Tales from IT

I can always tell when Microsoft releases a patch that restarts computers because I get a slew of calls about people's computers not working.  This morning, for instance, I got one from someone who said that.  I asked her if her power was on.  She said she didn't know, so I asked her to push the power button on her tower.  She told me that she kept pushing it and it just went from black to orange but wouldn't turn on.  It was at that moment I knew that she wasn't pushing the power button on her tower like she said she was...instead, she was pushing the power button on her monitor.  Suffice it to say, once she pushed the right power button, it turned right on.

While we're at it, a lot of people complained they weren't getting email.  Upon closer examination, it's because the person they weren't getting email from wasn't sending them email.  So that's 15 complaints resolved in one fell swoop.

We've Got Power Here

Another IT tale of wont and woe...I had someone come in a few weeks ago and tell me that their computer was just a black screen.  I said we'd had a power outage before they got in, so they'd need to make sure they turn their computer and monitor back on.  They said that they'd done that already.  I was in a meeting but told them I'd be there in a few minutes.  Before I was able to get to it, one of my colleagues did.  This person said they'd pushed the power button and demonstrated it to the person who was helping them.  It turns out that the "power button" they had pushed was the button to eject the CD-ROM drive.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Our Marketer!

Here's a gem from our marketer.  We're considering getting a new logo and the head of marketing just said "it doesn't matter what our logo is because we're not a national company."  Yup, he's our marketer!

E-Mail for Dummies

Something quick that isn't worth exposition, but I just had somebody come in and tell me that they can't send an email to somebody else in the office. Well, first she asked how to set up her address book. By this she meant "how can this happen without me doing anything." I said I didn't know where a group address book was that she could pull, but she could always hand enter it, like I have. She then said she couldn't send someone else the email. I told her that she could just create a new email and type in his address. This was a revelation to her.

Yup, these are my coworkers.

Looking for Complaints

I have somebody who I've provided some tech support for today and they said that they haven't been able to print for a month.  A month.  They're all frustrated about it, but it's the first time they've come and talked to the IT department about it.  If you've gone without printing for a month, there's really only two reasons: you want something to be angry about or you don't need it.  The last thing you should do is go without it that long then come and be mad that it's been that long.

It's All About Me

When I say me, I mean the execs at our company. I've been in a meeting that was going well until we got talking about the company's holiday party time.  We typically have it at 5 on a Friday because everybody pisses and moans about giving up a Saturday.  We've been in a discussion for the past 30 minutes about the time for the holiday party.  The concern of course is the needs of the many versus the needs of the few.  By the few, I mean the one guy who has been hammering this thing against sense because the man can't be on time to save his life.  Not only that, but he doesn't like dinner at 6.  Therefore, we should all conform to his desires and wants.  As a result, 5 just isn't good because he can't make it (not that he'll make it at 5:30, which is the new revised plan right now, anyway).  Yeah, he's THAT important.

Crazies in the Office II

I have had the same conversation with the same person at least 7 times in the past month. Allow me to quote it to you verbatim, as I've heard it enough I can remember it word for word.

Employee comes in my office (hereinafter E): I was wondering if you had any laptops for sale?
Sorro: I don't yet, but I have some that we will be refurbishing for sale here shortly.
E: Okay. Could you put me down on the list for one when they're ready?
S: Sure.
E: Are they going to be done in time for Christmas?
S: They should be, yes.
E: Okay, that's good. Because I'm going to get one for my grandson. Just something small.
S: I'll let you know when they're in.

Seriously, is there a glitch in the Matrix or something? I don't see how this whole conversation is somehow nondescript enough to forget this many times - and this is coming from someone who has a history of forgetting conversations (not 6 times, but certainly at least once).

Picture of a Picture

Today we had Bill Clinton as our keynote speaker.  As you'd expect, the room was packed.  As you'd also expect, people were taking pictures of President Clinton.  As you wouldn't expect, they were taking pictures like this - Bill Clinton on a big screen.  My question is why don't they just take a picture of Clinton or other celebrities on their TVs?  Isn't this the same thing?

Just an Observation

If you're not paying enough attention that you don't just kind of trip over someone's computer cord, but you actually pull it out of their computer (this isn't a MacBook MagSafe plug here), then proceed to spend 30 seconds untangling it from your flip flops, you may want to, as a courtesy, give it back to the person you yoinked it from.  When you walk around mumbling what kind of jerk would plug into a wall instead, it makes you look like the jerk.

