Posts by jcitron 129 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2014
Where I live in New England, we don't have that however I have travelled elsewhere in the US and other states have it.
The biggest advantage of having a gas nozzle lock is to keep the hands from freezing to the metal handle when it's below zero with a 35 mph wind on to of that!
Just getting in and out of my Jeep Liberty, I have felt a good zap! The cloth seats really build up a nice charge!
You more than win, you take the gold award while running laps around the building! :-)
Whilst reading your list, I had a suspicion that this was a smallish organization and the IT person was family or a friend of the owner. I've run into a couple of these situations, but not as scary and off the walls as yours!
I had a manager that thought batteries for the big UPS units in the server room were unnecessary expenses until we lost power followed by a quick surge that killed the main data server. I was promptly blamed for the incident and I stormed not only into his office but in the GMs office as well. My fault? No way! I had put in the request, in writing no less because I follow the CYA rules always, and his response to my PO request was "declined".
He was let go some time shortly afterwards due to other poor decisions.
"Apple computers don't have viruses" according to all fan bois that use them. We know this isn't true, but try convincing them. The problem is they don't have any antivirus software installed to notify them that their machines are infected!
Does it matter that the current iPhones and iPads are vulnerable? This won't be an issue in 6-months when the new ones come out and all the Apple device users will flock over them anyway.
I've had that happen before myself. Way back while at a long gone manufacturer, the order department would get knocked offline every afternoon when they were shipping out the products. It turned out that the computer system was located in Belgium and was set to do backups at 23:00. When the backups kicked in, we'd be disconnected and I'd get the calls about lost transactions.
It took a meeting between my manager, corporate IT, and myself to get this straightened out.
John
As technicians and support people we have our job cut out for us every day. The thing is we can become too focused on what is directly around us and sometimes this can cause heart ache and frustrations for the users we support. Over the many years of my varied technical career, I learned the business operations side of thing and how my technical work impacted the other users. This may sound odd, but knowing this actually put me at an advantage as a prospective employee for a very large company.
So what did I learn over the years. many of you are probably asking yourselves. First of all it's understanding the quarterly and monthly operating cycle. This time of year is usually busy and hectic as the sales force and accounting are closing the books. Knowing this is a big plus as this can determine whether servers can be touched, for upgrades and other maintenance tasks, or if one should plan on extra O/T for extra support at the month end/quarter end/ fiscal year end cycles.
While I was at my last employer, I am retired now, I worked with the sales force directly and stayed late on those book closing nights. Most of the time it was quiet and I got a lot of my own work done like closing tickets, imaging laptops, and refreshing old loaner machines, other times were quite busy as the users were sometimes left hanging out in limbo with a down machine and critical contracts to close.
A good example of a clueless operations staff happened a couple of years ago. During a quarter end close, the tech operations staff decided it was time to upgrade the mail server. No notice was sent to any of us so we didn't even know why our phones were suddenly ringing off the hook. I called the helpless desk and got a prerecorded message that the mail server had been taken offline for a preplanned upgrade and there was no ETA until the upgrade was completed. Hello! Preplanned and no notice! I called my manager who assisted me in contacting the right people. Going forward this never happened again.
The other thing that comes out of this, as I mentioned is preplanning for O/T and time off. This is a time when vacations can't be taken and I would deny vacations to any of my support staff. The reason is this is the time when we need to be in the office even if it's for a couple of weeks. Any other time is okay, but never, ever plan a vacation at the end of the quarter.
Understanding the business side also gives us a better understanding of the end-user applications. I used this opportunity to learn a B2B and CRM application that the users used. When it came to support, I was frontline support for it and it was another thing I could put on my CV (resume for us here in the US). At one company, after I became a jack of all trades due to downsizing, I was also responsible for creating the new fiscal year on a SQL-based server. This used to be done by my manager, but he was let go and now I had to assist in that process as I built up the GL tables and setup the forms, tested, and proofed along with the accounting department. Later on I assisted accounting with running their reports, and then much later would run them automatically upon their approval.
These are only a small sample of what one can learn. Learn what you can about the business you work for. This makes you a more valuable employee in the long run and is also valuable for future employment.
John
(A retired IT guy)
I agree.
So we get some code from a so-called "trusted source". This oh well and good should this be fine, however, there is always the risk that this code has already been modified and we end up with the security hole.
The other problem is most people, meaning the majority of the consumers, use the same login credentials for everything. To them a user name and password are a pain and bother rather than being an account protector. This is why we see so many security breaches due to soft passwords. How many machines have we seen where the password is a birthdate, a child's name, or something very guessable? With the end-user putting their already soft password on all their devices, and with this being the same password on their bank accounts, computers, credit card accounts, etc., this gives cyber-criminals another backdoor into their data.
When General Electric (GE) was showing the house of the future with networked devices, the first though that came to mind was this is one big security issue with everything connected to the outside world. Monitoring ones home remotely and adjusting the thermostat can still be done the old-fashioned way. Have a neighbor go in and feed the cat, water the plants, and adjust the thermostat if need be. At least in this case we'd know who was doing anything in the house, and there would be someone to point fingers at should there be a problem.
