In which this shit really happens.
“But it worked yesterday!”
The fact that something works today does not guarantee it will work tomorrow.
Have you ever had an appliance that quit working? Computers are like that. One day it works, the next day it blows up. Shit happens.
“But everything else works fine.”
This is exactly like telling your mechanic that you can’t have a bad water pump because your electric windows still work.
In which I bitch about my good fortune!
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] spent two years unemployed. It was — after blocking out the stress and fear of being only moderately employable during a very deep recession — freakin’ wonderful.
I didn’t have to get up five mornings a week and get my ass to work. I could avoid leaving the house for days if the weather was bad. There was no rigid schedule. I could eat whenever I wanted, sleep whenever I wanted, stay up all night if I wanted, sleep all day if I wanted (sleeping is so cool it gets mentioned twice), go for a coffee whenever I wanted. I was nearly always caught up on my household duties because I could do them whenever.
In which each regulation begets a new one, aimed at shoring up its own failures.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his site is going dark on the 18th in protest of SOPA and PIPA. Yes, people should be paid for their work. Yes, pirates are jerks. No, I’m not going to give up my civil liberties in pursuit of what is essentially a personal problem for an industry I don’t really spend that much time worrying about.
In which it’s not jargon if that’s what it’s called.
Circular explanations are circular:
Customer: Connection slower than usual
Me: What speed are you connecting at?
Customer: I don’t know….SLOW
Me: Hold your mouse over the dialer icon in the system tray. It will show you what speed you’re currently connected at.
Customer: What is the dialer icon?
Me: It’s the icon that represents your dialup connection.
In which there’s a sendlog.
When mail is transferred from server to server across the net, this is what it looks like when the servers talk to each other. More or less.
LOG: MAIN
< = root@server.bmi.net U=root P=local S=381
[root@server ~]#delivering 1Raxum-0002J0-Cc
Connecting to blahmail.goblinbox.com [66.240.255.128]:25 ... connected
SMTP<< 220 fc8255128.aspadmin.net ESMTP
SMTP>> EHLO server.bmi.net
SMTP< < 250-fc8255128.aspadmin.net
250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-STARTTLS
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
SMTP>> STARTTLS
SMTP< < 220 ready for tls
SMTP>> EHLO server.bmi.net
SMTP< < 250-fc8255128.aspadmin.net
250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
SMTP>> MAIL FROM:
SMTP>> RCPT TO:
SMTP>> DATA
SMTP< < 250 ok
SMTP<< 250 ok
SMTP<< 354 go ahead
SMTP>> writing message and terminating "."
SMTP< < 250 ok 1323903521 qp 8064
SMTP>> QUIT
LOG: MAIN
=> sender@goblinbox.com R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp H=blahmail.goblinbox.com [66.240.255.128] X=TLSv1:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:256
LOG: MAIN
Completed
In which you experience part of my day.
Phone rings.
I answer, “Technical support. May I help you?”
A person immediately starts a harangue. She does not identify herself. She opens with, “Your message is wrong, because I live in Dayton and my Internet is down!” and ends with “There’s nothin’ comin’ on here at all!” and I’m pretty sure I can hear her gesturing at her monitor over the phone.
While she’s speaking I grab her number from the HUD, search my database for her account, discover her account type, verify the account isn’t suspended for non-pay, and quickly check the Radius logs and run the MNPP tool. I now know two things: her DSL is up and she doesn’t know how to communicate.
At all. Because she’s been talking the entire time and still hasn’t identified herself or made any sense. I’m not even clear on what it is that isn’t working.
“—and I know something’s wrong ’cause it only has two bars!” she finishes up, triumphantly.
“You have DSL,” I say, knowing that she’ll think it’s a non-sequiteur. (I can see from her account that she doesn’t have a wireless router, so her bars comment is completely irrelevant.)
“And it’s just not doin’ nothin’,” she says, “it won’t ever load your web page.” Ah-hah! Bingo. By this comment, I am able to infer that she’s running Internet Explorer 8 and that bmi.net is her homepage. I am able to do this because I’m a goddamned genius, and because it’s my job to guess what the lusers are talking about and to solve problems with hardly any clues whatsoever.
I am Sherlock fucking Holmes, people!
In which I am baffled by many of the people I speak with.
As you may be aware, I’m back in tech support. If you read my tweets you may occasionally get the idea that I don’t like it, but I do!
I’ve been doing it off and on for a dozen years, and I actually do enjoy solving people’s connectivity problems. I enjoy the process of figuring out what customers are trying to say, and helping them get their problems fixed. I love the Internet, and I love helping people get online.
However.
The majority of the people I talk to absolutely baffle me. I have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about (they literally expect me to understand phrases like, “it won’t do that thing it used to,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean in English), and I have no idea why individuals who can’t do even the most basic computing tasks–like copy and paste, shut their machines down properly, or even read–want to get online in the first place.
In which I get to play with tools.
My awesome job not only came complete with a window office, a title, and a space heater, it also came with TOOLS.
I have custody of the freakin’ tool bag. It lives in my office. I do not have to ask to borrow a Phillips head. This makes me happy. Here are many of its components unceremoniously dumped on the floor:
In which there’s a picture.
This is where I work now. Dual monitors!
In which I rejoin the workforce!
Last night I took myself out for dinner and drank a lot of wine (because that’s what you do when you’re damn near broke and the check you’ve been expecting for weeks still hasn’t shown up, right? RIGHT?), which means I was still in bed at 10:30 this morning when G’ma called up the stairs, “Shelly! There’s a man from BMI here to see you!”
A what from what? Did she say BMI? “Um, okay. I’m not dressed! Tell him I’ll be down in a minute!”
I grabbed some clothes from the floor and put them on, found my glasses, put my messy hair up in a pony tail and stumbled downstairs.
The man turned out to be RB, my old boss from BMI… with a job offer! Their network engineer has taken a position elsewhere, and since they really weren’t excited at the prospect of running ads and doing interviews and background checks and calling references and finding someone with the right personality for their small office, they thought of me! (I left because I wanted more responsibility and there was, at the time, no room for growth.) Then they checked my blog and saw the job hunting post, realized I was still available, and started trying to hunt me down. Since I hadn’t answered my phone, RB decided to jump in his car and come find me. Continue reading OMG OMG OMG I HAVE A JOB