My Approximated Running Meeting Diary

10:00 AM: We gather. As a refresher, the members of the team are:
Sorro
Forro
Jorge Posada
Alex Rodriguez
Derek Jeter
Robinson Cano
Jason Giambi.
Giambi is out this week in another office. We're actually getting more and more on time, which is a HUGE deal for this group. We have a couple of the latest people in the world on our team.
10:10 AM: Forro foolishly walked into a trap. We've got a player in the minors (let's call him Phil Hughes) who Jeter is really pushing to bring up to the big leagues. Forro and I think that he's good, but we've got to hold on on it and let him earn his way up rather than just saying "there you go." Posada, in all his infinite yes-mannity, is going along with whatever Jeter says because Jeter said it. "Well, you're the team captain, so I'm going to plant my lips firmly on your rear end and it will take the Jaws of Life to remove them." Meanwhile, Cano is having a conversation on his phone. Because, you know, it's not like he should be actively engaged in our meeting or anything.
10:20 AM: Cano decides that his phone call is more important than everything else that we need to discuss in our meeting and he does this by putting the employee he was talking with on speakerphone and proceeding to hash out the issue of "what do we do, we have competitors!" with the help of the entire management team. It's at precisely this point I gave up on trying to stear the meeting in any sort of productive direction and instead I did some work and blogged.
11:15 AM: A-Rod decides to get our lawyer on the phone to hash out some more of this having competitors issue. Seriously, you'd think we were a monopoly or something. At any rate, he gets her on the phone and proceeds to give her the long and the short of the conversation (his words), which meant, of course, the long of the conversation along with some commentary, heresay, and conjecture.
11:30 AM: After a 15 minute (billable) conversation, we hang up with the lawyer, Cano calls back the hibbity-dibbity employee, and I finalize a trade in my fantasy football league. I think that the most productive thing that's happened so far in this meeting is indeed the finalization of that trade.
12:20 PM: We finally finish with all of this ridiculous time wastage and get back to business. At this point, we get back to the agenda and get back to Posada pretending that he's actually a valuable member of the team. He shows this value by saying that he will "help people with this" and/or regurgitating things that we talked about months ago and presenting them as fresh ideas that he somehow came up with.
12:40 PM: Posada pulls a rabbit out of his hat! He is talking about how some of his people are auditing things that my people should be auditing in a ridiculous attempt to get a leg up on me. I counter with the fact that we had a meeting 2 months ago wherein I talked specifically about that issue and he and his people said straight up that they had to audit that. They get first crack at the documents so I said that they could and we all told my people not to re-audit what his people were auditing. His parting line after I told him this? "Well, it would be good to go over that again with your people." What I wish I could have said? "How about you shut your big yapper!"
1:10 PM: We get out, and only about an hour late. Even though we've had longer meetings, time-wise, I can't think of any single meeting that has been as annoying as this one was. I think the reason is because we actually had good meetings there for a while.

Off The Rails

I'm sitting here in our management meeting and you may notice that I haven't done a running meeting diary for a while.  The main reason for that is because I've been running them and also because they have gotten better.  At any rate, today it's spiraled completely out of control and there wasn't one thing I could do about it.  I should have known that it was too good to last forever.  Right now I'm anticipating a 5 pm end time based on the tangents/unnecessary addition of random people into the mix for absolutely no reason at all.

What Part of NO Don't You Understand?

There is an office furniture salesman (we'll call him Lem) who has come around my office probably 15 times over the past two years. Every time, he's asked for me. Because of the vagaries of the fact that I have a job that keeps me pretty busy, I've never been able to meet with him. Every time that he's come, I've asked our secretary to tell him to give me a call or send me an email and I would be happy to set up an appointment to meet with him. He never has done that. Instead, like some sort of crazy person, he insists on stopping by again and again and again.
It finally got to the tipping point with Lem this past week. He stopped by Monday and I gave him the same spiel that I have every other time...I'm busy, call and I'll be happy to get an appointment with you (through the secretary, of course). So he finally did call, but I didn't listen to his message until he had already stopped by the day after he called. Then, he stopped by again that afternoon. Never have we talked or have I set up a time to talk with him. I'd still set something up with him, but it would be to ask him the following questions:
1. Do you really think that somehow this time is going to be different when the prior 15 times haven't been?
2. Do you think I'm actually going to buy anything from you when you don't care to listen to me when I tell you call for an appointment? It's not like you could have forgotten that, what with me telling you it over and over and over again. Write it on the business card that you picked up - "call for appointment." It's not hard to make a good first impression, but you've failed miserably before I've even met you.
3. What salesman school did you go to where they told you to keep stopping by and ignoring the customer's wishes?
4. Do you like wasting your time going someplace without that appointment when you could take a few minutes to call and then go over at the appointed time? I think that if you added up all the wasted time from stopping by and getting rejected over the past 2 years you could probably have seen a baseball game by now. It's certainly the cheaper option, what with gas prices being what they are.
5. Are you indeed mental, or do you just seem that way?

Another Awesome IT Tale

It's stories like this that turn IT people into Nick Burns, I swear.  So I'm walking past her desk and an employee asks me "What's my e-mail address?"  She asks me this even though she's been using e-mail for years with us and should know her own e-mail address better than I.  I told her and she promptly asked me again.  I repeated the answer, spelling it out for her.  She then asked me if she needed capital letters or not.  I said that it didn't matter, either way would get it to the right place.  I found out later that she asked one of my support people to help her with her e-mail address a scant 5 minutes later.  Am I being picky, or is that the height of idiocy?