His salary is so high because they don't pay the employees any more than they have to and don't believe in giving raises. You start at a specific salary and that's it for the rest of your life there, and they push you until you drop.
Every review I had, and we had to go through the useless review process with our managers, was above average at 4 / 5 or 4.5 / 5 points, but got nothing more than a great job from my manager. I even got rewards from the division (org) VPs, but no financial compensation. There's a high turn-around and we wonder why.
What would I like to see:
** An antivirus/anti-malware product that absolutely does not cause any kind of drag on system performance. We think they don't have a performance impact until we disable our current products.
** Application menus that are easily scaled and can be seen no matter what resolution the display is set at. The displays have gotten higher-rez but the menu text has remained the same size so everything is the size of ant footprints on the screen.
** LCD/LED displays that have the same clear image as the old CRT. I miss my old NEC 22-inch display. When I replaced it with a Samsung 23-inch equivalent, I found myself constantly adjusting it just to see it.
** Keyboards that don't lose their characters because I have a broken fingernail and scratched them lightly. In the old days keyboards lasted forever; now they're crap.
** Dido with mice too.
** TV remotes that don't require a degree in computer science to operate.
** TV remotes which just operate a TV and have simple controls.
(The last two are meant for old folks because I usually get calls to rescue them because they've messed up the programming).
I would do the same. :-)
What's bad about the tech industry, like everything it seems, is driven by pure sales margins regardless of quality. Management, as I said is clueless because they don't usually come from the industry in the first place. In a few places I worked at, they came from the food industry, but worked in the printing industry. They had no clue about making pre-press proofing equipment or product development cycles.
But sadly, we see this mess mostly in big-named consumer-ware which we pay an awful lot for in the first place.
It's not that...
Sadly today software development is driven by the bean counters, upper management and the marketing departments. The bean counters and upper management have salivated over the great new product based on sales figures supplied by marketing. Then the dev manager is called in and given a zero-day development cycle and told to produce even with many, many protests. So now the developer is doing their part but corners are cut to meet unrealistic shipping deadlines that the marketing department dreamt up without consulting the developers first but put the screws on the line with the help of the salivating bean counters and CEO.
Then when it comes time to produce, the poor devs are stuck working triple overtime to meet the deadline with hopes that things don't go too wrong. Then when it comes to testing, Alpha and Beta testing is done on cursory basis to show that the product works and doesn't crash horribly.
Since the program didn't crash completely, it's shipped to the unwitting customer who now has to deal with odd behavior in the software. He/she reports this as a bug, and this bug like all other bugs is added to a list to be fixed at some unknown date.
Then this is the big crux. Version 2.0 comes out. This is really a patch that has taken care of most (note the word *most*) of the bugs reported with the first version. The thing is this Version 2.0 isn't given away free as a patch, instead it's sold as an upgrade for a measly $199.99 compare to the $299.99 full price.
This Version 2.0, however, now has its own bugs, coupled by those that were never fixed with the upgrade/ I mean patch we paid for. These bugs now cause the supposedly fixed bugs to now appear again, and so the cycle goes until the code gets so bogged down with patches and upgrades that the program needs to be rewritten.
If I recall from my ancient days in computing, that software was never this bad. Programmers took their time, or were at least allowed to take their time, because they weren't pressured by the bean counters and upper management who have no clue in the first place what it takes to produce a decent software product. Instead they are driven by the stake holders and other outside interests.
AVAYA had that kind of system back in 2000. My old company had the software package and I put the client part on all the user PCs.
Fast forward to 2010 and to another company that used CISCO and Beehive email. The CISCO system integrated easily with Oracle's Beehive. (Other than this feature, the software was a horrid mess to deal with). A voicemail would come in and be directly stored in the email system which would then be sent to the client's inbox. The client can be anything from the user's smart phone, PC running Thunderbird, Outlook, or Zimbra mail client.
I agree with you on the touchtone phone thing and voicemail. It's as though one has to enter in a bank vault combination just to access a voicemail. I think it's worse on some mobile devices where you click on get voicemail then they proceed to ask again if you want to access your voicemail. Well Doh! I wouldn't have clicked that in the first place!
Because sometimes they sound like big diesel locomotives instead of Hondas and Mazdas being driven by kids with loud speakers. This is worse at night or the wee hours in the morning when they make the closed windows vibrate as they drive by.
This doesn't invade our freedom of speech because the loud car driver can make noise all he wants. The rest of us don't have to listen to him. :-)
The same goes with the goofball that listens to tunes on his iPhone while wearing ear buds in a public place. I don't give a crap if he/she is listening to his music crap as long as I don't have to listen to it too. The good news is if they keep this up, there will no longer be any noise because they'll be completely deaf and won't hear a thing!
I don't blame the end-user so much because they are just that - end users who usually have no clue when it comes to data security. The VAR and system integrator that sells these POS network devices should educate the users and enforce secure passwords. This may mean a bit more work for the VAR consultant, but in the end everyone wins.
I love doing that! :-)
I have my parrot Barney answer the phone for me. HELLLLOOO!!!! he screams followed by an ear wax moving whistle.
