BOFH: Smells like Teams spirit BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns They say that what you don't know can't hurt you, yet our former Boss (the human one as opposed to the AI version) proved this was not the case by not knowing the PFY had bought a hand-operated tablet press and had combined some generic laxatives with his breath mints. Let's just say it' …
I try to avoid teams
Microsoft is WAY ahead of you in making Teams by default a startup app, which is really fun if you have to stage and prep a number of systems.
They're very, very busy with proving to people that owning a computer doesn't mean you're actually in any way in control of it.
Not really. Enter will nearly always send a message, and you use shift+enter to add a new line. There is an exception when it decided to make a list for you, but then you have to press enter to get out and again to send it. So basically, users probably aren't doing the multiple message thing by accident. I think they do it because, if you have to write a large paragraph, sending it in pieces means the recipient doesn't have to wait for you to type the whole thing to read it, but that's only of use if they're already in the conversation. Otherwise, it makes them want to avoid helping you instead.
I have a colleague that messages in teams "can I call you Chris?" The dumb nuts can see my stus is either green or busy, just call if it's green FFS! He's already disturbed my concentration with the message anyway! Then there's others that call any time without checking if you are down as busy.
In all fairness, Microsquishy's indicators as to a user's status are about as reliable as Windows 3.1 had been. At least half the time my board goes all-red because of problems at their servers, and unless you're actively using Teams, it doesn't update the indicators with any predictable frequency.
"Can I call you" is absolutely the right thing to do. My "Teams" status often shows as "green" when I am working, because the damn thing keeps resetting the "busy" status if you set it manually.
Anyone who calls me out of the blue, without asking first, and who is not someone I am currently working closely with, gets no response.
Oh, that is annoying. The other one I get is when it's the other way around and the analyst stops for no reason.Hello
I'm contacting you about INC01345234
Even worse is "I'm contacting you about your ticket"
So you respond with "Which one?" and then they get very confused....
A pint because working with the outsourced people chosen for their low cost is enough to drive a man to drink...
I had a direct report who insisted on installing the Facebook app on her company phone (as well as the mandatory Teams one it has for business purposes).
Between the two, the thing sat there beeping and chirping almost the entire day. It got to the point where I told her either she mutes it (especially FB) or I would mute it ballistically by chucking the thing at the nearest wall. Especially as she also had the nerve to complain that the thing had a poor battery life and always died before the end of the day.
One of her more annoying traits, but not the only one and she is now no longer an employee here...
We have millennials (I assume) at our office asking why we can't use Slack instead of Teams as it is soooooo much better for communicating. I tried our "unofficial" one for a few days and had my fill of headbanging parrots, Pepes and profile photos of people MAGA hats (and we're not even a US company); not to mention the CONSTANT >ping< >ping< >pi-pi-pi-p-p-p-pp-p-p-ping<.
Teams ain't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than that abomination...
I might have done some configuring of my install when I first got it, but slack, for me, only pings when I'm mentioned, and only if I choose to turn my sound on. It must be a company thing that it's basically used for discussing work, so very few headbanging parrots here. We do have an off topic channel, but it's fairly easy to not read it. On the whole, slack works really well for us (I haven't had the pleasure of teams yet, though, although I think we have it on one of the tendrils of the ever sprawling onedrive configuration we have)
See, the mute button on the keyboard has this tendency to mute all sounds from the computer. That's not helpful when you might actually want noise (Somebody's voice on a teams call, an @ in a group chat, music etc) and muting from the system tray has all the same problems from noises the app does make. Much more elegant to use the tools provided in the application to control noise.
We had a large open plan office. Some people with these chatting tools would "ping" every 30 seconds or more frequently, which would interrupt me (even across the room). I would go for prowl, and having found the guilty person politely ask them to turn their sound off, and turn visual notification on. The typical response was "oh, is my sound on ?". (ping) "ah yes"
After a while, my presence going for a walk in certain parts of the office would trigger people to check their computers were muted.
