Thoughts from the abyss

This is a post to clear up my last post about “help desk annoyances.” In case I offended anyone at my place of employment, that was not my intentions nor my true feelings on people in general that I assist and work with. Rants are just that, rants. They allow you to get things off your chest, and for me writing is my own therapy with helps decrease stress from life and work. Rants are just that, an avenue to blow off steam and usually nothing more to some. Any geek should understand that’s what a rant is all about. When you have a bad day or something really gets under your skin, then sometimes you just rant a bit and life goes on as it normally would. They don’t always reflect your true feelings on a situation as a whole.

Anyways, to anyone that took offense to my little rant about having a bad day and getting tired of waiting on others, then you need to not bother being offended, because it wasn’t worth getting offended about to being with. Just a rant than any IT person (manager or employee alike) has been subjected to at some time or another…nothing more and nothing less.

Do you know what really annoys me about work, employers, bosses, users, and managers? It annoys me when they all want something done, they want it done now or better yet yesterday. When a manager or normal user contacts the help desk, they expect results ASAP. They don’t want to wait around, they don’t want an explanation most of the time, they don’t want you to do it tomorrow, they want it done right now so they can continue on with their business, or at least done in a timely fashion.

Since this is the primary job of a help desk type, I understand that’s my job and that’s not the frustrating part. The annoyance and frustration comes from when I need something, or I have to have a question answered that I can’t or don’t have authority to do. Instead of the prompt response back from an e-mail, phone message, IM, or however many other ways of correspondence between office persons, when the help desk (that’d be me) needs something, it takes days, weeks, and sometimes even months to even receive an answer back.

What’s even more frustrating is when the initial request was asked from a normal user, so the long drawn out delay makes myself look bad, or makes it appear to the user that I am ignoring their requests for assistance. It just pisses me off to know that my services are expected to be timely and prompt, but when I need to ask someone for their services to complete my portion of my job, it’s completely ok and normal for others to do it at their leisure. How many days, weeks or months does it take to reply to an e-mail message?

Now, I fully understand that this is the right of any and all bosses to exercise their “power” above the normal employee, but it’s rude to not correspond back when something is asked of you. Perhaps I should close my help desk for a week at a time, and only respond when I want something. I wonder how my employer and bosses would like that…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very thankful and lucky to have a good job. But damnit! This is just one of those things that have nothing to do with that, and all about trying to show a little respect to those that serve you day in and day out. I vote for national IT appreciation day, where we reserve the right to ignore everyone for a day.

</rant>

I got into a bit of a pissing contest today with someone on a list, which I’m not going to mention. I’m not mad, and so therefore I’m not getting too personal about this argument. I’ll start from the beginning. I’m going to use two mailing lists, A and B as my examples. I’m a member of mailing list A and for over a year now since I’ve been a member, they munge the message to include a Reply-To header. This means they wipe the header information so you can’t reply to only the author privately. Obviously for them, they think it’s better to send all traffic through the list. At any rate, you never have to worry about sending duplicate messages, or sending accidentally messages to a private user…which obviously some people despise for some reason. Now, I’m very used to just clicking either Reply or Reply-To on Thunderbird and it automatically goes to the list.

Mailing list B, however, doesn’t work this way. They leave the headers intact so when you click Reply, you get the original author, and when you click Reply-To, you get the original author, any Cc:’s that have been added along the way, and the mailing list’s address. Well, what happens when you’re used to mailing on list A but you’re replying to list B’s questions….

Obviously, sometimes you forget to yank out all the To: and Cc:’s leaving only the list’s address before you click send. This made this person a bit pissy. Now, after asking my more knowledgeable boss, he passed me on this link: Reply-To Munging. Now, the point I was getting to with this entire thing. If you read through the document I pointed you to, you’ll notice at the bottom, and I quote “On the whole, it has worked out quite well. Yes, on occasion somebody mistakenly responds directly to the author of a message when they wanted to reply to the group.”

