IT takes a level of abuse unseen very nearly anywhere else.
If people drove their cars straight into trees, and then abused their mechanics for a) not being able to fix it and b) not having found some way to prevent it in the first place, mechanics would have the same level of contempt as well.
If people plugged 50 appliances into the same circuit, and then fired their electrician because "well, you never told me not to", electricians would also have their corners of the internet on which to bitch.
If one hundred people a day called the police saying "I was driving my car, and this sign popped up saying 'LANE ENDS, THROUGH TRAFFIC MERGE LEFT', what do I do?" and expect a polite and calm answer, "Oh, sir, that means the lane is ending, go ahead and merge into the lane one to your left... what? You hit someone? Well, yes, I told you to merge, but I expected you to look first. No, I didn't tell you to, but when you learned to change lanes in driving school, I... But... Yes, you can talk to my supervisor. Please hold... I'm sorry, sir; I understand that you don't want to hold, but my supervisor is on another call...", the hospitals would be full of incidents of police brutality.
IT has to deal with users with the apparent common sense of a concussed lemming and the reading comprehension of a pygmy shrew. And they like being that way! People are proud of their computer ignorance. I've had the owner of a small company - as I'm saving his livelihood by restoring the backups that I first had to spend two weeks talking him into buying - sneer at me and call me a "geek". I had another client - a salesman - note that he used to beat up people like me in high school, but he'd "found a use for us after all."
Done this for a couple years. Looking desperately to get out. I know I'm reiterating what's been said here, but I feel the need to put my own spin on it. Some random thoughts:
Most small business owners are petty tyrants who are too used to having power in their own little worlds. The only reasons they can imagine that their word is not instantly done are a) stupidity, b) laziness and/or c) maliciousness. They are HELL to deal with.
On any given account: start small and careful. You don't want your first project for someone to be $8000 worth of work which they then refuse to pay until you come back and fix one printer attached to a machine that you didn't even see, let alone work on, which broke at the same time. (True story.)
For any bid, get scope of work in writing and signed off on. Make sure anything else is noted as time and materials. Recommend three year hardware warranties, also in writing.
Accept that any small business customer will be underdocumented, over picky, and will have at least one nasty cobbled-together trap waiting in their environment from a previous tech who made it look good and then got the hell out.
Also accept that you'll never convince them to pay you to get their environment running correctly and supportably.
Also also accept that you will get blamed for things out of your control.
God help you if you have to deal with a company that also maintains a connection to a mothership company. Even if whatever is wrong is at the parent site, and they already know about it, and you can do absolutely nothing from where you are, you will still get blamed.
Home users are hell too. They never keep backups. They don't keep original disks and then yell at you when you can't just install your copy.
The machine is always crawling with spyware - they install every program they can find, they click on every ad, and little 13-year-old Johnny or Jenny surfs porn at midnight while the 'rents are asleep. (And watch out if one of the kids thinks they're a leet hacker and downloads password crackers or something like that. Hoo boy.)
You clean the spyware, it comes back next week, they demand you come back for free. [I've had some success with the car wash analogy - but only some.] And yes - most of the time for an onsite is spent sitting waiting for a scan to finish. Yes, you can pull it back to your workshop, but it's still only profitable if you have built the volume to be doing three or four of those at once.
Speaking of your workshop. Especially if you're working from home, separate everything. Get a separate IP address and a whole different network for work stuff - you don't want something nasty jumping the wall into your personal stuff. Get an older computer that you can ghost-and-reimage strictly for Google searches and working on customer hard drives. When you can afford it, get a laptop just for onsites. Get separate email address. Get a separate cell phone. Occasionally turn it off. Get a four-port KVM and a good CRT. Get a NAS. To get utilities onto customer computers, find a USB key with a write protect switch or burn CDs. Keep an eye out for the latest and greatest utilities. Back up every last thing on any hard drive you're reformatting.
Get a version of UltraVNC SC done. It will save your ass. Hell, you could even use it to remotely run spyware scans, if you're feeling lucky.
Whenever you buy parts for someone, get a deposit up front.
Document, document, document. Keep a call log, keep a job log, write down any password that crosses your space. Any time you fix something, write down the symptoms, what the root cause was, and steps to fix. A week later you'll remember without that, but six months later you might not.
God help you if you have to hire help, even so much as an accountant, a secretary, or a courier. If it's another tech, all bets are off - very few people can do the job for what you can afford to pay them. Most of the rest surf along on chutzpah and shoddy spit-and-baling-wire work. Oh
In an interview in Starlog in 1980, Mark Hamill recounts a background story which he had been told:
"I remember very early on asking who my parents were and being told that my father and Obi Wan met Vader on the edge of a volcano and they had a duel. My father and Darth Vader fell into the crater and my father was instantly killed. Vader crawled out horribly scarred, and at that point the Emperor landed and Obi Wan ran into the forest, never to be seen again."
And how long before this gets worked around by bunches of Microsoft drones who suddenly somehow know about it?
I got it! This was a plant by management at Microsoft to see how many of their staff come up to them saying that they read "somewhere" about a WGA hole!