Oh fuck, you have one of those, too?
On the other hand, I'm the asshole that insists on correcting grammatical and spelling errors, and since my right hand has dyslexia, most of my multi-word replies are followed by [edited]...
anonymous because I don't want that stupid bastard to know I'm referring to him.
So one from me - back in the days before I worked in an open plan office and IT was a small corner next to various other functions. At that time I was still dev'ing (since moved on to a higher plane of existence) and when I used to get to one of _those_ problems and things got really intense a dialog would start up between me and me (if it got really bad me cubed) - not a monologue and not just internal to the grey matter, a proper spoken conversation.
I used to find it really helped to put the problem outside my head and talk around it but god knows what the rest of the office thought. Good times ;)
The last time I used it Sametime was way better at handling that kind of stupidity.
You could configure it so that it oppened a window in the background, without any notification at all, so the Idiot With The Enter Key could ramble all day long without me being aware of his rambling.
When Teams was forced upon me, I tried to reproduce that behavior but couldn't, the best I could do was to get rid of the nasty ping, but I still had that pesky notification appearing in the corner of the screen everytime somebody typed something.
And I had to deal with Zealous Indians ( and quite a few others ) that always started some Teams chat with an hello or a hi without going on as to why they contacted me ( and disrupted my work ) before having spent 10 to 20 minutes chatting of anything except work.
After wasting time with them several time, I just set up a status message that told : "I won't answer to a hi or an hello, state why you're contacting me or you won't get any answer".
But it didn't change anything... In the end it was going to 3 screens that /solved/ the issue ( 1 Laptop + 2*24" screens ) I told windows the main screen is the laptop screen so the notifications would go there. Since it's on the side, and I'm concentrating on the two other screens, I'm not being pissed by stupid Teams notifications any longer.
I don't think it's a new thing. Where i work we have radios and it is very common to be called on the radio "hello technician, can you come to the front desk please?" Quite likely I'm at the opposite end of the building. Probably under a floor or something. I might try a "can you tell me what you need?" but the radios are noisy and often you don't even get a reply. So traipse up to the desk to be told "oh, so-and-so was asking for you. they've gone to <room that I've just walked past to get to reception>" or "I just wanted to make sure you knew <x>" which they could have easily just told me over the radio, saving me the trip!
When my previous gig jumped on Teams - it was still very much a beta offering by MS.
For kicks and giggles, I randomly inspector'ed the AJAX calls from the browser offering ... only to discover there was no rate limiting, debouncing, nor deduplication checking of the POST API to like/unlike a message.
A quick bit of bash while looping with curl (and a JWT stolen from my browser) later, and several of my poor colleagues had notifications filling the entire RHS of their screens informing them I had liked (and rapidly unliked, shortly before relinking) their last message.
Needless to say - they couldn't dismiss the notifications faster than then appeared.
--
A few weeks later, Microsoft patched it.
I like to think I was the cause of some odd looks by some poor Ops person at MS - wondering why there was a sudden spike in that particular API in the UK region.
Doesn't Microsoft's consistent UI make things easier?
That's a whole nother kettle of ball games.
MS and companies writing Windows software seem to have abandoned any kind of consistent design.
Classic example. Avast have the xClose button in the usual top-right corner in the main window. But it's in the top-left and indented away from the corner iin the "check for updates" window.
The people that emit few words instead of complete sentences - in any medium - need ressocialization with cattle prods.
I'm going for a Pavlovian response here. No complete sentences, zap. On whatsapp, zap. On Messenger, zap.
It feels like these people have short breath. and.
interrupt.
their.
train.
of thought.
every.
few.
seconds.
My missus would drain the batteries of a prod so fast.
with platinum at USD 30,000/kg I would imagine that Simon would have had the new boss' teams pulpit down the scrappy and replaced with some shitty alloy item.
«new wave of IT professionals who embrace modern technologies.