That’s what I accidentally did today and the person seemed to get all bent out of shape. But on e-mails to follow, I remembered and changed things. While I understand the benefits of leaving the headers alone, especially after reading the link, I can see it both ways as well. Secondly, if the list is going to leave the headers alone then they must show some sort of tolerance for people who mistakenly (or people who never even look) don’t check over where the mail is getting sent. Now, I completely understand that many geeks are going to say “well, if they aren’t checking to see where the mail is going, what the hell are they doing on the list.” Ummm…it’s a help list.

So this brings me to my conclusion, if you don’t add a Reply-To on the e-mails, then expect some private messages to accidentally get sent to you from a mailing list. Next, exhibit some type of patience or tolerance to people if you’re not going to make it easier for a normal user to reply to a help list. Lastly, don’t act like your time is more important than their time when you do receive a personal message. If it happens more than once, kindly explain how it works, hit the delete button and shut up. If you see the user has fixed it on subsequent e-mails, then why bother wasting time saying anything at all. Obviously, they were smart enough to figure it out all by their lonesome. Don’t act like you’re better than them and belittle them with typing in capital letters.

So I’m still annoyed from something the other day. I had to work a little late a few evenings ago to update the BIOS and diagnostics firmware in a couple of IBM xSeries 235’s. Why do corporations still insist of using tiny ass floppies to put images on?!?! I don’t get it. I mean hardly any computer or server ships these days with a floppy drive even in them, so why can’t they put the firmware images onto a CD. Or better yet, just upload the images onto their websites and offer them in the form of ISO images….whoa, yeah I know that’s a new one. So anyways, I’ve found one thing I really dislike about IBM now, and it’s not just them that do this.

Instead of offering you a pack of images for your server or PC line on an ISO image to burn to CD, you have to dick around with multiple floppy disks. Then of course it’s inevitable that you get a bad floppy disk or two and you have to make another one. Remember though, since the flash process is dependent on more than one disk, your server/PC is sitting there in limbo on a flash script, while you scurry back to your machine to make another damn floppy disk. AHHHH! I wonder what happens when you’ve only loaded disk 1 of 2 and the power goes out, because you know not everyone has battery backups (I do of course), but I’m just trying to make a point here.

Yeah, I know it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make a bootable image off a floppy and onto a CD from Linux, but damnit I just shouldn’t have to! Especially when my manager pays IBM metric-shitloads of money for contracts a year. They should go out of their way to provide an easy firmware update process. And before anyone says, well you can flash firmware through Windoze…I trust little floppy disks much more than I do Microsoft to flash my BIOS and firmware for me…please. This is the year 2006 you know. Ok, I’m done…</Rant>

I live in the wonderful state of Pennsylvania where fireworks are illegal. About the only thing that is legal in this stupid state are snakes (you know those things you set on fire and they grow), and those little snapper things you throw on the ground. Bottle rockets, nope illegal. M-80’s, nope illegal. Roman candles, nope illegal. Everything you could have fun with is completely illegal.

I’m sitting outside this evening on my patio. There’s nice fireworks going boom and pretty colors to my left, directly in front of me, and to the right of me. Now, technically everything that I’m seeing and hearing is “illegal” to have in anyones possession. Why? I don’t know. I think it’s pointless. Obviously no one pays attention to the law of illegal fireworks. They buy them out of state, bring them in, and set them off like most every normal person does for July 4th. So, what’s the point of them being illegal to begin with. It doesn’t stop people from obtaining them. It doesn’t stop people from setting them off.

It should be like anything else. Require a mandatory minimum age to purchase and tax them. People are going to get their hands on them anyways, why not allow people of age to have some fun. At the same time, the state can generate a few bucks off taxes to spend friviously like it would normally do anyways. Alcohol isn’t illegal and it causes way more problems than fireworks would once day out of the year. Alcohol is a problem everyday of the year, but I don’t see them making it illegal. My state controls liqour and beer sales. Hmmm, I wonder why this is…because the state gets a huge cut of all the sales. Why not do the same with fireworks?!

They are illegal because apparently they say they are protecting us and kids. Whatever. Kids get their hands on just about anything. Cigarettes seem to land in kids’ hands all the time. Guess what, anything and everything will fall in someone elses hands no matter what you do to prevent it. It’s just a simple fact of life. Politicians and lawyers are the demise of so many things in life.