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Tension caused by mug segregation in the break room appears to have reached a new high.

Humor, Photos

Yes, this is a water cooler. The same one we hacked to display our own messages:

And, yes, there are occasions when we have too much free time on our hands.

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Oh dear… have I just created peachse.cx?

Humor, Photos

Received a complaint from a co-worker today – the long and short of it is his battery backup (UPS) wasn’t working properly. Upon suggesting that I try testing/replacing the batteries, I was told the batteries were new. I mentioned that since I was working on a customer-affecting issue, I’ll take a look shortly, and asked him to please email me with the battery date on the sticker affixed to the case of the UPS – and that will help determine our plan of action. His response was that “that’s not my job” and to “go look at it yourself”.

I figure he was just having a bad morning, but it brings up the topic of what you can do to help IT help you with your problems (also known as “how to NOT piss off IT”). Without getting into too many intricate details, my list is:

• Be patient. I realize your issue is important, but troubleshooting problems (be they yours or someone who is in queue ahead of you) takes time. Please don’t assume because something isn’t done immediately that you need to follow up by phone or in person – I work on tickets according to priority, then submission date. If you choose to call, you’re probably going to end up in voicemail and getting a call back when I’ve cleaned out my ticket queue. If you come to my desk, you’re likely going to end standing there waiting until I wrap up my current ticket or call.
• Set realistic priorities. At any point throughout the day, I probably have a minimum of 5 – 10 tickets open in my own queue, often many more; that means there’s only about a 1-in-10 chance that yours really is more important than everyone else’s. Continually marking your low-priority issues as an “emergency” will not get them fixed faster, but may get your true high-priority issue you open later pushed to the bottom of the queue.
• Don’t lie. If you changed something that may be related to your problem, man up. If you’re consistently going to let me waste my time troubleshooting instead of coming clean and providing me the whole story, then when the time comes that you have a real issue it’s going to take longer to get resolved since I’ll be spending my time looking to see what you screwed up but won’t admit to.
• Give details and note error messages. Provide usernames, email addresses, and callback numbers. It’s much faster for you to provide the information I need to troubleshoot than it is for me to go back and forth trying to squeeze information from you or wading through a metric ton of server logs. I’m not going to troubleshoot in the dark — if you send a ticket saying “email is down”, I’ll respond with an equally vague message saying “it’s working fine for me”. Doing this one step alone could mean the difference between having the problem persist for a few minutes or a few hours.
• Don’t argue, clarify. If you think I’m wrong about something, ask for clarification or explain that you thought it worked differently, but don’t simply start an argument. Not to be rude, but you called me for help and I’ve been dealing with issues like this for a long time. Almost every time someone wants to argue, it comes down to them not completely understanding the intricacies of protocols and services such as BGP, ATM, PPP, DNS, and SMTP. If you know I’m wrong, explain why and I’ll listen and admit it if so — and we can continue with getting your problem fixed. If you feel the need to have an argumentative conversation, please don’t waste my time – there are plenty of Internet forums out there for you to troll.
• Don’t play the blame game. Bickering about who is at fault for your document getting deleted, your workstation crashing, or your email bouncing is not going to resolve the issue. Technology breaks, mistakes happen, life goes on. Deal with SLA’s per your contract, but AFTER the service-affecting issue is resolved; don’t attack the person on the other end of the phone when it comes to settling the dispute.

Anything else I’m missing?

Complaints, Systems Admin headdesk, lusers

Sometimes, in my job, there’s just no time for lunch. That’s not always a bad thing.

Meat and Mountain Dew: The lunch of champions, WHERE champion.career = “sysadmin”

Just don’t tell a cardiologist.

Photos