Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[RealAlHazred]

If you've never read anything about "Lean" [SNIP]

Let me stop you right there: I don't know how to read. As should be obvious from my responses here.

Also, I've had a variety of these methods from management at various jobs in the last 30 years. And it always comes down to, it doesn't matter what sort of efficiency training you give me, I'm not the one making the ultimate decision about equipment.

Case in point: customer retains our services for one month, and then calls us out for an issue with server; this was in 2012-2013 sometime. I arrive onsite to find a SuperMicro server (‽) running Windows Server 1998 (‽‽‽) with some implementation of dBase that some guys with downtime during Y2K had worked up a bunch of macros for and packaged them for the company. I call my boss to tell him that literally every piece of hardware and software I can find is either End of Life, or the company that made it is out of business. There are multiple hardware issues with drives, memory, and one of the cards; there may be issues with the software, too, but I'm not familiar with any of it.

Boss: "Let me pull you into a conference call with <Customer> to explain this."
Me: "... Oh-kaaay."
<Customer> joins
<Customer>: "What is the issue?"
Boss: "My tech will explain."
Me: explains all the issues
<Customer>: "So? What's the problem? Just fix it!"
Boss: "But we can sell you a better system that will break down less often!"
<Customer>: "I don't want to spend the money."
Boss: "But I haven't even calculated the charge!"
<Customer>: "It doesn't matter, it will be more than the one-month charge for technical support you sold us."

Upshot, I managed, by a miracle, to find a memory stick at home that fit (because I never throw anything out), and my boss managed to find a replacement for the faulty card which another coworker couriered to me. The hard drive was no issue. Got all the hardware back together, apparently the hard drive was a data drive that restored from backup, and at the end of the month the customer dropped our services. My boss ended up mad at me, for no real reason other than he was hoping to upsell the customer, despite it being obvious that was never going to happen.

Doesn't matter how efficient I am if I'm not the one making the call.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I'd totally watch that Nat Geo special, especially if it was narrated by Werner Herzog.

Look into the eyes of Snarf and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. Snarf is the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creature in the world. It was when I first encountered Snarf that I realized that the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.

People think that I have a love-hate relationship with Snarf. Well, I did not love Snarf, and I did not hate Snarf. We had mutual respect for each other, born of long nights of drinking and recriminations, but we spent most of our time planning each other's murder.

Werner Herzog, narrating his upcoming film The Boojum was a Snarf: The Great Ecstasy of Discursive Superfluity

 

[Scribe]

Doesn't matter how efficient I am if I'm not the one making the call.

And this is where my gen-x apathy shines. I quite literally had this conversation with a PM on my team yesterday. When there is nothing I can do, all I can do is not care.

 

[Ryujin]

Let me stop you right there: I don't know how to read. As should be obvious from my responses here.

Also, I've had a variety of these methods from management at various jobs in the last 30 years. And it always comes down to, it doesn't matter what sort of efficiency training you give me, I'm not the one making the ultimate decision about equipment.

Case in point: customer retains our services for one month, and then calls us out for an issue with server; this was in 2012-2013 sometime. I arrive onsite to find a SuperMicro server (‽) running Windows Server 1998 (‽‽‽) with some implementation of dBase that some guys with downtime during Y2K had worked up a bunch of macros for and packaged them for the company. I call my boss to tell him that literally every piece of hardware and software I can find is either End of Life, or the company that made it is out of business. There are multiple hardware issues with drives, memory, and one of the cards; there may be issues with the software, too, but I'm not familiar with any of it.

Boss: "Let me pull you into a conference call with <Customer> to explain this."
Me: "... Oh-kaaay."
<Customer> joins
<Customer>: "What is the issue?"
Boss: "My tech will explain."
Me: explains all the issues
<Customer>: "So? What's the problem? Just fix it!"
Boss: "But we can sell you a better system that will break down less often!"
<Customer>: "I don't want to spend the money."
Boss: "But I haven't even calculated the charge!"
<Customer>: "It doesn't matter, it will be more than the one-month charge for technical support you sold us."

Upshot, I managed, by a miracle, to find a memory stick at home that fit (because I never throw anything out), and my boss managed to find a replacement for the faulty card which another coworker couriered to me. The hard drive was no issue. Got all the hardware back together, apparently the hard drive was a data drive that restored from backup, and at the end of the month the customer dropped our services. My boss ended up mad at me, for no real reason other than he was hoping to upsell the customer, despite it being obvious that was never going to happen.

Doesn't matter how efficient I am if I'm not the one making the call.

Had something similar, but not quite that bad, on Friday. We received a call about a printer/scanner not working with Microsoft Scan (a stupid little app that you can download from the Microsoft Store). I found the original call for setup and it said that the MFP had been connected, tested, and was working. Except that it wasn't.

1) My co-worker who set it up somehow missed that it was a MFP, not just a printer. Since it's unsupported hardware I suppose he can be excused, but it's pretty obvious.
2) As stated, my group doesn't support this equipment. Another group within IT does. When they couldn't get it working, they threw the ball to us. It should have been closed immediately because, as stated, it's unsupported.
3) Said MFP is 15 years old. The manufacturer stopped supporting it at Windows XP. Some people have managed to make it work with Win10, but no one has with Win11.

Let me reiterate. It's 15 year old unsupported hardware, that the manufacturer no longer supports, and my group was supposed to somehow make it work when the people who have experience with it couldn't. We would normally call that sort of thing "Tuesday" and move on, but it was Friday.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

We had mutual respect for each other, born of long nights of drinking and recriminations, but we spent most of our time planning each other's murder.

