box definatly wasn't working. Happened to my dad once,
call at 2am, better fix it by 6. This was one of the 10- largerst banks in
the US. Fortunatly at that level he was talking to clued people. I don't have
money in that bank, never have.
Mark Stapleton
In a fit of apathy, chr...@iceonline.com (Canadian) wrote:
>The second wonderful experience was setting up backups for my office and having
>*everyone* in the office -- all 5 people -- treat my docs like the Word O The
>Diety Of Your Choice. It was great. Nearly nine months later they still
>backup religiously, and daily!
Unusual. Lusers generally remember that lesson for about a week, and then,
"Oops! I got too busy to push that 'Backup to Network' button again."
--
"Money is the root of all good."
Mark (mst...@insync.net)
Ingvar Mattsson
ent...@monopoly.cs.umn.edu (Bridget Kromhout) writes:
Entropi! I see you!!!
>I work on the 1st floor of the computer science building, but we have no
>windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
>Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
>I have never seen this anywhere else.
On a former job (as SA on Södersjukhuset (a hospital in Stockholm,
Sweden)), we had our offices on the ground floor. That's what the
signs on the floor said. That's what the elevator said. You had to go
up one flight of stairs to reach the ground floor, but... ;)
The main entrance was on the Upper Cellar Floor (or something). Weird.
Totally weird.
//Ingvar (and they had computers that...)
Lamont Alan Lucas
In article <4sk38u$n...@epx.cis.umn.edu>,
Bridget Kromhout <ent...@monopoly.cs.umn.edu> wrote:
>Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
>I have never seen this anywhere else.
HA! You ought to come to UT. A full 25% of our campus is underground.
Our main math/physics building (18 stories or so) has the 4th floor as
ground level. My office is on the 5th floor, in the old graphics lab,
so we have no windows, and heavy tinting on our 8 inch by 8 inch portal
to the hallway. The more senior admin got to move across the hall where
he gets two arrow-slit windows by his desk. We have the ugliest
building on campus, and by damn, we're proud of it.
Oddly enough, I'm getting a tan somehow. Must be some odd effect of the
florescensents and my 20 inch monitor. I bet the contrast is up to
high.
I thought about getting a plant or something for my desk, but decided
that my monitor would cause it to mutate into something dangerous.
(then again, if it was something dangerous, I could put it near the
corner of my desk near the door. Maybe I could train it to react to the
word "install" ie:
EEstudent: Hi, I'm trying to run a 452342334x8999423423 element matrix
using some software written by dyslexic gerbils on our poor beleagured
solaris machine that is already overloaded by 1000 students attemping to
start up pine and netscape at the same time, and I was wondering if you
could help me by moving the software over to our hideously insecure HP
stations with the desktop that only the idiot savant's among us know how
to use with any regularity.
Me: (after typing and ignoring them for 2 minutes) Oh, let me help you,
Seymore! Install! (pointing)
Seymore: (tendrils lash out to the EEstudent, dashing glasses from his
face and simultaniously pressing multiple buttons on his watch)
EEstudent: Aieeee! I can't see! and my watch is beeping, (attempts to
bring watch close enough to face to see it, manages to knock himself
out)
Me: Good Seymore. (tosses him a defective pentium chip to snack on)
Then again, maybe I've been inside to long. Speaking as a species, do
we still exist as carbon-based O2 breathing lifeforms? Did we evolve
since I've been in here?
--
Lamont Lucas -- ECE Junior -- The University of Texas
Stephan Neuhaus
What was it that Mark Brady <mark....@connectcorp.com> wrote
in <31ED1C...@connectcorp.com>? Ah, yes:
> (2) Danstar's Second Law - The amount of complaining is inversely proportional
> to the seriousness of the problem.
It works the other way, too. We had one of our major servers
fail, and it took the lusers three hours to notice that something
was wrong...
Stephan
--
To err is human; to really fuck things up requires the root password
Al Castanoli
Sean B Purdy (se...@fastnet.co.uk) wrote:
[...]
: Therein lies the nub, as they say. Can't we bump up the radiation
: on those PC thingies so that they're all infertilised[1] the minute
: they come within 6ft of their computer?
: [1] Oh all right, "made infertile" [2]
Here we disagree - you see those PC thingies as infertilizers and
I see them as fertilizer. If the lusers want to poke their fingers
in fertilizer, why on earth don't they comprehend gigo? Should we
start saying siso so they'll understand?
--
Al Castanoli | afc...@texas.net | afn2...@afn.org
| ah...@rgfn.epcc.edu | <insert standard disclaimers>
"Computers save time like kudzu prevents soil erosion."
Joe Zeff
gr...@vortex.netbistro.com (Ernie Dunbar) wrote:
>: > I'm not cut out for this job. Thank god I'm quitting at the end of
>: >the summer. On the other hand, the job has taught me a valuable lesson.
>: >There is no amount of money that anyone can pay me to be phone tech
>: >support ever again...
>Nobody likes tech support. Some people are just better at it than others.
>I am that someone. However, I'm going to school starting this fall to
>learn to program (this job told me I can do it, and that it's pretty cool)
>so's I can be a Sysadmin.
What I trained for is programmer. (I've done it a few times. When the
funding ran out at my last programming job, they *really* wanted to
keep me.) What I'm doing is phone tech support. Now that you've done
it too, remember what it's like next time you *call* for support! If
you ever forget, LART youself!
------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Zeff Earthlink Network
jo...@earthlink.net Senior Tech Support
(800) 395-8410 Extension 2615
"The only problem with troubleshooting is that
sometimes trouble shoots back."
------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Zeff
ir...@lmsc.lockheed.com (Tim Irvin) wrote:
>Sometimes I think our users are clueless, as all sysadmins do, but at
>least I'm not at a university or an ISP. That would have to be BOFH
>Hell for anyone who tires of dealing with clueless lusers.
We have (basically) two types of techs here. The regular ones that
take random callers and the senior techs that return calls, fight
fires and take the callers nobody else can help. One nice thing about
being a senior is you don't have as many lusers/idiots blithering at
you. (The real bad ones never figure out how to leave a message.)
Elliot Smorodinsky
>
>>You know, I was just going to ask you what was so hard about knocking on a
>>1st floor window, when I noticed your UK address. Ah, yes, that explains it
>
></hiding>
>
>windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
>I have never seen this anywhere else.
In Carnegie-Mellon University's Wein Hall, floor 5 is the ground
level. The building is built into the side of this really steep hill, you
see -- so what's the ground floor on one side is 5 stories above ground
on the other.
--
Elliot Smorodinsky val...@panix.com
Mark Brady
Lamont Alan Lucas wrote:
> Oddly enough, I'm getting a tan somehow. Must be some odd effect of the
> florescensents and my 20 inch monitor. I bet the contrast is up to
> high.