Another time I got one of those "Your system is infected and Microsoft has been notified" calls. I put the phone inside my grand piano and played an octave etude. The caller hung up promptly!
In this economy the employee, both prospective as well as hired, is the one that loses out due to wage deflation. Companies see that they can get the cheap labor and will avoid giving out raises and bonuses to their current employees knowing full well that there is such a glut of applicants in the job market that they could hire a replacement very easily.
Sadly, this is the bean-counters driving this and feeding the drivel to the corner office and of course then to HR who laps it up voraciously. What they don't realize is they will end up losing good, talented employees, as they look for the cheap way out. This is why there are those adverts from the same companies always looking for employees. They are not growing, they just get good people who leave for better opportunities when the chance comes along.
John
I used an Oracle CRM on Demand custom application called Own-IT. This had the tracking and metrics in it and the management had all their pretty pie charts they needed.
Only 200 employees. I wish I had that at my last job, I supported over 550 people myself plus the field until I nearly had a stroke. It was then they brought in a contractor and the number of employees increased to nearly 700 in-house plus field. When there was an "org change", we also did phone support for worldwide apps until that proved it was too much and the tasks were split.
Oh we were salaried and got bonuses...
John
I agree with Julian. This is more plausible and I too would never, ever divulge my password for any system I log into.
That is a security issue and shame on the HR 'droid asking for it! They should know better than that, or maybe not. They probably have their passwords taped to their monitors ;-)
I was asked "What to I want to do when I grow up?"
I was 36 when I had that interview with whom was to become my manager because I got the job. I looked at him with a bit of an odd look because I was "grown" up. He then explained it was about goal setting and what not. Eventually he left the company and as I planned, I moved into his roll albeit briefly.
Now that you've created a tool-set that no one wants or cares about, I say use them to your advantage and use the free time to pursue some more skills in other areas. You can easily take online classes to improve your skills and then pursue an employer who see your value as an employee and as a person too.
I've actually seen this in the past and had my own manager tell me to "not look so good" because it made the rest of the team look bad in a less than subtle manner. You are doing the same job that everyone else is doing only more efficiently and this makes everyone else look bad. :-)
I had a Compaq Proliant 6000 go down. It shutdown and I couldn't restart it. Okay... it must be the power supply or something. At the time we were being serviced by one of the dumbest, most idiotic helpdesk companies anyone could ever hire. Talk about a helpless desk! I hated calling them for anything, but because we had to play nice with corporate, we had to go through them. I called the 800-number listed on the side of the server which rang up to the very same helpless desk I didn't want to deal with.
I bit my lip and begrudgingly told the representative the problem. She said she'll send out a technician to have a look. Now mind you, this is a server and not someone's desktop PC which I usually fixed before the techs came over from the helpless desk.
The technician, who was dispatched "right away", finally came two days later. He looked at the server and said "Yup, it's broken" and left to get the part which was supposed to be replaced the next day.
Well 3-days later, after I kept pestering them about the job, the tech comes in and can't replace the part as he brought the wrong model. He must've written down the wrong part number or something! Finally he comes in now a full week since the failure, and replaced the motherboard.
When we split off from the parent company, we brought in our own service contractor for the servers and never had that kind of issue again. That helpdesk company, we dealt with, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy a year after that incident. I wonder why!
Don't knock your skills, Bene. You have a lot of good things to work with. I too was an IT generalist. I am now retired and no longer seeking employment.
Let me explain... I started as a hardware guy - a technician to be exact that repaired circuits right down to the component level. As these jobs disappeared, I ended up in MIS working with VAXs and IBM mainframes then transitioned to servers. Finally after a short stint in the graphics industry with a family-owned business and a couple of other graphics-related jobs, I ended up back in IT again and this time as a PC support specialist. This position went from a 3-month contract to a full-time network administrator/ system administrator position that lasted 11 years with the same company until that company closed. Eventually, I became a Tier-3 support guy at a very, very large company and retired from there.
On the way I learned about project management, built and designed computer rooms, moved a company twice, setup networks, servers, and tons of workstations, learned various operating systems, network protocols, Avaya, CISCO telecom, etc. In the end I was helping C-level management and became the go-to-guy for whatever technical problem the user base suffered from. I was there to help.
In the end, just before I retired early due to medical reasons, I earned two awards from upper management. One for bringing on line over 300 new employees and the other for always being there to help no matter what. Both I didn't expect as I was doing my job as I always did it.
Good luck.
This sounds like a position I was in. I worked for a place that shrank through attrition. As people were let go the few of us that remained got more and more to do. In 2004 I went from being just the system/network admin to order admin/customer admin as well. I would literally sit in my chair and jump from one job to another and had multiple workstations setup so I could place orders on one system and manage my computer room and network on the other.
I can say I learned a lot too doing this. In the end I earned great respect from the customer base and could ship product worldwide without any issues with customs. I even got letters and compliments from freight forwarders and customers due to my great job,
When all this ended, I was back in IT, at another company, but made use of my customer service skills in addition to my IT support skills. Learning to listen to people proved to be one of the best tools/skills I earned from that crazy job.
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