Job Security
Posted by Steve | Filed under Work
So I’m playin hooky from work today. They have called five times already and it’s just after 11aM. My three-year anniversary raise is coming in two weeks and it better accurately reflect my value to the organization. I’m just sayin! 
Tech Support Blues
Posted by Steve | Filed under Work
Man, I’m so frustrated I could rip off a grizzly bear’s head and shit on it’s neck right now.
We have an externally hosted website however I still control our DNS zone because I don’t trust them (1AND1.com) to do it. I got an email saying they were moving our site to a new data center this morning. It would be complete by 6AM EST but at no time would the website be down…of course it was…for 8-9 hours. I call to explain that if they’ve moved us to a new IP I need to know what that IP is so I update the zone file. Doofus pings “ourdomain.com” which brings up a different IP than what he’s expecting, but exactly what I’m expecting since ONLY “WWW.ourdomain.com” points to them. Doofus is completely incapable of getting his head around this revelation. He repeats (for 30 minutes, mind you) that I need to contact the person that manages the DNS, which I’ve now told him 754 times is IS ME!
He finally agrees to escalate the call after I demand his name. Who the f*ck names a kid Froilan anyway? Stupidvisor comes on and I say before we get too far into this let me explain something. I’m a Cisco Certified Network Associate. I’m a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. You don’t have to talk to me like I just got an AOL account last night…….CLICK! Mutha fucka hung up on me. I’m gonna have to choke a bitch now! I call back and exercise amazing restraint while preparing to abuse yet another tech doofus. I can call them doofuses because I was them at one point.
My first IT was telephone tech support…a job I talked my way into with absolutely zero experience whatsoever. I already know he’s reading canned workarounds from a database but since our setup is unique it won’t be covered in there. During the time I’m explaining things to Doofus 2 the site magically comes up. Pure coincidence my ass. I know those fuckers realized they forgot to flip the doomathingy switch but were NEVER gonna man up and admit it.
The Final Countdown
Posted by Steve | Filed under Cycling, Work
Three weeks to go to my greatest physical challenge ever. The AIDS/Lifecycle ride (not too late to donate, btw). I’m cycling 545 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for AIDS-related charities and services. It’s gonna be difficult but lots of fun. I’m still trying to finalize my travel arrangements. I’ve already booked an Amtrak ticket up to the ride start. I have to take a bus then a train then another bus but it’s only $54 so it beats a one-way plane fare. I have to be there two days early for registration and orientation so I have a hotel arranged. I wish I could find somebody to split that part but no luck so far. I still need to call a company to get my bike shipped up to the start at the Cow Palace. I’m going to be out $300 before I even get rolling. I haven’t ridden nearly as much as I needed to but I’ll be fine as long as I pace myself and stay hydrated.
There’s a ton of sh*t I have to pack and I still need to buy a sleeping bag since we sleep two to a tent each night. Next week I’m switching cell phones because we have another with extra batteries. I won’t have access to electricity on the route and I’m sure work will have at least one disaster they can’t handle themselves. I’m still up in the air about whether I want to get a Garmin Edge 305. It’s a bike computer that tracks mileage, speed, hear rate, calories burned and has a GPS built in. The problem is it only holds a charge for 12 hours so I’ll need some sort of battery operated charger to go with it.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks at work getting things done before I take off. I’m hoping they won’t have to call me for anything but not counting on it. I have to finish up some disaster recovery documents at work in case anything goes wrong with the website or email. I’ve also got to finish upgrading all the clients to Windows XP since the next version of our CRM software requires that.
On a positive note my sweetheart Belle is now officially an award-winning journalist. She brought home some several pieces of hardware from the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists awards banquet. I am very proud of her.
Posted by Steve | Filed under Technology, Work
I finally get a new PC at work and it’s gonna be a whopper. A Dell Optiplex 745 with:
- Intel® Core 2 Duo Processor E6600 (2.40GHz, 4M, 1066MHz FSB)
- 2GB DDR2 Non-ECC SDRAM,800MHz
- 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s and 8MB DataBurst Cache
- 16X DVD+/-RW SATA
- Dell 13 in 1 USB Media Card Reader
I just stuck with onboard video since we have some extra video cards laying about. I am curious to see how fast this thing encodes video compared to my dual Xeon at home. If the difference is a lot I may upgrade at home too. I really want a nice and quiet Shuttle mini that will let me get some shuteye even if its on at night. The Xeon sounds like a freight train.