 

[Scribe]

Had something similar, but not quite that bad, on Friday. We received a call about a printer/scanner not working with Microsoft Scan (a stupid little app that you can download from the Microsoft Store). I found the original call for setup and it said that the MFP had been connected, tested, and was working. Except that it wasn't.

1) My co-worker who set it up somehow missed that it was a MFP, not just a printer. Since it's unsupported hardware I suppose he can be excused, but it's pretty obvious.
2) As stated, my group doesn't support this equipment. Another group within IT does. When they couldn't get it working, they threw the ball to us. It should have been closed immediately because, as stated, it's unsupported.
3) Said MFP is 15 years old. The manufacturer stopped supporting it at Windows XP. Some people have managed to make it work with Win10, but no one has with Win11.

Let me reiterate. It's 15 year old unsupported hardware, that the manufacturer no longer supports, and my group was supposed to somehow make it work when the people who have experience with it couldn't. We would normally call that sort of thing "Tuesday" and move on, but it was Friday.

I've never felt so connected to another being through the internet.

 

[Umbran]

Look into the eyes of Snarf and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. Snarf is the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creature in the world.

So... you're the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

 

[Staffan]

And this is where my gen-x apathy shines. I quite literally had this conversation with a PM on my team yesterday. When there is nothing I can do, all I can do is not care.

Let me reiterate. It's 15 year old unsupported hardware, that the manufacturer no longer supports, and my group was supposed to somehow make it work when the people who have experience with it couldn't. We would normally call that sort of thing "Tuesday" and move on, but it was Friday.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Based on the response, I can assume that @Dannyalcatraz was the only person who is checking my sources.

FWIW, my personal #2 bit of legal tomfoolery is the infamous (in some circles) Becky Klemt Letter.

https://www.texasbar.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Say_What_&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=35461

Alas, I cannot fully share my #1, for 2 reasons. First, I was exposed to it in a handout by my college Philosophy of Law prof and I lost my copy of it back in the early 1990s, and have been unable to find it because I never wrote down its citation.

Second, the subject matter itself would be verboten on this board. You see, it was an employment lawsuit involving an employee who got fired for dropping an F-bomb. His counsel’s oral pleadings were legendary: he was trying to re-contextualize and reframe his client’s action in a way as to imply that the boss who fired him was misunderstanding the reason & targeting the verbal weapon in question.

(IOW, he was throwing major BS around the room and hoping the governing body would be befuddled, thus ruling for his client.)

And he did so by showing all of the grammatical ways “F***” has been used in standard American English…with illustrative sentence samples. So there were nouns, transitive verbs, intransitive verbs, etc. The number of times the lawyer said the offending word on the record would have made Samuel L. Jackson shed tears of respectful pride.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Let me reiterate. It's 15 year old unsupported hardware, that the manufacturer no longer supports, and my group was supposed to somehow make it work when the people who have experience with it couldn't. We would normally call that sort of thing "Tuesday" and move on, but it was Friday.

That reminds me of a call I answered in 2009. I was coming off of a 12-hour shift at midnight, driving home, when my boss (same one as before) called me to go to a customer site. I get there and find they're using two ancient servers, apparently linked somehow, running an OS called "AEGIS" I'd never heard of before. The one server was only giving error messages, which I couldn't interpret because of my unfamiliarity with the system. However, our website listed "AEGIS" as a system we supported, so the customer, in desperation, had reached out to us and paid our one-time fee for instant tech support.

I called my boss (same jerk as my previous story) and explained the issue. He told me he'd reach out to one of our subcontractor techs, who was the whole reason we had "AEGIS" on the website at all. He only worked for us on a one-off case-by-case basis, and I hadn't talked to him for a few years at that point. Then I sat down with the manual. Let me tell you, it is sheer torture to try to comprehend a manual written in 1983 when you're exhausted and running on caffeine fumes.

An hour later I heard back from my boss, who told me the tech was not reachable on any of the numbers we had, and after some research, my boss found out he'd moved out of state the year before. No forwarding address, no emails to us, nothing. So, there would be no support.

By that time, by some miracle, I'd found something in the manual that looked like what we were seeing. I ran the suggested update, and then the manual said the linked server would also need to be restarted to get the system up again. I told that to the customer.

Customer Technical Manager: "No."
Me: "... Uh, what?"
Customer Technical Manager: "You can't restart the other server. What if it doesn't come back up?"
Me: "I mean, that's the only way according to the manual to get this server back up. Downtime should be minimal."
Customer Technical Manager: "No. I'm not going to let you do that."
Me: "Well, what else would you like me to do?"

And then the customer said a thing that has stayed with me through the rest of my career to date. I can still hear his exact voice in my head, saying something so profoundly dumb (coming from what is supposed to be a tech person) that I'd never heard the like before or since. This next line, I guarantee you despite my terrible memory, is verbatim:

Customer Technical Manager: "I want you to wave your magic wand and make the problem go away."

So, I continued reading the manual to see if I could achieve a second miracle and find some tech workaround to do just that. I was still reading at 8AM, when my boss finally had mercy and sent one of my coworkers to relieve me. I explained everything to that guy, and finally got to bed by 9AM. By 9AM, the customer's overnight technical manager also left and was replaced by another guy. My coworker told him the same thing and what would be needed to get it up again.

New Customer Technical Manager: "Sure, go ahead! Let's get the system up!"

And before I even fell asleep, my coworker got the customer up and running, receiving many email kudos from my boss and the customer technical manager. I got complained about for "not solving customer problems."