My fiancee tells me that I receive more radiation from working in front of
my trusty monitor that she gets working on 56Kv x-ray machines all day.
I believe her.
Ob-Thread Drift: I got a copy of Danstar's Third Law:
The processing power of a computer is inversely proportional to the user's
actual need and proportional to their seniority.
Although, I think that one was stolen from Dilbert.
--
Mark Brady <recovering sysadmin>
CONNECT! Corporation
14700 North Airport Drive, Suite 100
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 (602) 951-6226 Fax: (602) 596-6950
Visit http://www.connectcorp.com for Quick, Java applet caching software
Chris McCraw
In a previous article, Tim Irvin <ir...@lmsc.lockheed.com> wrote:
>Sometimes I think our users are clueless, as all sysadmins do, but at
>least I'm not at a university or an ISP. That would have to be BOFH
>Hell for anyone who tires of dealing with clueless lusers.
actually, what it takes is *aim*. now, while im normally ranked among the
most uncoordinated population segment in existence, i somehow got lucky.[1]
i landed smack dab in the middle of a university, in a department with
only grad students and postdocs. what does this mean to me as a potential
BOFH? well, basically, it means that everyone who could possibly bug me
is better educated than me. while this could still pose a problem in a
liberal-arts sort of department, it is basically a big win when the depart-
ment's main focus is on computing[2]. while i get the occasional lame ques-
tion, few are boring, and more than half actually present some challenge,
thus keeping me sane, and less than pissed off 90% of the time. now, if
only none of my friends, family, or acquaintances realized that i knew any-
thing about computers, i might be in nirvana...
[1] luck, aim, theyre about equally random to me.
[2] note, i do NOT work for the CompSci dept, just to stave off any possible
necessity for a disclaimer in my nonexistant .sig
Josh Tiefenbach
Timothy Hunt <t...@xara.net> burbled:
>In article <4sg7i5$c...@ccshst05.uoguelph.ca>,
>Josh Tiefenbach <jo...@scis.org> wrote:
>>
>>I dont do phone support. I have enough problems with people sticking thier heads
>>over the partition and asking me questions. :)
>
>Do you sit on a disk or something?
Yeah. A real scuzzy one[1].
josh
[1] ducks
--
"Perl is the language of choice for net abuse"
-- Larry Wall
"No, I'm not going to explain it. If you can't figure it out,
you didnt want to know anyways..."
-- Larry Wall
Ned Brickley
On 16 Jul 1996 18:33:54 GMT, hil...@netaxs.com (hillary gorman)
wrote:
>
>Oh god. Please.
>
>Support ticket #1:
>From: luserbeyo...@netaxs.com
>To: sup...@netaxs.com
>Subject: Your modems don't work
<snipped. We know the story>
>His final email to me said something like:
>
>Thank you for pointing out my error with the port speed. I have changed
>to 57,600 and now your modems work.
>
>LUSER!!!!!!!
Try this one.
The luser comes in to pay his bill. We had been having trouble with
him for a few days. It was the old "I can't connect!! Somthing is
wrong with your system" type problem.
Anyway he came in and after paying his bill, mentioned in passing that
his modem was fried. Seems that a bolt of lightning toasted it.
My only question is, Why did the viking god Thor forget to take out
the rest of his computer??
***It has been determined that you can get far more***
***cooperation from a luser using a kind word and a 2X4***
***then with a kind word alone***
Dave Brown
In article <4sjm6v$6...@inet-server.sit.fi>, KeA <k...@penti.sit.fi> wrote:
: HEUREKA! That's it, we can't kill them, but neuter them all, and the
: lusers will hopefully die out, but WWF would probably come up with a
: program for their survival...
Hmm. Using lusers as practise dummies for pro wrestlers. The idea has
lots of promise...
--Dave
--
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~dagbrown
`"bang bang bang bang baaaaaang" whoo! i think i like that. =)' --Debbie Wu
Mark Milton
chr...@iceonline.com (Canadian) wrote:
>Chris King <ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>I hate that when my users start using excuses for lame stupidity.
>>Example: user puts an entire month's correspondence in a single file,
>>takes no backups, corrupts file. Gets all shirty when told that recovery
>>of said file is impossible due to user not clicking on her "network
>>backup" icon for over four weeks. "I was too busy to do that" she said.
beingthe only cluefull among my lusers, in the early days I sometimes
had requests to "ressurect" files that had been corrupted. mostly
these were files where they had spent the entire
morning/afternoon/both working on a single open file without saving it
once then the inevitable happens. they got *very* shirty with me when
I explained (in as few syllables as possible) that what was typed in,
was not automatically stored in the file on the disk and that they had
to select the save option from the menu. Mind you, they only did it
the once.
>So I got two wonderful experiences in one day. The first was having the junior
>sysadmin type -- you know, the designated groveler -- come upstairs to explain
>what happened to everyone. I felt sorry for the poor sap, having been the DG
>on many occasions in the past, but hey, better him than me.
We have central servers in my building that are run by another
department, I make a strong point to my guys not to use 'em since
a) If they go down, we don't get a peep out of the dept. that runs
them. and b) their charging structures bring to mind the words
"daylight" and "robbery".
I set up a small fileserver from a spare system I had, but this is
only used to shuffle files to & fro. If I get the resources later in
the year, I hope to set up a bigger, more robust one.[0]
>The second wonderful experience was setting up backups for my office and having
>*everyone* in the office -- all 5 people -- treat my docs like the Word O The
>Diety Of Your Choice. It was great. Nearly nine months later they still
>backup religiously, and daily!
A few weeks ago, the topic of backups surfaced in my department. so ,
to make backups easier to manage I created a virtual drive[1] on each
of my lusers PCs to separate out their data from the system &
applications so that only their data was backed up[2].
No prizes for guessing what the first luser did....[3]
[0] Current "fileserver" also acts as department's Intranet web
server.
[1] using the DOS SUBST command.[4]
[2] or should that've been the other way round???
[3] fortunately, he had DOS's undelete program, and managed to recover
*most* of his files.
[4] For those who've forgotten DOS, SUBST allows a subdirectory to be
considered a hard drive.
[5] His going overseas on business the following day didn't help his
attitude to me as he struggled to contain his ever growing panic.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
Mark Milton. Work: mark_...@nortel.com
Home: mmi...@cityscape.co.uk
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
Chris King
erik seielstad <er...@siren.acs.brockport.edu> writes
>Chris King (ch...@csking.demon.co.uk) wrote:
>: My users say "sorry" a lot when they call me out. It seems that my
>: predecessor was pretty nasty to them, and declared all problems to be
>: impossible if not solvable instantly.