I need to upgrade all the office computers to Windows XP in preparation for outsourcing our Exchange services and upgrading our CRM software. They will both require it.
It’s not that freaking difficult, people!
Posted by Steve | Filed under Work
Luser comes into my office (IT manager)
Her: Is there any reason my monitor won’t turn on when I hit the spacebar?
Me: Maybe it’s not on. Did you check?
Her: I dunno how to look for that.
Me: I’ll handle it…..walk into luser’s office, turn the monitor on and walk out w/o saying a word.
We’ve had computers here for ten+ years now and I’m pretty fucking sure that ON was covered the first day of class.
I can’t get no satisfaction
Posted by Steve | Filed under General, Work
I think my job satisfaction level is about to go thru the floor if these changes get implemented at work. Stay tuned but it’s looking like 2007 will be my last year here. I might try to hang around to get one more year’s bonus and profit-sharing but I may not even have the desire to do that.
Don’t mess with a man’s football!
Posted by Steve | Filed under Technology, Work
People have died for less.
Thursday I arrived at work around 7:45 AM, the usual time. I swap the backup tapes, read a few server logs, and check the voice mail. Around 9:30 AM roommate calls. Her car has overheated on the way to work and she needs me to come pick her up from the mechanic….and thus began possibly the worst 36 hours of my professional life.
I pick up roommate at the Arco station, drop her off at home and begin making my way thru late morning Los Angeles traffic. Now I remember why I start work at 8 AM. It allows me to miss all this fun. I’m about 15 minutes from the office and Boss calls. She can’t get on the Internet This is a frequent occurrence as our Netscreen firewall has a 10-user license but we have 15 computers. However, we only have 9 employees so it’s usually easy to find unused computers to shutdown. Actually I purchased an unlimited user license from CDW earlier this week; it just hasn’t arrived yet.
I tell the boss to shutdown one or both of my computers and I”ll settle it once I get back. Five minutes later she calls back to say not only did it not work but now she can’t get email either, nor can several other people. This is unusual but I’m almost there so help is on the way.
I get back to the office and check each computer one by one. Four computers have access to the internal network but not the WAN. This definitely a new. According to the logs the firewall seems to think people are getting out, but they aren’t. There are no license limit violations being logged. For seven computers everything is fine; for the rest all is not well and unfortunately one of those is the mail server. That means NOONE is getting mail in or out. It also means our self-hosted web server is down. I reboot the firewall, DSL modem (don’t start on this) and still no go.
I’m now four hours into the outage and I’m at my wits end. I call my ace-in-the-hole consultant OC-3 (who got me this job in the first place) and ask him to come take a look. Wouldn’t you know it? His wife just delivered her second child today so the soonest he can get here is Monday. An hour later he calls back and offers some time troubleshooting over the phone while he’s waiting. We dissect things for a couple of hours and get nowhere fast. Finally he suggests getting a Linksys router just to see if it will work; that way we will know if it’s the firewall, the modem or the line itself.
At 4:30 boss gives me the okay to run to Compusa. I should be back in no time flat……WRONG SUCKA! Nothing in L.A. involving public roads happens fast. As it turns out today of all days Century Blvd , which we are on, is shut down 3-7pm for protests/marches by hotel workers. I discover and alternate route and manage to sneak out the back way. On the way back I discover nearly EVERY road within a half mile radius is closed. I drive around in circles until I find a way back to the building. It took me 90 minutes to go five miles and back.
It’s now 6:30 PM and I’m starving since I worked thru lunch. I grab my food from the fridge and wolf it down. I decide to make a run to the restroom before I settle in to work. The restrooms on the 6th floor are out of service due to renovation on the floor so I have to upstairs to handle my bidness. I get on the elevator, push 8 and immediately zone out. Next thing I know the door opens on floor #5. WTF…the only floor I can get to is the lobby! It dawns on me that it’s now after 7pm. That means the elevators are now secured. That means I have to swipe my parking garage card in the elevator before I can get to any other floor. Oh well fuck me! I can’t get my parking card because my keys are upstairs and I can’t get upstairs without my parking card. Hmmmm. That isn’t a mouse in my pocket and there’s nobody I’m happy to see so what is this bulge in my pants. Suh-weeeeeeeet! Car keys! Luckily because I’ve just driven somewhere I have my car keys in my pocket. In normal instances they’d be in my desk drawer and I would’ve been SOL.