> if a tech can't fix the machine without reinstalling the OS [...] then the problem is with that tech's skill level
okay, genius, here's a scenario from you from last week at my work.
customer computer comes in, bluescreens on boot.
"The registry cannot load the hive (file):/SystemRoot/System32/Config/SOFTWARE or its log or alternate. It is corrupt, absent, or not writable."
bluescreens on boot to safe mode.
boots fine to knoppix, all devices work, hard drive is readable.
chunks of the registry all over C:\found.000
repair install failed.
what would you do?
i could have run manufacturer's drive scan on it, made sure the hard drive was good, pulled off the data via knoppix and ftp, and reformat/reinstalled.
i could have pulled a new hard drive from inventory and rebuilt on that.
(either way, it cost her more than buying a new computer the INSTANT the old one broke and just having me do data transfer and reconfigure.)
well, obviously, the 9-to-5er is not effective in his current job, so we'll move him into another position, perhaps a minor supervisory position where he can use his knowledge to oversee a small group of people doing what he used to do. if he does well there, he can always move it up...
meanwhile, that guy who works his ass off? we love him. he'll never lose that job. 'course, that also means he'll never be promoted either, and he'll be working deep into the night long after his health or his life really allow it...
way back when, one of the kids in the neighborhood, after seeing nintendo for the first time, decided she just had to go and ask her parents to buy her this wonderful new toy.
so she runs home and tells mommy and daddy she just has to have duck hunt.
except, in her excitement, she slightly mispronounced it.
as a parent, what do you say when your little girl runs in and says, "buy me duck cunt!"?
Slashdot Mirror
IT takes a level of abuse unseen very nearly anywhere else.
If people drove their cars straight into trees, and then abused their mechanics for a) not being able to fix it and b) not having found some way to prevent it in the first place, mechanics would have the same level of contempt as well.
If people plugged 50 appliances into the same circuit, and then fired their electrician because "well, you never told me not to", electricians would also have their corners of the internet on which to bitch.
If one hundred people a day called the police saying "I was driving my car, and this sign popped up saying 'LANE ENDS, THROUGH TRAFFIC MERGE LEFT', what do I do?" and expect a polite and calm answer, "Oh, sir, that means the lane is ending, go ahead and merge into the lane one to your left... what? You hit someone? Well, yes, I told you to merge, but I expected you to look first. No, I didn't tell you to, but when you learned to change lanes in driving school, I... But... Yes, you can talk to my supervisor. Please hold... I'm sorry, sir; I understand that you don't want to hold, but my supervisor is on another call...", the hospitals would be full of incidents of police brutality.
IT has to deal with users with the apparent common sense of a concussed lemming and the reading comprehension of a pygmy shrew. And they like being that way! People are proud of their computer ignorance. I've had the owner of a small company - as I'm saving his livelihood by restoring the backups that I first had to spend two weeks talking him into buying - sneer at me and call me a "geek". I had another client - a salesman - note that he used to beat up people like me in high school, but he'd "found a use for us after all."
I think I need to start a fight club...
i've actually detonated a psu doing that. as in loud bang and bright flash of light.
> The other instance the Game Master simply moved my avatar without any interaction...
Sounds like you met [GM]Dave. Did you then get fed to a dragon?
Argh. I *meant* to type:
Professor Palindrome said, "Diasemord nilap rosseforp?"
Professor Palindrome said, "Dias emord ni lap rosseforp?"
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white.
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Screenshots, anyone?
Done this for a couple years. Looking desperately to get out. I know I'm reiterating what's been said here, but I feel the need to put my own spin on it. Some random thoughts:
Most small business owners are petty tyrants who are too used to having power in their own little worlds. The only reasons they can imagine that their word is not instantly done are a) stupidity, b) laziness and/or c) maliciousness. They are HELL to deal with.
On any given account: start small and careful. You don't want your first project for someone to be $8000 worth of work which they then refuse to pay until you come back and fix one printer attached to a machine that you didn't even see, let alone work on, which broke at the same time. (True story.)
For any bid, get scope of work in writing and signed off on. Make sure anything else is noted as time and materials. Recommend three year hardware warranties, also in writing.
Accept that any small business customer will be underdocumented, over picky, and will have at least one nasty cobbled-together trap waiting in their environment from a previous tech who made it look good and then got the hell out.
Also accept that you'll never convince them to pay you to get their environment running correctly and supportably.
Also also accept that you will get blamed for things out of your control.
God help you if you have to deal with a company that also maintains a connection to a mothership company. Even if whatever is wrong is at the parent site, and they already know about it, and you can do absolutely nothing from where you are, you will still get blamed.
Home users are hell too. They never keep backups. They don't keep original disks and then yell at you when you can't just install your copy.
The machine is always crawling with spyware - they install every program they can find, they click on every ad, and little 13-year-old Johnny or Jenny surfs porn at midnight while the 'rents are asleep. (And watch out if one of the kids thinks they're a leet hacker and downloads password crackers or something like that. Hoo boy.)
You clean the spyware, it comes back next week, they demand you come back for free. [I've had some success with the car wash analogy - but only some.] And yes - most of the time for an onsite is spent sitting waiting for a scan to finish. Yes, you can pull it back to your workshop, but it's still only profitable if you have built the volume to be doing three or four of those at once.