>
> nope - that standard luser procedure. Get somebody to come do it
>for them, and offer shallow "appologies" for causing such trouble.
Yeah, but they used to be AFRAID of calling us out.
Perhaps we're going soft in our old age...
>: I keep telling people to read the Message Of The Day, but they keep
>: banging a key to go past it. Well, that's not going to be the case much
>: longer, 'cos I've knocked up a piece of Visual Basic to display the MOTD
>: and prevent them doing anything for 30 seconds. Other apps load in the
>: background, but they can't dismiss the MOTD or switch away from it for
>: that time.
>
> I'll clue you in - it won't work. They'll still ignore the message
>- they'll turn on their machine, go get a cup of coffee, and come back
>and click that MOTD off the screen without reading it. In fact - I'm
>willing to bet that the same luser will go to the boss and say they
>need a new machine because their new 100 Mhz Pentium takes too long to
>boot.
Actually, it seems to be working.
You can't get a coffee in this place until about ten in the morning,
unless you make it yourself. And most of 'em are too lazy to do that.
And 100 MHz Pentiums ? They should be so bloody lucky - the average
*user* machine at work is only a 486DX, and I only recently managed to
get a "hand-me-down" upgrade to a DX4.
Also, making the MOTD more humourous has helped - if you make it too
heavy, they turn off after one sentence.
--
Chris King
ch...@csking.demon.co.uk
Turnpike evaluation. For information, see http://www.turnpike.com/
Timothy Hunt
In article <4sk38u$n...@epx.cis.umn.edu>,
Bridget Kromhout <ent...@monopoly.cs.umn.edu> wrote:
>I work on the 1st floor of the computer science building, but we have no
>windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
>Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
>I have never seen this anywhere else.
Heh. At my old university[1] the multiple buildings had an interesting
floor numbering scheme. Floors were from 17-22 (depedning on which building
it was, some wouldn't have all floor numbers). The university is on the side
of a hill, so "ground" floor on one side of the building would be first
or second on the other. The level numbers were (approximately) tens of
feet above sea level. This mean as you went from one building to another
level 21 in one building would be level 21 in the other, even if the lowest
part of the building was 20 or 30 feet higher than the other, so it did make
sense once you were used to it.
Timothy
[1] University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, England, GU2 5XH
--
I said the above. No-one else.
Robert Ellison
>I work on the 1st floor of the computer science building, but we have no
>windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
>Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
>I have never seen this anywhere else.
At the engineering department of Surrey University (UK) the floors are
numberd in meters above sea level!!
Terje Bless
In article <4sk38u$n...@epx.cis.umn.edu>, ent...@monopoly.cs.umn.edu
(Bridget Kromhout) wrote:
[...]
>
>I work on the 1st floor of the computer science building, but we have no
>windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
>Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
>I have never seen this anywhere else.
Try out uni. Tromsoe in Norway. You enter, from the street, into the 6th
floor. No matter how many times I look at the floor plans I can't figure
out where 1-5 went.
--
Party? Party, lord? Yes, lord. Right away, lord.
- Beopunk Cyberwulf
Michael Meissner
In article <31EFA9...@europa.c-dilla.co.uk> Robert Ellison
<ab...@europa.c-dilla.co.uk> writes:
| At the engineering department of Surrey University (UK) the floors are
| numberd in meters above sea level!!
Do they have a plan in case global warming changes the level of the sea by
melting the polar ice caps?
--
Michael Meissner, Cygnus Support (East Coast)
Suite 105, 48 Grove Street, Somerville, MA 02144, USA
meis...@cygnus.com, 617-629-3016 (office), 617-629-3010 (fax)
Tom Salyers
Joe Bork (jb...@junior.wariat.org) wrote:
> Ah, well, idle babblings. I just found out that I'm to be responsible for
> maintaining a NetWare 4.1 network, as well as training a "new guy" to do the
> day-to-day sysadmin stuff. I've never used NW4.1. It's going to be a long
> week.
At the risk of being LARTed with a sharp stick, I think you'll find
that NetWare 4.1 is fairly well-behaved and pretty easy to pick up. It
still sucks, of course--they all do--but it sucks less than some.
--
Tom Salyers "Now is the Windows of our disk contents
IRCnick: Aqualung Made glorious SimEarth by this Sun of Zork."
Denver, CO --from _Richard v3.0_
Matthew Crosby
In article <4sm7e2$c...@neigh.cs.utexas.edu>, Chris McCraw <fo...@dfw.net> wrote:
>In a previous article, Tim Irvin <ir...@lmsc.lockheed.com> wrote:
>
>>Sometimes I think our users are clueless, as all sysadmins do, but at
>>least I'm not at a university or an ISP. That would have to be BOFH
>>Hell for anyone who tires of dealing with clueless lusers.
>
>actually, what it takes is *aim*. now, while im normally ranked among the
>most uncoordinated population segment in existence, i somehow got lucky.[1]
>i landed smack dab in the middle of a university, in a department with
>only grad students and postdocs. what does this mean to me as a potential
>BOFH? well, basically, it means that everyone who could possibly bug me
>is better educated than me. while this could still pose a problem in a
>liberal-arts sort of department, it is basically a big win when the depart-
>ment's main focus is on computing[2]. while i get the occasional lame ques-
>tion, few are boring, and more than half actually present some challenge,
Oh my. As a (former now I just graduated) University sysadmin, I want to know
what sort of weird CS dept you have there.
You wouldn't believe the sort of idiocy we could get from some prima donna
faculty, and being in the field only meant that they thought they knew how
program, and we had to support their @%@#$% programs.
--
Matthew Crosby cro...@cs.colorado.edu
Disclaimer: It was another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
Tyrone L Cartwright
er...@siren.acs.brockport.edu (erik seielstad) typed:
| I'll clue you in - it won't work. They'll still ignore the message
| - they'll turn on their machine, go get a cup of coffee, and come back
| and click that MOTD off the screen without reading it. In fact - I'm
| willing to bet that the same luser will go to the boss and say they
| need a new machine because their new 100 Mhz Pentium takes too long to
| boot.
Simple... have the program ask a series of questions about the content
of the MOTD, and not let them proceed until they've answered
correctly.
Oops, that's almost useful. Where's that electric cattle prod?
Tyrone "Bzzzt Ow!" C.
Geir Emblemsv}g
In article <DurqD...@xcski.com>, ptom...@compass.xcski.com (Paul Tomblin) writes:
> In a previous article, k...@penti.sit.fi (KeA) said:
> >HEUREKA! That's it, we can't kill them, but neuter them all, and the
> >lusers will hopefully die out, but WWF would probably come up with a
> >program for their survival...