Unlike the PFY and myself, who prefer more traditional items»
Even before reading the next sentence I was thinking: "a hammer to the back of the head usually works a treat."
«""I've fixed the Teams issue," the PFY says, putting his hammer back in the drawer.»
"The wear and tear on that piece of essential equipment is terrible."
This video may help in keeping it clean, especially if you need to efficiently remove blood stains.
In that orientation it has to be below about waist height and so usually rests on the floor.
I prefer to keep mine horizontal with the handle protruding over the edge of the desk for ease of grabbing. In that position it's a more visible deterrent and even quicker to access with my mouse hand.
I actually have a sledgehammer within easy reach of my desk (a Halder one with rubber and plastic heads, intended for assembling stuff rather than rapidly disassembling it). I work entirely from home, but when someone or something annoys me I often look at "Sledgy the Attitude Adjuster" and let my imagination run wild just for a moment.
And as mentioned before, the best hammer is the thor number 2 copper/hide mallet.
Heavy enough to do so serious thumping, small enough to be hidden away and light enough to be thrown at the head of a retreating enemy.
But this weeks BoFH has made me truely glad I dont have to put up with any nonsense like 'teams'
Although it does make me wonder if I could craft an add-on that bleeps out any profanity so I could safely use it without getting fired.......
Icon for the title, BTW
Simon must have had one of those memory fades that block out traumatic events. That hardcore of coloured pencil users who hang on grimly to Skype and will not touch Teams with a coloured barge pole, we all have them.
Still, it's all a refreshing change from the days when office clerks spent all day running around delivering paper memos and the odd telegram.
Digital just helps us cock everything up faster.
If I was forced to choose between the two, I'd go with Skype. It still has some of the good things in it that made it popular in the first place. Teams still looks and feels like the social experiment it is. Typical for Microsoft they took some existing chat program and added the stuff from what it thought was the biggest competitor at the time: first Slack then Zoom. This is where the awful integration with Sharepoint and needless customisations for video calls come from, with useful things like disabling incoming video carefully hidden deep under the wrong menu item.
I mean, it's not as if Microsoft doesn't have talented developers and even designers, but it seems that nothing can be released without getting marketing's approval and input, which leads to the "designed by committee" feel of everything.
IIRC "Skype for Business" was Microsoft's own chat program, Lync, rebadged. Lync was pretty unstable on Windows as well.
But they managed to "improve" on things with Teams for Mac. Before switching to the "new" (work or school) version it would regularly lose its windows. Notifications seem to be all or nothing with the default per e-mail, in case you missed it being worst of all.
But the worst thing was its ability to trash whichever network interface it was on during a call! And I mean trash: ifconfig en11 up didn't help. For a while I had a workaround switching between my docking station and a dongle, and when they had both been trashed, forced hibernation and waking solved the problem. Some of the blame must lie with Apple, which is obviously moving control of the interface to some kind of service, but it was really on Teams that would crash things.
The email notification was easy to deal with. They all come from the same @whatever-it-is.com. 5-6 years ago, when I started with my current company that uses these things as a main way to communicate, I set up an email rule. When message comes from @, move it to this folder, mark it as read. I would set it as delete permanently, but on the off chance I might need it I hang on to it. Besides, IT has an endless amount of archival space and I see no reason to not waste it by saving crap they want me to have.
Zoom had been a clear favourite with me for remote conferencing as that was what it was really good at. You connect with a link, you talk, chat and share screens, then disconnect - event over. Teams managed the talk part reasonably well (though tried to be too fancy with its layout; screen sharing wasn't as slick if you weren't embedded in a corporate system; chat worked but could get annoying when it wasn't ended with the actual meeting. This was especially annoying for me as I have several Teams accounts and chat in one sometimes appeared in another - there seemed to be aspects that got detached from a specific login. It's got better of late and Zoom seems to be trying to emulate Teams by now adding yet more and more to get in the way of what it was really good at.