Speaking of your workshop. Especially if you're working from home, separate everything. Get a separate IP address and a whole different network for work stuff - you don't want something nasty jumping the wall into your personal stuff. Get an older computer that you can ghost-and-reimage strictly for Google searches and working on customer hard drives. When you can afford it, get a laptop just for onsites. Get separate email address. Get a separate cell phone. Occasionally turn it off. Get a four-port KVM and a good CRT. Get a NAS. To get utilities onto customer computers, find a USB key with a write protect switch or burn CDs. Keep an eye out for the latest and greatest utilities. Back up every last thing on any hard drive you're reformatting.
Get a version of UltraVNC SC done. It will save your ass. Hell, you could even use it to remotely run spyware scans, if you're feeling lucky.
Whenever you buy parts for someone, get a deposit up front.
Document, document, document. Keep a call log, keep a job log, write down any password that crosses your space. Any time you fix something, write down the symptoms, what the root cause was, and steps to fix. A week later you'll remember without that, but six months later you might not.
God help you if you have to hire help, even so much as an accountant, a secretary, or a courier. If it's another tech, all bets are off - very few people can do the job for what you can afford to pay them. Most of the rest surf along on chutzpah and shoddy spit-and-baling-wire work. Oh
You may be thinking of this:
In an interview in Starlog in 1980, Mark Hamill recounts a background story which he had been told:
"I remember very early on asking who my parents were and being told that my father and Obi Wan met Vader on the edge of a volcano and they had a duel. My father and Darth Vader fell into the crater and my father was instantly killed. Vader crawled out horribly scarred, and at that point the Emperor landed and Obi Wan ran into the forest, never to be seen again."
And how long before this gets worked around by bunches of Microsoft drones who suddenly somehow know about it?
I got it! This was a plant by management at Microsoft to see how many of their staff come up to them saying that they read "somewhere" about a WGA hole!
many very educated men just screwed up nine planets...
> Karma BROKEN since March 2006. I show excellent karma but get no karma bonus. Ah well.
yes you do:
Starting Score: 1 point
Karma-Bonus Modifier +1 (Edit)
Total Score: 2
did you adjust karma bonus down to +0 in your display settings?
> if a tech can't fix the machine without reinstalling the OS [...] then the problem is with that tech's skill level
okay, genius, here's a scenario from you from last week at my work.
customer computer comes in, bluescreens on boot.
"The registry cannot load the hive (file):
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable."
bluescreens on boot to safe mode.
boots fine to knoppix, all devices work, hard drive is readable.
chunks of the registry all over C:\found.000
repair install failed.
what would you do?
i could have run manufacturer's drive scan on it, made sure the hard drive was good, pulled off the data via knoppix and ftp, and reformat/reinstalled.
i could have pulled a new hard drive from inventory and rebuilt on that.
(either way, it cost her more than buying a new computer the INSTANT the old one broke and just having me do data transfer and reconfigure.)
do you have a third option for me?
well, obviously, the 9-to-5er is not effective in his current job, so we'll move him into another position, perhaps a minor supervisory position where he can use his knowledge to oversee a small group of people doing what he used to do. if he does well there, he can always move it up...
meanwhile, that guy who works his ass off? we love him. he'll never lose that job. 'course, that also means he'll never be promoted either, and he'll be working deep into the night long after his health or his life really allow it...
The problem there is forgetting which song and which phrase in which song.
"... okay, now for the root password, did i use the chorus from broken, the bridge from coin-operated boy, or the intro from engel?"
*pawwave*
Bah.
Is it server-side or client-side? Is it push or pull?
If it affects the install on the clients, but needs to get access to them, I wave my paw and say "bah."
If, on the other hand, it can attack the server...
Well, then again, everything should be behind a firewall anyway, with only needed ports forwarded.
I mean that's just common sense...
ahhh, memories.
way back when, one of the kids in the neighborhood, after seeing nintendo for the first time, decided she just had to go and ask her parents to buy her this wonderful new toy.
so she runs home and tells mommy and daddy she just has to have duck hunt.
except, in her excitement, she slightly mispronounced it.
as a parent, what do you say when your little girl runs in and says, "buy me duck cunt!"?
The only thing automatic in Nethack is death.
Death stalking you with nasty pointy teeth.
Or, in some cases, a gnome with a wand of death.
DYWYPI?
don't forget bouncing off the roof of "homer"'s car and sticking the landing...
> I wonder what would happen if the worm made it past the last restore point, would it restore the worm as well?
it does. good thinking. now if only you worked at micros~1 and had pointed that out back when...
> I had a rootkit last month. Nothing could get rid of it but a full fdisk/mbr where I lost everything.
did you think of obtaining a second computer, mounting that disk as a secondary and copying the data off?
> You need far stronger static magnetic fields to damage a drive without opening it than you can buy.
really?
apparently you don't need to type unc paths very often.
net use P: \\server\home\users\site\employee_name takes plenty of \s
if we're going to quote the boss on this one:
we went down to the river
but i know the river is dry...
except for river, read "well".