>
> the wrestling one needs lusers to ensure their own survival...)
Yes, it would probably be the Wrestling Folks. The people in the World Wide
Fond for Nature(sic) are more concerned about _endangered_ organisms.
--
Sir Geir the Gloomy of .no | Ikke noe kan redde dere! Jeg er
| uovervinnelig! Jeg er SELVE DOMMEN!
| -DD
Jaakko Jarvenpaa
>In article <4sjm6v$6...@inet-server.sit.fi>, KeA <k...@penti.sit.fi> wrote:
>: HEUREKA! That's it, we can't kill them, but neuter them all, and the
>: lusers will hopefully die out, but WWF would probably come up with a
>: program for their survival...
>
>Hmm. Using lusers as practise dummies for pro wrestlers. The idea has
>lots of promise...
Oh. It is not World War Four?
hillary gorman
Ned Brickley (trav...@empire.net) wrote:
:
: Try this one.
: The luser comes in to pay his bill. We had been having trouble with
: him for a few days. It was the old "I can't connect!! Somthing is
: wrong with your system" type problem.
: Anyway he came in and after paying his bill, mentioned in passing that
A good one happened today:
luser sent us a letter for his yearly renewal...he's already paid us the
$200 for a year's worth, and now he's sending us another $180 for the
second year. Text of the letter:
I still don't have a computer, but I might have one in the next 6 mos or
so, so please keep the account active.
fine. we'll take your money. no problem. :)
--
hillary gorman......................................hillary@netaxs.com
For Net Access questions, write to: <sup...@netaxs.com>
"believe me, it's ON THE LIST of things to do. now, where IS that list?"
Alistair Young
In <31eeb33e....@news.empire.net>, trav...@empire.net (Ned Brickley) writes:
>Anyway he came in and after paying his bill, mentioned in passing that
>My only question is, Why did the viking god Thor forget to take out
>the rest of his computer??
*My* only question is, why did he hit the computer and miss the luser?
Alistair
--
Alistair Young - Arkane Systems Software Development & PC Consultancy
e-mail: ava...@arkane.demon.co.uk http://www.bofh.net/~sloth
sl...@bofh.net Phone/Fax: +44 (1833) 638233 (24 hr.)
sl...@jurai.net Sysimperator, dominus regis deusque machinarum.
The opinions above ARE my company's, because I OWN it! [Team OS/2]
"Beta-testing is a *privilege*, not a *right*."
Petro
Alistair Young (ava...@arkane.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: In <31eeb33e....@news.empire.net>, trav...@empire.net (Ned Brickley) writes:
: >Anyway he came in and after paying his bill, mentioned in passing that
: >his modem was fried. Seems that a bolt of lightning toasted it.
: >My only question is, Why did the viking god Thor forget to take out
: >the rest of his computer??
:
: *My* only question is, why did he hit the computer and miss the luser?
He'd probably been drinking.
--
Postmodernism is the refusal to think--Ron Carrier pe...@suba.com
Deconstruction is the refusal to believe that anyone else can either.
Freedom of choice is what you have, freedom from choice is what you want.
-- DEVO
Forest Sprite
In article <4snl2l$7...@whitbeck.ncl.ac.uk>,
Trevor Kirby <Trevor...@ncl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>To add to the confusion the bridge (my bit) only connects to the tower
>on floors 2 [1], 4 [2] and 6 [3]. The rest of the dept is in the daysh
>building on the 8th floor which you reach by walking out of the tower
>6th floor. It is of course totally unconnected to the Daysh 7th floor.
>We also have a lab in the daysh 3rd floor which you reach by going in
>at ground level and walking up one flight of stairs.
Wow, you work in the building from _Headcrash_?
--
____
------------------------------------------------------------------ \ /__
dr...@access.digex.net "There's a fish... \X /
Forest Sprite ...in the percolator!..." \/
Trevor Kirby
In article <4sk38u$n...@epx.cis.umn.edu>, ent...@monopoly.cs.umn.edu (Bridget Kromhout) writes:
|>
|> I work on the 1st floor of the computer science building, but we have no
|> windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
|> Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
|> I have never seen this anywhere else.
|>
consists of about 3 offices that hang from the bottom of the bridge. They are
known locally as the pimple.
To add to the confusion the bridge (my bit) only connects to the tower on floors
2 [1], 4 [2] and 6 [3]. The rest of the dept is in the daysh building on the
8th floor which you reach by walking out of the tower 6th floor. It is of course
totally unconnected to the Daysh 7th floor. We also have a lab in the daysh 3rd
floor which you reach by going in at ground level and walking up one flight of
stairs.
To move equipment from the Daysh 8th floor to the Daysh 3rd you have to go via
the tower 6th, down to the 5th, into the daysh 7th and take the lift. Moving
kit from the daysh 3rd to the bridge 3rd is the subject of a phd thesis in
topology.
Trev "the network is even worse"
[1] but you have to go outside
[2] but you have to go round the back and climb over a 4' high concrete beam
[3] but only at the west end, there is a house at the east end.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Look here, what has fish got to do with it? Why bring them up?"
Wilkin did not bother to reply.
Ernie Dunbar
Chris King (ch...@csking.demon.co.uk) wrote:
[thwack]
: Unfortunately, this was from a "storyteller", you know, one of those
: uber-lusers who sends you an e-mail the length of "War and Peace" just
: to tell you she's lost an icon. It took her ten minutes of *MY LUNCH
: HOUR* to explain the problem - anyone else would say "My printer's
: jammed, can you take a look at it ?", but oh no, she had to tell me how
: *urgent* this printout was, and that it was so *important* - no it
: bloody well wasn't, I know her better than that.
This little spiel reminds me of the expression on Garoth Blackstock's[1]
face when he is listening to someone telling him their sad story, and he
is annoyed. The very expression tells you that he would care more about
the plight of the fleas that caused the Black Plague in the middle ages,
than about what the luser he is facing is trying to say.
[1] The main character in a show called "Chef!" It's made by the BBC, but
in my little corner of the world, is shown on The Knowledge Network. The
said character is someone every BOFH could look up to, and who's general
personality is comparable to that of the Antichrist.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do I look like someone who cares | covered in hope, and vasoline
what God thinks?" | still i can't fix this broken machine
-- out of Hellraiser Bloodlines | -- NIN "gave up"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I will proofread your commercial e-mail for $100 a page.
Joe Zeff
abb...@tezcat.com (Abby Franquemont-Guillory) wrote:h
>guy, then when I told you to pick up your cigarettes, you would have
>gotten angry, and told me that last time, I told you to pick up your
>beer, and you wouldn't have wanted to have anything to do with the
>idea that this time, we were doing something different from taking a
>sip of beer... and it would really piss you off when I tried to
>explain that part."
