* Posts by vectorspace

4 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2021

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

vectorspace

Long ago when I was in first line IT support the company used lotus email. Mailbox storage was 25MB for regular users, and 50 for managers, no exceptions. I remember having a "discussion" with one low level team supervisor who claimed to require unlimited storage because they used their email account to archive performance documents for their team, and refused to consider one of the many network drives. I don't know how that was resolved because I had to pass it to my manager, but I assume they never got their unlimited storage.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

vectorspace

Was working for a sizeable international financial company (in the UK) had been there for 9.5 years, 7.5 as an IBM i RPGLE dev on a big legacy application. Only 2 of us, so we had a lot of unique and barely documented knowledge.

Both of us made redundant with 6 months notice along with most other UK based IT when the company decided to move as much IT as possible out of the UK and into India, Poland, and Hong Kong. Not outsourced, just overseas in the same company.

Then insult to injury, had to train our replacements. And document as much as we could. I think I myself wrote about 700 pages of pure knowledge dump. So much I bet they couldn't find anything (can't see the forest for the trees and all)

But we did it properly. No bombs left behind, everything as proper as we could manage in the time.

I do feel bad for the replacement people, having to pick up after such a short handover for such a complex system (parts of which were 30 years old at that time)

And the final insult before leaving, was getting my 10 years service gift and presentation on my very last day with the company. My boss was very apologetic, telling me about it by saying "I'm not sure if this is actually a joke but..." and telling me how the presentation script he was supposed to read said to say "here's to another 10 years"

And then there was the delayed action insult - my redundancy package never arrived because the person handing it missed that I was on an unusual type of contract and didn't file the right paperwork, and no-one flagged that it hadn't been done. Had to flag it myself once it was late and go back in to go through the paperwork, but I did get it eventually 2 months late.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

vectorspace

Reminds me of a support case where a login prompt was insisting the user's password was wrong (turned out to be caps lock which they had denied at first)

Watched them log in, they hit enter twice - muscle memory for clearing the normal post-login info screen, but in this case cleared the login failed error message details. I pointed out that I needed to see what actual error message was being reported and their response was "it doesn't matter"

sigh...

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

vectorspace

Early days in 1st line IT support, 15 years ago. A user's ball mouse was misbehaving, I showed them how to take the ball out and clean the gunk off the rollers, and advised them to do the same every now and then. Their response - "Isn't that the cleaner's job?"