I get to work configuring the Linksys and still no go. I shutdown the server, remove the firewall, configure my workstation to use one of our unused public IP addresses…still no dice. I fiddle around with things until 10:30 PM or so and surrender for the night. I’ll get in an hour early tomorrow and surely I’ll have something working by the time people stroll in at 8 AM.
I make the hour long drive home ready to collapse onto my bare mattress. I had removed all the sheets because the dog spit up on my bed the day before and I hadn’t put clean sheets on. I arrive home to find roommate has put clean sheets on for me…an apparent attempt to butter me up for a ride to get her car in the morning. Shit shit shit! So much for going in early.
The next morning we leave at 8AM to drop her off at the mechanic. On the way boss calls to say he’s arranged for a friend/computer consultant to call in at 8:30 and asks if I’ll be there by then. Sadly I won’t so the opportunity is lost. Fuckeroni!
I get to the office at 9 MA and OC-3 calls to help me some more. While we’re on the phone Mike (the guy who had my job before me) calls to ask something unrelated. He asks how I’m doing…big mistake…I unload on him. As luck would have it he has a client that had an issue very similar to this two weeks ago. It seems the ISP made a change to the network that the Netscreen didn’t like. They ended up buying a new Netscreen then upgrading the firmware to an even newer release.
After conversing with the boss we agree this sounds like our ticket to the promised land so we arrange to buy a new Netscreen and have it sent over by courier by closing time. With any luck I can have it working without having to stay more than a couple hours over. To make the deal even sweeter Netscreen has changed the pricing on new models. The new one we just ordered already comes with an unlimited user license AND it’s cheaper than the $700 CDW.com was charging us just for the license upgrade on our existing Netscreen.
At 3pm the vendor calls to tell us the courier is stuck in traffic and he hasn’t even picked up the hardware yet. He’ll never make it today. Boss arranges to have it delivered to his house instead so I can come in tomorrow and get it running. Time out, biatch! It’s Fall. That means college football. Oh hay-ell no! If you think I’m spending Saturday working when my Georgia Dogs are on national television you have lost yo mind. I can’t let email and web presence stay down til Monday so I resign myself to coming in.
Sitting at my desk sulking I decide to call SBC, our ISP. I hate doing this because I never know which number to call. We have had our account a long time and they have merged, split and changed names more times than I can count. Departments close, numbers change, etc, etc.
I call the first number I have, wade thru the menus and give up and I get asked about Yahoo ID’s. This doesn’t sound like the right area. I call the second number, wade thru more menus whereupon the woman asks me about Covad account numbers. I call the third number, wade thru more menus and finally get a human. Of course he’s in India. I immediately experience Vietnam flashbacks of past sales calls from Dell Sales people from India. We go thru some gyrations and he passes me on to his upper level support.
Ooh, she sounds nice….translation = English….yes, minorities can be bigots too. Sue me. A few minutes later I realize she’s also Indian after this exchange:
Her: I want you to allow remote connections to your modem temporarily.
Me: (ugh)….done
Her: Can you give me the admin password?
Me: (double ugh) R-E-D…
Her: our ID?
Me: huh?
Her: our ID?
Me: what ID? you asked me for the password
Her: yes, what is the password?
Me: ooh (she was repeating r-e-d to me) r-e-d blah blah
* obviously I changed this and disabled remote admin before posting this blog, knuckleheads.
a minute or so of silence whiles she talks under her breath
Her: it should be fixed now
I test it…hmm seems to be working. I hear someone down the hall cry out “I got an email!”. Another cry is followed by others still. Remember, email has been down for 29 hours at this point. Email is flowing and the website is up! My job is saved and college football is on! 15 minutes before closing time too…..sweet! Later I hit Outback Steakhouse for a couple of 22oz Fosters and some buffalo wings.
P.S. India r0cks!