>But anyway. My friend was convinced, and we had another beer.
Very good! But a *real* luser (especially a MacIdiot) would have
asked you where the beer was if you had him pick it up again. After
all, he *knows* he'll never need to access it again.
Joe Zeff
medw...@onramp.net (Mark Edwards) wrote:
>Abby Franquemont-Guillory <abb...@tezcat.com> burbled:
>>>Hehehe. It can be better -- do phone tech support in the middle of
>>>disaster recovery. *grin*
>jtie...@uoguelph.ca (Josh Tiefenbach) wrote:
>>I dont do phone support. I have enough problems with people sticking thier heads
>>over the partition and asking me questions. :)
>My peeve is "Mark, I know you're at lunch, but..."
"Then why did you ask?" you reply, picking up the biggest LART on your
desk.
KeA
Bridget Kromhout (ent...@monopoly.cs.umn.edu) wrote:
: I work on the 1st floor of the computer science building, but we have no
: windows. Why? (besides the fact that some of us are allergic to the BBR...)
: Well, in this building, Floor 3 is the ground level. Yep. You figure it out.
: I have never seen this anywhere else.
I'am on the second floor, with windows in two directions, no it's not in
the corner of the building, and the room doesn't run all the way through
the building, the darn architect[1] figured it would be neat with a WFH[2]
to the machine room from the hallway.
1: I have been talking with peoples studying to become architects, they
had made a field trip to this place to learn from his mistakes.
2: WindowFromHell, more like a glass wall, so you can't even hide in
their!
--
From the desk of k...@penti.sit.fi
http://www.sit.fi/~kea (And I'am not proud of it)
Remember: Down, not across!
Lusty Wench
In article <1fFUmCAb...@csking.demon.co.uk>,
Chris King <ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>It's always a little problem when handed to you by your boss, until you
>realise how much work it's going to entail. Then the problem suddenly
>blows up in you face.
This reminds me of the time my boss asked me to install this one software
package on one of our RS/6000s for a meeting in a couple of days. I ended
up spending about 3 days at the office without sleep and still never did
get that software package installed (just _try_ running an RS/6000 with
400 MB of disk space and then making it do anything useful!)
Lusty
Christian A. Scarborough
In article <Pine.SUN.3.95.96071...@crl.crl.com>,
Stan Kalisch III <sjk...@crl.com> wrote:
>And I felt like a luser just for screwing up cancellation messages... ;-)
Ah, but did quoting a 50 line message to give a 1 line reply make you feel
like a luser too?
Christian
--
Christian Scarborough - http://www.aber.ac.uk/~ccs95
Research student, Dept. of Mathematics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Al Castanoli
hillary gorman (hil...@netaxs.com) wrote:
: A good one happened today:
: luser sent us a letter for his yearly renewal...he's already paid
: us the $200 for a year's worth, and now he's sending us another
: $180 for the second year. Text of the letter:
: I still don't have a computer, but I might have one in the next 6
: mos or so, so please keep the account active.
He probably heard that the Internet was filling up or nearly full
and wanted to assure himself that he had his place reserved. Just
wait until he hears about how evaluation copies of Netscrape have
expirations on their licenses! Better use it up before it expires!
--
Al Castanoli | afc...@texas.net | afn2...@afn.org
| ah...@rgfn.epcc.edu | <insert standard disclaimers>
"Computers save time like kudzu prevents soil erosion."
Todd Showalter
jja...@cs.joensuu.fi (Jaakko Jarvenpaa) summoned a news daemon to
say:
YM World War 15. HTH.
Todd.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/ Todd Showalter / The rider said "King Harold has already declared /
/ gan...@interlog.com / how much of England he is prepared to grant. Seven /
//////////////////////// feet of ground, or as much more as he is taller than /
/ / other men." - King Harald's Saga. /
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Don
li...@tss.no (Terje Bless) writes:
> Try out uni. Tromsoe in Norway. You enter, from the street, into the 6th
> floor. No matter how many times I look at the floor plans I can't figure
> out where 1-5 went.
Now you know where all the bodies are buried.
Oh, but I assume you're looking for them to ADD something, right?
--
<d...@cs.byu.edu> http://students.cs.byu.edu/~don PGP 0x994B8F39 fRee cRyPTo!
Linux was made by foreign terrorists to take money from true US companies
like Microsoft." -Some AOL'er. "To this end we dedicate ourselves..." -Don
** This user insured by the Smith, Wesson, & Zimmermann insurance company **
Chris King
In article <31f2a6c1....@news.empire.net>, Ned Brickley
<trav...@empire.net> writes
>On Fri, 19 Jul 1996 08:18:19 GMT, ava...@arkane.demon.co.uk (Alistair
>Young) wrote:
>>>My only question is, Why did the viking god Thor forget to take out
>>>the rest of his computer??
>>
>>*My* only question is, why did he hit the computer and miss the luser?
>
Perhaps Thor is just toying with his prey, before getting ready to
*really* toast the miserable specimen.
"That was a warning shot, kiddo, the next one's got YOUR name on it..."
> ***It has been determined that you can get far more***
> ***cooperation from a luser using a kind word and a 2X4***
> ***then with a kind word alone***
Why bother wasting breath on kind words ?
--
Chris King
Mark Green
>
> HA! You ought to come to UT. A full 25% of our campus is underground.
> Our main math/physics building (18 stories or so) has the 4th floor as
> ground level. My office is on the 5th floor, in the old graphics lab,
> so we have no windows, and heavy tinting on our 8 inch by 8 inch portal
> to the hallway. The more senior admin got to move across the hall where
> he gets two arrow-slit windows by his desk. We have the ugliest
> building on campus, and by damn, we're proud of it.
>
I know of one university - Surrey, I think, which has all its floors
numbers based on the number of feet above sea level that the floor is divided
by ten. Hence, the ground floor is never called that, and the floor numbers
change as you walk up hills.
> Seymore: (tendrils lash out to the EEstudent, dashing glasses from his
> face and simultaniously pressing multiple buttons on his watch)
Sounds more like Twoey. ;)
Mg
--
Sean Berry
In <4sooqi$r...@shell1.aimnet.com> lu...@aimnet.com (Lusty Wench) writes:
>In article <1fFUmCAb...@csking.demon.co.uk>,
>get that software package installed (just _try_ running an RS/6000 with
>400 MB of disk space and then making it do anything useful!)
[1]
[1] It's called Project Vincent. Seems that the Provost, in his
infinite wisdom[2], decided that the solution to our becoming a
world class university was to have as many seats as possible on
the 'distributed computing system.[3]'
[2] Yeah, right.[7]
[3] Distributed file system and accounting, maybe.[4]
[4] Not to ditch on the systems guys.[5]
[5] Those that are still here, and not at the Sloth[10][11].
