Atmospheric Musings

It pisses me off when someone who should know better, doesn’t.

It’s infuriating to have taken the time to try to explain a concept, only to have the idiot in question decide, “You already know better and have it under control, so I’m not going to even try to understand it.”

“Take a look at this report…[link]”

“Okay, I’ve got it.”

“Shouldn’t the numbers in Section B be higher?”

“Higher than what?”

“[copy/paste from the chart] Those numbers.”

“Those are the same numbers.”

“Shouldn’t they be higher though?”

“Higher than what?”

“What?”

“What is it that you’re trying to do with these numbers?”

“Well I’m running comparative percentages on…”

“Are you doing your math right?  You should be running these [point] against this [point], not that [point].”

“Oh.”

“That’s what you meant by ‘These numbers should be higher?’ all this time?!”

“Well, yeah, um thanks for uh, clarifying… that… [leave]”

“*le sigh*”

“…if I try to yank/wiggle/tug/press/slide every last apparently movable piece on this device.”

When the secretary responsible for swapping out the daily backup drive is out sick, all the “backup secretary” knows is that she needs to bring in “Thur” tape, push a button, and change “Wed” for “Thur” and she’s done.

Problem is, she assumes it will pop out instantly, and it doesn’t.  No, don’t ask the guy sitting right there, go ask someone “higher up” instead.

The higher-up-guy proceeds to come just short of disconnecting the drive or fetching pliers and a screwdriver to force the drive out of its housing, before I suggest waiting, or perhaps checking to see if maybe there’s some software on the server that gives the current status of the drive.  Maybe something like “Preparing to unmount drive” or simply “Disconnecting…” or “STOP POKING ME YOU MONGOL” or the like.

I’m afraid to take a vacation; who knows what carnage I will return to find?

If you like your job, you calmly voice your concern, then patiently let your boss fuck up, then gently explain why they fucked up and how much it cost them.  Here’s an example scenario:

“Should we set a quota limit for the weekend?”

“Yeah, the client said about 400.  So set it for 600.”

“600? Really? If they only want 400 then…”

(interrupt) “Well what does ‘about 400′ really mean?”

“Well, I’d say plus or minus 10 on the liberal side…”

“Nah, set it for 600.  If we go over, then we go over.”

Well, it turns out that they shut our traffic off at 411.  Our system was not set to shut off in that range and continued to try to send traffic.  All of that traffic was denied, and wasted for this project, as we can’t reuse that traffic when they eventually open the project up for the remaining group of 1,000.

Running the numbers based on previous traffic samples, we lost out on about $600 worth of revenue from that wasted sample.

Now if they had just not fucked up so many times before, $600 wouldn’t be such a big deal.  There is hope however; they are allowing me to rebuild the site and rework the model to support both ethics and profits.

It’s just a matter of time, and patience.

“Did we get a list of the changes that were made based on our list of observations?”

“Yes, here’s the email…”

“I don’t see a list here.”

“It says right there, ‘We addressed half of the items on the list.’ It’s right there.”

“No, that’s not a list. Did we get a list?”

“It says RIGHT THERE, they did half of them. Can’t you read that?!?”

“Yes, right there, it says they did half. It does not give a listing of which half they did.”

“No but it says they did half!! Why are you trying to make things difficult!!”

“Difficult? Based on this email, the answer to my question is simply: ‘No, they did not send us a list.’ Simple.”

“But they TOLD us they did HALF!”

“Yes, and they did not send us a list. Thanks!”

I’ve decided to blog my frustrations here, unless any objections arise.

I’ll start with today.  I got to see an exec “in action” so to speak.  He actually said, “I’ll take that call, and stick around, maybe you’ll learn something.”  First mistake.

Long story short, the user had a considerable concern and was totally put at ease and assured that his assumptions were incorrect.  Too bad it was utter bullshit.

The primary problem was the overconfidence on the part of the exec, which caused him to believe that he understood what the user was asking without actually having to listen to what the user was saying, let alone think for two seconds.  This, coupled with the need to “show Jim how it’s done” resulted in a simply disgraceful customer service event.

I keep repeating to myself, “one day they’ll learn, one day they’ll listen…”  I think that I think that, (not a rambling typo, an interesting turn of phrase), and I hope that I’m right.

Wow, double posting on inordinate on the same day. Must be a miracle. Anyway, after a year or so of the Webmail link being useless, it now has a function. I finally got around to setting up Roundcube, which is an AJAX based IMAP client. It can theoretically connect to any IMAP server, but if you have an account on inordinate.net, you can just set that as the server and log in to your mail account. Speaking of mail accounts, I’m trying out the Ubuntu server default install which uses Dovecot for mail receipt and IMAP support and Postfix for SMTP services. We’ll give it a shot. Overall, I’m fairly pleased with Ubuntu server so far. It’s been relatively easy to migrate over to from FreeBSD and installing the optional Gnome GUI environment makes local maintenance and installation much easier, since I can update with a few mouse clicks instead of having to update the Ports directory manually and then update my individual ports (ala FreeBSD). We’ll see how the uptime goes once everything’s configed and running smoothly. FreeBSD did have legendary uptimes… it pretty much only went down when the power did… just like my wife! OOOOHHH!!!

I figure if I’m paying for this goddamned domain I should be putting some work into it. I have nothing of relevance to post, though. Well, maybe a thought:

Voters in Los Angeles are fucking stupid. They voted for a 9% phone tax (a reduction from the rather illegal 10% phone tax imposed on them last year) when they could have voted against the phone tax and paid 0%. This is why it was better when only the educated voted. Now we have morons fucking up the system because they can’t even figure out what the hell they’re voting for.

Oh… in a flashback to a previous post of mine from years ago - Canceling Verizon DSL this time was much simpler (if you don’t count yet another 30 minute wait.) When asked why I was canceling my service I simply replied, “I decline to comment.” With no other recourse and no angle to hit me with a sales pitch I was off the phone 1 minute later with my service canceled. Now I have a 10 meg cable connection for $5 less than the 1.5 meg DSL connection I had. That’s what I call sex.