Worthless Holiday

One of the things that makes absolutely no sense to me is why I am off today.  It's Pioneer Day, a strange local holiday that celebrates Brigham Young marking a stake in the desert and starting the state of Utah.  It's not that I'm opposed to days off, but when we don't have MLK day or President's Day off, why couldn't we move this day off to February?  We have a big stretch of work without any holidays - from Jan 2 through Memorial Day, and then suddenly we have a holiday at the end of May, beginning of July, end of July, and beginning of September.  A little more separation would be much appreciated.

Mandalay Bay Conventions

I'm here at the Mandalay Bay attending a conference.  I think the carpet here is a cut above most convention centers, probably because it's attached to a casino.  It does look pretty much the same as everywhere else though. 
In non-carpet related news, we got our room at THEhotel for the same price as everyone else who got theirs at Mandalay Bay.  What's the difference?  THEhotel is a nicer, casino-free sub-hotel that is pretty sweet.  The upshot is that it's a 15 minute walk to my sessions though.

Troy's Tales from IT

Here's a post from Troy, one of my IT people who had an experience with a rather idiotic co-worker, and I will attest to that (the idiocy, that is):

I am simply amazed at how stupid some people can be. I was approached by a co-worker; we’ll call him Junior, concerning an IT issue that we were having at work. We had a server go down and people were, for the most part, unable to do any work. Junior came up and asked me what was going on with one of our major programs, which was down due to the server issue. I informed him that it would be down for the remainder of the day.  His response?  “It can’t be!” Well yeah, it is, deal with it. I told him that I was sorry and that we couldn’t really do much to get it running today because it was a fairly major problem that we were dealing with. Junior then wanted to know what the problem was - like he would understand anything that was said about the issue. So I told him what the issue was and he gave me that “deer in the headlights” stare. He asked when it would be fixed and I told him that I wasn’t sure on the exact date and time, but that it wouldn’t be today. Period. He then asked if we were fixing it. No, we figured that we would just let it have problems and see if maybe it just needed the 3-day weekend to fix itself. Are you kidding me?! I told him that it was being fixed. A few minutes later he approached our head IT guy, Craig, who is fixing the issue. Junior walks up and asks Craig “What’s going on with this program?” Wait a second! Didn’t I just tell you that? So he is told the same thing by Craig that I just told him and as Junior leaves Craig’s office he comments “I’m glad that you know what you’re doing.” Yeah, thanks, I hate you too.

Tales of Idiocy

It seems like every time that our meetings get good, A-Rod comes around to muck things up.  First of all, after not showing up for our meetings for the past month, he comes in here at 9:55 and says "Let's get started!" as though he's Mr. Timely.  We've been getting along without you better than fine, thank you very much.  I think part of the reason why he's so "I'm in charge" today is because we have 3 people from the next level down with us today, which means that he must seem like he does stuff.  So he gets in here and wants to look all important, and we've spent an hour discussing something that should have taken 20 minutes in part because he wants to "lead the discussion" and also because we have to explain how the business works to him as well. 
While I'm sitting in this interminable meeting (which had been getting much better since Forro and I took them over), I'm going to tell you another tale.  He held a meeting yesterday on one of his other ventures that I'm helping with mainly because I want to get him out of here.  So I've given him some ideas and gotten the things taken care of that he asked me to, but nothing much has come of it, primarily because he's an idiot.  At any rate, he brought in a guy to tell him what to do and the guy told him the same things Forro and I had - retail's for suckers, downloads, etc, etc.  He didn't listen when we told him that, but when this guy did he was all ears.  Heaven forbid he listens and gets some good ideas from us!

A-Rod Strikes Back

I had this conversation on Wednesday with the fabled A-Rod, the Destroyer (of companies).

A-Rod: Yeah, can I get my Quickbooks running again? It says it needs administrator or something like that and can I get that done if I bring it in?

Me: Yeah, we can get that done.

A: Do you need to do it, or can Nick and Jayne do it?

M: They both can, but I don't think Nick will be in tomorrow, so you should probably go to Jayne.

A: Okay, and you're not going to be there?

M: No, I'm going out of town for a week.

A: Okay, so is Jayne certified to do this?

I think: No, I just told you that she could because I wanted to confuse you. She's actually not certified to do anything.

I say: Yes.

Seriously, who's the idiot who feels the need to say that? I ought to beat him with a tack hammer.

Network Issues

Remind me to tell my SysAdmin to never change our network name again. This has been a beast of a nightmare. He was in all weekend trying to get it squared away and I've spent all day fixing user issues that will invariably pop up as a result. On the plus side, we're not running our domain (which really is the most important thing we can run on the server side) on a regular old desktop PC anymore. That's always a nice benefit.

My Marketing Director is a Moron

Let me know if you think that this is a problem. I know more about our marketing numbers than our head marketing guy. This isn't financials or anything like that, its basics like prospects, number of clients, and so forth. I think he's an idiot, am I right?