[6] Beware the hanging footnote.
[7] Not that I mean to jeopardize my job, account, or net connection.[8]
[8] All hail Van Jacobson.
[10] Those still here are working seriously wicked hard.
[11] The Sloth hired away ~90% of the systems staff.
[12] Imagine running ~1200 DECstations and DEC Alphas, with 80M[14],
300M[15], or 1G[16] disks.
[14] Admittedly, 2100s and 3100s, but there's barely enough for
root(16M), swap(16M), and AFS[19] cache(50M).
[16] On an alpha.[17]
[17] Remember the alpha? Netscape's around 8M. That's for -one- binary.
[19] AFS, Andrew File System. Cached, distributed, everything appears
transparent, nice permissions and security within it.[18]
[18] Probably not too bad of an idea, and it worked ok for a
while.[20.01]
[20.01] Bah, I'm tired of this. Beer and pizza.
[21] While not a bad way to tell a story, it's kind of choose your own
adventure(6), and severely discontinuous[22].
[22] Which is kind of cool if you hate calculus[23].
[23] Ah well, MIS, here we come.
--
Sean Berry is an ISTJ cellist who works in netbsd. (must have more toys)
I imagine someone is likely to misinterpret
my opinions as those of my various employers. This is not the case.
Martin Hargreaves
gr...@vortex.netbistro.com (Ernie Dunbar) wrote:
>Nobody likes tech support. Some people are just better at it than others.
>I am that someone. However, I'm going to school starting this fall to
>learn to program (this job told me I can do it, and that it's pretty cool)
>so's I can be a Sysadmin. (or something)
Learn to program so you can be an admin? Shurely learn to program so
you can be a programmer? There's a bit of programming but unless they
teach /bin/sh, perl, expect sh again most of the programming you learn
at school may be useless.
I know mine was[1].
M.
[1] I learnt BASIC, 8086 assembler, C, Fortran. In that order. As a
result of this mindfuck any original programming I do is in sh[2].
[2] Although I can port C and Fortran easily, read C like english and
read and eventually comprehend Fortran, BASIC and 8086 assembler[3]
[3] And these days some SPARC and MIPS asm too.
[4] Only being able to write sh scripts helps even slightly at work,
except for the interest factor in crash dump analysis to find out
exactly what operation on the Indy panicked it (jalr usually, to
address zero, somewhere in the IRIX networking code, often NFS)
[5] Sorry about this post.
##################################################################
# Martin Hargreaves (mar...@datamodl.demon.co.uk) Computational #
# Director, Datamodel Ltd Chemist #
# Contract Unix system admin/Unix security Sysadmin #
##################################################################
Chris McCraw
In a previous article, Matthew Crosby <cro...@nordsieck.cs.colorado.edu> wrote:
> <i wrote:>
>>i landed smack dab in the middle of a university, in a department with
>>only grad students and postdocs. what does this mean to me as a potential
>>BOFH? well, basically, it means that everyone who could possibly bug me
>>is better educated than me. while this could still pose a problem in a
>>liberal-arts sort of department, it is basically a big win when the depart-
>>ment's main focus is on computing[2]. while i get the occasional lame ques-
>>tion, few are boring, and more than half actually present some challenge,
>Oh my. As a (former now I just graduated) University sysadmin, I want to know
>what sort of weird CS dept you have there.
oh, my, youve failed to read the footnote which was designated as \[2\] above;
while i am an avid CS student here at UT, and spend my recreational hours on
the CS machines, and post news from there[1], i am not employed by them. and
thus i will not be able to comment on the state of our dept--looks relatively
calm and collected from down here. (naive undergrad viewpoint)
my department, on the other hand, is extremely professional while remaining
fun to work for, and doesnt seem to have the associated pettiness which may
come into mentally challenging academia...hmm...tho i cant explain this, im
not complaining. of course, im not especially friendly towards politics of
any sort, so i could just be deluding myself. but im doing a fantastic job
of it, in that case.
should i? nah, ill just let the question of whether im making this up or not
lie in your hands...no need to shamelessly dispel curiousity by naming names.
--
[1] there are a few exceptions to that last bit, but, i dont think theres a
terribly large cross-population between here and comp.unix.aix, so ill just
carry on as tho i dont read news anymore while im at work and hope nobody
calls me on it ;)[2] [2] McQ footnote.
Terje Bless
>li...@tss.no (Terje Bless) writes:
>
>> Try out uni. Tromsoe in Norway. You enter, from the street, into the 6th
>> floor. No matter how many times I look at the floor plans I can't figure
>> out where 1-5 went.
>
>Now you know where all the bodies are buried.
Actually the hospital and the uni. are connectet by a bridge-thingy and
the hospital has an incinerator[1] to dispose of the lus^H^H^Hrecently
departed.
[1] - I have no idea what they are called in english, but you know what I
mean[2]
[2] - Great LART tho'.
--
Party? Party, lord? Yes, lord. Right away, lord.
- Beopunk Cyberwulf
Tim Bandy
David Hobson <Da...@nazca.dircon.co.uk> writes:
!:jb...@junior.wariat.org (Joe Bork) wrote:
!:> all. Just out of idle curiosity (is there any other kind?), what is the
!:> floor on the ground level called?
!:> I'd guess the "ground floor," but that would be too obvious.
[ blah blah blah]su -
!:[1] Sometimes on lift panels instead of G.
!:[2] How the hell do you represent underground floors if not by -1, -2, -3... ?
Ahhh, see, there's the problem. The building was built with the floor
type typecast to type unsigned. In order to have negative values enabled
on your floors, you need to download the source from the contractor and
recompile with floor typecast to type int. HTH
--
Tim Bandy University of Minnesota
tim...@monopoly.cs.umn.edu ba...@cs.umn.edu
http://www.cs.umn.edu/~bandy/index.html
"On justice, and on friendship, there is no price, but there are
established credit limits" --The Tick
Ned Brickley
>>Anyway he came in and after paying his bill, mentioned in passing that
>>his modem was fried. Seems that a bolt of lightning toasted it.
>>My only question is, Why did the viking god Thor forget to take out
>>the rest of his computer??
>
>*My* only question is, why did he hit the computer and miss the luser?
My guess is Thor was somewhat hungover.
