Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error Brace yourselves, gentle readers, for it is once again Monday, and the work week has commenced. Thankfully, The Reg is here with another dose of Who, Me? in which readers share tales of times they had a day worse than the one you're having. We hope it helps. This week meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Hugh" who once worked at a …
While we're in the neighborhood …
"On which side does sir dress?"
I had thought that use of to dress had passed with captain Peacock and Mr Grainger but clearly not as the previous post indicates.
(Not such a silly question from ones tailor as I am assured a slight adjustment is made to accommodate the difference. ;)
I am sure I would be so embarrassed by the ATM I wouldn't know where to mit meiner Steife*.
* Steife(f?)
When I was getting fitted for a school uniform back in 1985 I was asked that question.
Nearly forty bloody years and I finally understand what he was asking me.
He was very "Are You Being Served" and I was, well, a difficult eleven year old. I don't remember what I said (probably something like "whatever side of bed I fall out of") and he said "Jesus Mary and all the saints" and threw his tape measure at my mother and then stormed out of the room. She cracked up, then finished measuring me. Dude was WEIRD.
But, hey, now I understand the question, so I can give the flippant answer on purpose.
I had to google that. I've never been asked it, and I'm older than you are.
I've also never had a "school uniform" in my life, and I tend to buy any suits I have to wear from the same prestigious brand my father did: I•R•R•E•G•U•L•A•R. It's quite the best brand according to him, and given he had to wear a suit for work every day in case he might have to go to court (small town lawyering was like that) he was an expert.
And now that I know... It goes in the middle. I have a convenient "compacts neatly for travel" model. I'd hate to have to deal with it dangling. So the question would be pointless for me anyway.
> The question presumes that one is wearing boxer shorts.
Not quite. It only assumes you are not doing/wearing anything that may interfere with Nature's Bounty, such as the (apocryphal) behaviour of Prince Albert.
Therefore, *not* wearing boxer shorts will also warrant correctly answering the question, if, at the time, you are also *not* wearing briefs, nor budgie smugglers, nor a thong, nor ...
to blame the upper echelons in management for skimping on a test environment, which was ultimately the root cause of the issue. I do feel a more experienced BOFH might have hinted that said "grown-up humour" apparently came from somewhere in the system, possibly from management or beancounters, but he would need to spend some serious (paid) overtime researching who he was going to pin it on was responsible for this problem.
Always hold your hand up and admit your mistakes ..... when they are small ones. This builds a reserve of trust in your honesty.
When that career ending mistake happens you are far more likely to be believed when you say it wasn't you! It will also give you time to find and delete the log files!
Cleary these odd sales agents don't peruse their scripts before inflicting the contents on their victims.
On the other hand these R rated spiels would be infinitely more amusing than the typical timeshare scams of the period and might have signed up a few adult site subscriptions.
Nor do they seem to understand what they're doing.
If I was on a phone following a script, and the script told me to inflict some NSFW language on a potential customer, I would not follow that part of the script.
Unless, of course, those callcenter employees could not care less either.
Every time I've ever left a job, I've always told the colleagues I liked that I was leaving behind to not hesitate to throw me under the bus (repeatedly if necessary) to save their own skin once I'm out of the door.
If nothing else, it's a theory you can throw at shouty management that buys you time to figure out what the hell has actually gone wrong, and why. You can always row back later on with "oh on first look we thought it was X, but it actually turns out that wasn't the root cause, it was Y".
I’ve never thrown former colleagues under the bus. Except when they deserved it. I expect pretty much the same when I leave a job.
IT is a pretty small world, and word goes around…
If I leave for greener pastures, I make sure I leave affairs in order. And that even goes when I’m on holiday. In the past I had calls during my holiday for “urgent” matters (not from C-levels, I don’t pick up calls from them during my well-deserved rest, only from IT coworkers), my first response was always : “have you checked documentation ?” and their reply was invariably 30 seconds of silence and then “ok, thanks, I won’t bother you again, next pint is on me”.
I know a guy who was copying and pasting config from a live site (big site, very important to the business, distribution). He, for some bizarre reason, was in global config for the core switch on the live site and hit the right mouse button which in putty pastes the clip board into the window. This would have been OK if it had been the config from the live site into the switch he was building but it was the config he had edited for the new switch, for a new site with new IPs, into the live site core switch.
It was a cautionary tale about least available privilege and not sitting on global config (or even enable) when you don't need to be. Dumping the live site config into notepad and then closing the session to the live router would have been better, pulling the config from the backups and not logging in to a live site would have been even better.
after enable mode:
rel in 5 (or other appropriate interval)
(Do the needful...)
(If all is well):
wri mem
rel can
(If all is not well, repeat a variation of the following to everyone who calls you):
"Network trouble? No, I havent heard... let me check a few things... ohhh, intersting, we seem to have some congestion on the Ethernet that's exceeding the token rate of the backbone, let me see if I can reset that for you, you should see things get back to normal in about X* minutes"
*where X = (reload time + router boot time + route convergence time) - ( T(now) - T(when you started mucking with the router))
My defaults include, on top of that, font size 11, bold. The colors adjusted so "blue" is not "ultra-dark-nightscope-only" blue, but a brighter shade of it to be readable. The other colors too of course. 132x40. The bell flashes instead of making that useless sound.
have I ever thrown a previous employee under the bus is yes
Not on purpose but it was rather funny.......
You see he had a little falling out with the boss.... well more than a little.... imagine huge screaming match with extra shouting and door banging. and thus he left.
Cue 2 months later after I'd replaced him and the boss takes over the cutting robot I'd been using as I had the day off.
Now this cutting robot had data tables in it for all sorts of cutting conditions..... metal type , thickness, laser power etc etc etc
What I didnt know was there were about 200 entries.... and the last entries had comments..... rather NSFW comments about the boss and his sexual preferences.. and he scrolled to the end ....
Then tried to blame me for it when I got in the next day
I told him "first it wasn't me, second I'm far more upfront and honest about what I say about people, and thirdly I'd tell you to your face if I thought you were a ---- ------- with a hint of ----- ---- ----ing"
I lasted 3 more weeks before telling him to stick the job up his ---- ------ backside.
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