Category: Rant

A company of idiots

I work at a company that employes thousands of people. Early this morning, Corporate IT send out a message to everybody at the company with a Lotus Notes (bleargh) account warning them that a couple of servers are going to be upgraded this weekend and Notes might not be available during the upgrade. That was immediately followed by a deluge of idiots using “Reply All With History” to ask why they were getting this mail, followed by a few dozen people saying “Stop using Reply All”, followed by more people saying “You’re doing it too, you idiot”, followed by the original few dozen saying “if I hadn’t done a Reply All, I’d only be talking to people who’d already done it”, followed by several petty flame wars, followed by still more people saying “take me off this list”. It’s the most traffic I’ve seen on Lotus Notes since I came to the company – as a matter of fact, it probably outnumbers all the Lotus Notes I’ve had in total since I came to the company.

Fortunately my Unix mail account is still working.

Aaaarrrgh!

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate typing with one hand, even with Sticky Keys turned on? I just spent way too fucking long on one of those stupid meme quizes. I wrote several paragraphs each on apple, linux, cross country skiing, flying, odd professors and the like, and was just finishing up 4 paragraphs on why usenet is better than blogging when I accidentally hit a key combination that closed the tab I was writing in – I think I was reaching for splat-x and hit splat-w. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

You know what’s aggravating?

When you order a $314 keyboard specifically so you can do some work while your arm is in a cast to immobilize your wrist (and because you had a bit of rsi already and were already thinking about solutions) and you spend $45 extra for “next day air” shipping, and 24 hours after you ordered it, it still hasn’t shipped.

OI! I SPENT THE RIDICULOUS AMOUNT YOU CHARGE FOR HANDLING TO GET QUICK HANDLING!

It better ship by COB tomorrow or I’m going to be more than pissed.

Weekend Update

Evidently the weekend’s activities weren’t as successful as originally thought. As well as this palm-to-armpit cast thanks to being rammed by a canoe full of idiot girl scouts, I also seem to have totally fucked up the light over the garage. As of yesterday, there is no power at all in the garage, not to the new light, nor to the inside light and plug socket. And the circuit breaker is not tripped. I even tried resetting it just to see if that would help. I swear there is a secret switch in the house for the power to the garage, and we’re switching it without realizing it.

God save me from impatient installers

I’ve spent the last couple of months doing an all-singing, all-dancing automatic upgrader for our customers sites. This process is designed to be totally hands-off – you stick the DVD in the drive and type “upgrade”, and at the end of the theatre day it will convert the main “cms” computer (one per site) and all the “cp” computers (one per projector) from Redhat 7.3 to CentOS 3.4, upgrade from version 3.3 to 3.6 of our software, and magically preserve all your settings and configuration. You should come in the next day to find everything ready for the day’s schedule.

For the very first one at a customer site, though, they sent out a technician to babysit it. Unfortunately they send a techician who’d never done or witnessed one of our many test upgrades in-house.

You probably guessed what happened – she saw the cms come up, didn’t realize that the cps start after the cms is done, and rebooted the cms at the worst possible time – right when all 18 cps were attempting PXE (network) boots and expecting the cms to be there to send them what they needed. And the cms doesn’t start dhcpd by default, so the cps have had nothing to talk to all night. And of course everybody is screaming for me when I got in!