Mary Conner
In article <4slitk$5...@hobbes.cc.uga.edu>,
Kate Wrightson <ka...@rigel.econ.uga.edu> wrote:
>-kate, I swear I love Georgia sometimes (and then we went home and saw
>the TV ad for RVs where a guy shoots a watermelon with a sawed-off shotgun)
Heh. I can see why they worried about the Olympics Opening Ceremonies
being too "bubba". :)
--
Mary Conner
tr...@serv.net
Ravan Asteris
Mark Edwards wrote on Wed, 17 Jul 1996 01:49:44 GMT:
#
# jtie...@uoguelph.ca (Josh Tiefenbach) wrote:
# >I dont do phone support. I have enough problems with people sticking thier heads
# >over the partition and asking me questions. :)
#
# My peeve is "Mark, I know you're at lunch, but..."
I know that one, or a variation thereof:
Cow-worker: "Hey soandso, I know your busy, but can you come to my office
and help me with this?"
Me: "In a minute, I need to finish this and save it"
Cow-worker: "I really need your help now. I've got a lotta stuff to do"
and starts describing the problem.
Me: "Just let me finish what I'm doing"
Cow-worker: "Can you hurry it up?"
Me, sighing and hitting Save "All right" Now mind you, I'm a bit
"mobility impaired", so I move a bit slowly.
Cow-worker: "Hurry it up, will ya, I haven't got all day."
When I get there, it turns out the problem is one that I'd shown him the
solution to a week before.
Cow-worker: "well, geez, I don't do this all the time, so I forget..."
Just think, I'm the one who's had brain surgery, what's his excuse?
Ravan
"Don't let the bytes bug you"
Communications "decency" protest: This legislation is a fucking
abortion of justice, passed by cocksuckers interested only in pandering
to the twisted, perverse desires of the religious right for control over
discussions of tits, cocks, cunts and other "non-approved" subjects.
*Round 1 Won! Preliminary injunction issued. Next Stop: Supreme Court*
Al Castanoli
Chris McCraw (fo...@cs.utexas.edu) wrote:
: In a previous article, Matthew Crosby <cro...@nordsieck.cs.colorado.edu>
: wrote:
: > <i wrote:>
: >>i landed smack dab in the middle of a university, in a department with
: >>only grad students and postdocs. what does this mean to me as a potential
: >>BOFH? well, basically, it means that everyone who could possibly bug me
: >>is better educated than me. while this could still pose a problem in a
: >>liberal-arts sort of department, it is basically a big win when the depart-
: >>ment's main focus is on computing[2]. while i get the occasional lame ques-
: >>tion, few are boring, and more than half actually present some challenge,
: >Oh my. As a (former now I just graduated) University sysadmin, I want to
: >know what sort of weird CS dept you have there.
[...]
: while i am an avid CS student here at UT, and spend my recreational hours on
: the CS machines, and post news from there[1], i am not employed by them. and
: thus i will not be able to comment on the state of our dept--looks relatively
: calm and collected from down here. (naive undergrad viewpoint)
{...]
So what's going on in recreational computing at the uni's these days, the
Kibo Olympics? Being connected to a network and actually having a few
clues as to how it might work, are not the same as administrating that
network. Learning to set up routers, servers, and workstations might
qualify one as an installation tech, but dealing with lusers is a whole
'nuther thing, and that's why most folks who subscribe to this newsgroup
find it useful. Not to read student evaluations of their networks.
OTOH, I think we've been trolled.
Martin Hargreaves
Mark Green <Ma...@antelope.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> I know of one university - Surrey, I think, which has all its floors
>numbers based on the number of feet above sea level that the floor is divided
>by ten. Hence, the ground floor is never called that, and the floor numbers
>change as you walk up hills.
Yep. I went there. I can still remember the snappy name of the
Computer Aided Chemistry lab[1] - 19AZ20. AZ being the building, 19
because it was 190 feet above sea level and 10 because it was the
tenth room on the floor.
They also built the library entrance on the first floor (so you have
to go up a hastily added spiral staircase on the side of the building
to get in), the step on senate house on the wrong site and one of the
residences (Guildford court) at 2/3rds scale. Meaning only short
people got that court.
Smashing job. Really.
M.
[1] Called a lab because it was in a chemistry building. It was
actually a room full of 286's and some ancient kit (sinclair QLs,
SIGMEX terminals attached to an upstair uVAX, etc.) rather than a lab
in which you had to wear a lab coat and safety glasses.
Robert Bonomi
In article <31f2a6c1....@news.empire.net>,
Ned Brickley <trav...@empire.net> wrote:
>On Fri, 19 Jul 1996 08:18:19 GMT, ava...@arkane.demon.co.uk (Alistair
>Young) wrote:
>
>
>>>Anyway he came in and after paying his bill, mentioned in passing that
>>>his modem was fried. Seems that a bolt of lightning toasted it.
>>>My only question is, Why did the viking god Thor forget to take out
>>>the rest of his computer??
>>
>>*My* only question is, why did he hit the computer and miss the luser?
>
>My guess is Thor was somewhat hungover.
you know how it goes. He once had a bad day with his hammer . It didn't
didn't come back exactly correctly, and he munged a few digits,
_permanently_. Not only that, it ricocheted, hit him in the face, and
affected his speech. To this day, he has had problems with accuracy,
due to inability to grasp properly. His explanation: "thith ith caused
by 'chronic Thor thumb'"
Chris McCraw
In a previous article, Al Castanoli <afc...@millenium.texas.net> wrote:
> <me>
>: while i am an avid CS student here at UT, and spend my recreational hours on
>: the CS machines, and post news from there[1], i am not employed by them. and
>: thus i will not be able to comment on the state of our dept--looks relatively
>: calm and collected from down here. (naive undergrad viewpoint)
>
>{...]
>
>So what's going on in recreational computing at the uni's these days, the
>Kibo Olympics? Being connected to a network and actually having a few
>clues as to how it might work, are not the same as administrating that
>network. Learning to set up routers, servers, and workstations might
>qualify one as an installation tech, but dealing with lusers is a whole
>'nuther thing, and that's why most folks who subscribe to this newsgroup
>find it useful. Not to read student evaluations of their networks.
hmm, you have made a number of good points above. unfortunately, none of
them apply to me. you have conveniently snipped the rest of that post,
in which i document my real job, which is as an administrator for another
department's network. the above reply was merely in response to someone's
incredulity at what he supposed was an intimation by myself that all
faculty in the CS department here were perfect. which, of course, was
not what i had said.
anyway. the point of my quoted post was "my lusers are not at the pinnacle
of heinousness." just to summarize.
>OTOH, I think we've been trolled.
better luck next time.
Al Castanoli
In that case, my apologies. I'd just been reading alt.folklore.computers
and was perhaps a bit quick off the trigger.
Chris McCraw (fo...@cs.utexas.edu) wrote:
: better luck next time.