For example, whereas I used to have a simple list of recurring meeting logins, I'm now presented with a calendar that I need to bypass each time. I already have an online calendar that syncs to all my devices and takes care of all appointments - I don't need another one that only addresses a few. It's all good news for Microsoft as, if Zoom becomes another Teams, there'll be no advantage in using it and we might as well let MS have its way.
Perhaps Skype might still have a role...
Feature creep and "refresh syndrome". If we don't keep changing it and making it "newer", people will get bored and stop using it, so lets just rearrange the deck chairs and it give a fresh coat of paint in whatever is the current style and colour according to the "k3w3l k1dz". The reality is that the vast majority of users would be happier if it just sat there doing it's job instead of having to re-learn how it works every other week. "Feature complete" seems to be a forgotten art.
people will get bored and stop using it,
For popular/mass use sharing and communication software or web sites - Skype Zoom Friends Reunited ( remember them) et al that may well be true. Especially since these are "all in" products. i.e. either pretty much everyone uses them or no one does. Because they are all closed proprietary products. There's no point someone using [Great Established Programme] to share the cat videos if everyone else has moved to [Great New Programme].
Nice to see Simon applying some malicious compliance, although the new Boss seems to be oblivious to it, but the breath mints should take care of that.
People sometimes ask me why I uninstall Teams from any Windows machine I own. Answer: because without it, there is a significantly reduced chance of me becoming homicidal, so you can MITFWMKY (make it till Friday without me killing you).
Oh dear, now I will need another new laptop. This one seems to have encountered a very solid object a great speed and has suffered a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly incident. You can switch off all of Teams noises and notifications, but you do need to be pretty determined. MS really want to be bugging you at least once every 10 seconds.
Who are these people who have to have every piece of software ping at them constantly and why are we not allowed to re-educate them with a Tazer? I had one on a train years ago. His phone must have beeped every 10 seconds for the entire train journey and he was merrily typing away utterly oblivious to the 20 or so people in his vicinity giving him death-stares. I gently nudged him to get his attention and asked him politely to switch off the beeping on his phone and got told "F*** off Grandad", so I shifted position and inadvertently pushed him off his seat and into the aisle. When I stood up to help him up, he looked up at all 6'4" of me and decided his life expectancy would be enhanced by going elsewhere in the carriage. My apologies to those elsewhere who had to suffer his constant beeping for the rest of the journey, but those in my vicinity were most appreciative.
"MS really want to be bugging you at least once every 10 seconds."
And if you don't turn it off, or can't because "corporate policy settings", even when signed out because you are not in the office and out on the road, it spams your email with "your colleagues are trying to contact you" emails.
Laxative breath mints served in a meeting room with dodgy ac, somehow I suspect the meeting room to be secure when it comes to sturdy soundproof walls and doors, no windows to worry about, bit of a Faraday cage when thinking about wireless signals really, and sturdy locks that doesn't always unlock from the inside
At least the AC tech is due Monday afternoon?...
I came here to gloat that I have never had to use Teams, Slack or any collaborative software. I was going to then rub it in further by saying that I now longer have to work, endure co-workers or waste time and effort unless I choose to. Furthermore my home is a MS free zone, and the only distractions come from my hi-fi* and coffee maker.
But now I can only imagine the ghastly working conditions that you're all forced to endure. I can't help feeling that you'd be better off being employed as battery chickens; after all they too are knee high in sh1t. I feel truly sorry that you all have to endure the progress that technology has created, and can't help wondering where it all went wrong. Life used to be quite good, at times, last century.
Anyway, it's beer o'clock for all you taxpayers, so I'll raise a pint to you all. Us oldies have had the option to be on it all morning, so you have a lot of catching up to do.
* yes, I'm very, very, old
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RIP Aiman, he didn't last long.
That plane crash was so tragic and so conveniently in the middle of the sea, they still haven't recovered the body of anyone yet.