--
Sune Karlsson
Elliot Smorodinsky wrote:
> In Carnegie-Mellon University's Wein Hall, floor 5 is the ground
> level. The building is built into the side of this really steep hill, you
> see -- so what's the ground floor on one side is 5 stories above ground
> on the other.
I work on the 4th floor, directly below me we have the 2nd floor. Above we
have the 5th, 6th, 8th and 9th floors.
/Sune
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sune Karlsson Internet: ST...@HHS.SE
Stockholm School of Economics Phone: + 46 8 736 92 39
Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden Fax: + 46 8 34 81 61
Clare West
lu...@aimnet.com (Lusty Wench) writes:
> In article <1fFUmCAb...@csking.demon.co.uk>,
> Chris King <ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >It's always a little problem when handed to you by your boss, until you
> >realise how much work it's going to entail. Then the problem suddenly
> >blows up in you face.
> This reminds me of the time my boss asked me to install this one software
> package on one of our RS/6000s for a meeting in a couple of days. I ended
> up spending about 3 days at the office without sleep and still never did
> get that software package installed (just _try_ running an RS/6000 with
> 400 MB of disk space and then making it do anything useful!)
Or the time the HyperMedia Guys came to me and said: "Can you connect us
to the MBone"
(me in my innocent ignorance said "What's that? I guess so, if you're
paying for the traffic")
"And we want it for a broadcast at 5pm this evening"
The docs seemed to reckon about 2 weeks to get yourself setup -- it's
a bit shorter than that, but 5pm this evening is not on.
clare
--
cl...@cs.auckland.ac.nz OWotRFA
http://clare.cs.auckland.ac.nz/
Thinking of Maud you forget everything else. -- hack v1.0.3
Who was that Maud person anyway? -- nethack v3.1.0
Mark Bush
In article <31EE94...@connectcorp.com>,
Mark Brady <mark....@connectcorp.com> wrote:
#Ob-Thread Drift: I got a copy of Danstar's Third Law:
#The processing power of a computer is inversely proportional to the user's
#actual need and proportional to their seniority.
Yer - like lecturers who end up with the latest thing on their desk
'cos they kick up such a fuss otherwise, develop bulky software based
on memory eating software and wonder why it runs like a dog on the
machines the undergrads have.
And then you discover a couple of years after that there was other
software they could have based their stuff on which runs faster and is
*much* smaller. Only the lecturer wasn't involved in it at some step
on the way, so doesn't have an interest in pushing it.
Mark
Sean B Purdy
Recently, the esteemed David Hobson, Da...@nazca.dircon.co.uk, imparted:
[re lifts]
~ No, really, it is! Also you can have 'ground level' and '0' [1] [2]
~ [2] How the hell do you represent underground floors if not by -1, -2, -3?
B, SB, then ghod-knows-what. The lusers obviously didn't think you'd
need more than 2 levels underground. H'mm, sounds familiar....
~ Ooops. That could almost be construed as useful.
Oh and CP perhaps.
Sean
--
Sean B Purdy, system administrator se...@fastnet.co.uk
> being a SysAdmin means never having to say you're sorry -
> just "I'll fix it right away...."
- Paul S. Sawyer
Sean B Purdy
Recently, the esteemed David P. Murphy, d...@access5.digex.net, imparted:
~ mnm...@swva.net (Mike Mills) writes:
~ ><grin>
~ >
~ >SOMETIMES the boss DOES back you up!
~ my boss _always_ backs me up. even when i've screwed up.
~ which is why i'm still here after three years.
He obviously remembers to restore you whenever anything goes wrong....
Sean
--
Sean B Purdy, system administrator se...@fastnet.co.uk
+++ ????? +++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo from Start.
discursive melancholia
In article <4sq36k$6...@epx.cis.umn.edu> ba...@itlabs.umn.edu (Tim Bandy) writes:
>!:[2] How the hell do you represent underground floors if not by -1, -2, -3... ?
>
>Ahhh, see, there's the problem. The building was built with the floor
>type typecast to type unsigned. In order to have negative values enabled
>on your floors, you need to download the source from the contractor and
>recompile with floor typecast to type int. HTH
or just press the "32768" button.
(whaddyamean you can't cast the button press into a signed..)
--
Erik Fichtner (te...@scf.nmsu.edu) [http://scf.nmsu.edu/~emf/]
"calling all angels, calling all angels, walk me through this one,
don't leave me alone" - jane siberry
Mark Bush
In article <$$kW+GAdt...@csking.demon.co.uk>,
Chris King <ch...@csking.demon.co.uk> wrote:
#I keep telling people to read the Message Of The Day, but they keep
#banging a key to go past it. Well, that's not going to be the case much
As soon as we started having any useful info in our /etc/motd
(et-cetra(sic) mott-dee) .hushlogin files started appearing in users'
accounts.
We have local announce newsgroups for information such as "this
Thursday morning servers X and Y will be down for maintenance - this
will affect A, B and C services and M, N, O sets of workstations".
Come Thursday morning there are phone calls from lecturers asking why
the network isn't working.
"A message was posted to the announce newsgroup a couple of weeks ago
about it. Services will be available again by 1pm."
"RANT. I don't bother reading that newsgroup. You should e-mail
everybody instead. RANT."
It is explained to them how more efficient it is for one message to
sit on the news host for all to see rather than multiple copies being
sent to all and sundry and that it is well puplisized that that
particular newsgroup will contain that sort of info.
Next time machines are down for scheduled maintenance? Yup - they
come out with the same stuff.
AAAARRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
Mark
Paul Tomblin
In a previous article, mar...@datamodl.demon.co.uk (Martin Hargreaves) said:
>[1] Called a lab because it was in a chemistry building. It was
>actually a room full of 286's and some ancient kit (sinclair QLs,
>SIGMEX terminals attached to an upstair uVAX, etc.) rather than a lab
>in which you had to wear a lab coat and safety glasses.
One of my professors told us about how his university (Cambridge) got the new
engineering lecture halls designated "Engineering Labs" so that they wouldn't
have to wear gowns to lectures.
--
Paul Tomblin (ptom...@xcski.com)
Sometimes I speak as NCF news admin. Most of the time I don't.
<a href="http://www.servtech.com/public/ptomblin/">My home page</a>
"GNU is not Linux - Linux has a kernel that boots" - Chris Thompson
Canadian
dfl...@io.com (Douglas R. Floyd) wrote:
>PS: My humor sense is pretty deformed right now -- been in bed for 3 days
>due to a sinus infection and strep throat, as well as possibly a
Magic Voice: Troll alert. Troll is now landing on runway 4.
> virus.
MV: Troll has landed. Thank you for flying Floyd Airlines.
--
Chris Foley (chr...@iceonline.com) DNRC POPE OF CAPITAL LETTERS, HPK