"Did you crash the plane?" The PFY asks.
"No, I just booked several flights in our former AI boss name, in a company know by how much theirplanes crash, labeled as business expenses of course. Couldn't do a insurance scam sadly, but better not get too greedy. He was good while he lasted."
"And you lost control of the AI app you were using."
"They started to charge money for using it, and they were eventually going to look into what Aiman was doing with his money anyway. Burrito?"
"Oh thanks, got them in the new place were that Iphone stored used to be?"
"Yeah, a pity they had to close down, should really have given me a refund."
Where one of the managers was very hands on. But in a micromanaging way, not in a "how I can help with this task?" kind of way.
He'd send out IM messages that should instead have been emails or open tickets on the service desk, asking for various little tasks to be done. But since it was sent to a bunch of people, everyone would ignore it hoping someone else would do it. So he'd send out something an hour later, "who is taking this as an action item?" I thought it was funny because I was pretty sure he wasn't wanting to me to do these mundane tasks but he was using some sort of alias that included dozens of people - not just those directly under his management but anyone who regularly worked closely with his team (which is how I got lumped in I suppose)
So one day a few of the employees decided to teach him a lesson, he put out a task and one guy pipes up instantly "on it!" then another, then another. Then they starting arguing with each other over who should do the task, others got involved saying why don't you just work together and pretty soon most of his team was shooting messages back and forth. It just got more and more ludicrous and I basically stopped all work and was just watching the screen because it was all so funny.
Not sure what happened behind the scenes, but that was the last time I ever saw one of those group IMs go out asking for some mundane task to be completed!
It's also a pretty good indicator of a particularly shit manager.Even a a half-way decent one would be able to decide who was the best person for a task ( using whatever criteria) and bloody well ask them to do it. That's pretty much the definition of a managerial role.
Best part of work, is we had a specialist guy who was a freakin' genius. He essentially was a team all to himself, but that apparently results in an "inclusivity score" of 0%.
Since this is a single man team, they forced the guy into a totally different role, and we now have a 23yr old non-binary "technology guru" who knows nothing whatsoever about the government servers in question. Those systems when they go over, will never come back up as original guy has handed in his notice.
But hey we have "100% gender divergency" in his team, so to the higher ups thats perfect.
I had a boss who thought that Dilbert was an instruction manual.
We had problems recruiting people because we needed specialist skills, so were 50% below head count.
One day we had a 1 hour session on Diversity, and how it is important, and how we should not discriminate due to whatevers.
Half way through I said I do not care if someone is one legged, three armed and five headed... as long as they have the skills. Do not hire people to hit diversity targets without the skills, because it will make us less efficient.
I was told that I was not being constructive.
After 6 months we still had no more people, 5 headed or not.
So that was a waste of an hour, but my boss got a tick in a box.
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Ahh teams. Brings back memories of Lockdown, even though I still use it daily..
I have no problem with Teams as such, It's a messaging tool. The only problem I have is that because I have it on my phone, it's more difficult to escape work.
But, when working from home, my then boss insisted I have a camera. He like video communication. I told him that my PC at home does not have a webcam. He offered me a laptop. The problem was the laptop offered was a generic laptop. It was a nice machine, and more than adequate for most of our users. However, a lot of the work I was doing at the time required a more powerful machine. The laptop offered was nowhere near powerful enough. I ended up not using it.
So, he offered a webcam.. I said that the only space I had to work in at home is my bedroom. That's my personal space.. I did not (and do not) want a webcam in there, and if I was forced to take one, I would likely not use it unless forced to.
He, surprisingly, backed down..
I spend half of my work hours attending Teams meetings that have nothing to do with my area of expertise, but I'm invited anyway, 'just in case we need someone from Identity and Access Management'. Well fair enough. If it wasn't for the fact that I later get asked why the tickets are piling up and not getting solved. Well, they would be, if everyone and their uncle wouldn't require me to attend their little company self-help groups.
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