Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.

[WildBaboons]

Where I worked previously our section of IT was in the back of an old building. We had dug some cubicle furniture out of an attic to setup for ourselves and it was really nice, huge and high and basically broke up the room we were in in to a few offices just lacking doors.

The CFO of the company walked through one day with us in there, saw the furniture and said to themselves aloud "Wow, those are way too nice for IT." We ended up moving to a new building shortly after that and the nice furniture didn't follow us even though it would have fit without issue. It went back into storage where I am fairly sure it still sits today.

[Auspice]

I've had some sort of stomach bug flu thing since Saturday (either that or some RL shit I'm dealing with has made me feel like I do) and yesterday I got into work and my boss asked me to proofread an email he had to send out.

An email announcing that they were cutting hours by 30%, project-wide.

"But I'm hoping not to cut yours at all!" He assured me.

My team, however, with their families and such, aren't in similar boats. And the "you can find spots on other projects!" isn't really a consolation when it'd be a $2-3/hour cut. So I spoke to the HR guy. He was already going to be talking to upper management about ensuring local / in office people can work those other projects and get the pay bump (to at least $12/hour). I tried to press how much it's needed.

I mean, the downside is there's less flexibility (work from home is work any time. Work from office is work when the office is open and it closes at 8p CST mostly because they couldn't talk me into being there later), but I'm doing what I can.

Why are they cutting hours? Oh because they pushed everyone to work harder and solve more tickets per hour. We did. So there's fewer tickets in queue and the client decided they don't need as many people working. So basically, we're being punished for doing a good job. I expressed worry this would happen. Repeatedly. For the past couple weeks. I was told there was no way it would.

I wish I could quit and not end up homeless. It's a bad sign when your job reaches "makes you physically ill with stress"

[Auspice]

Fuck Twine.

[Lisse24]

It always amazes me that people under 30 know next to nothing about technology.

[insomniac7809]

I'm peeved that my laser eye surgery does not mean surgery to get laser eyes like Cyclops.

[Tinuviel]

@lisse24 There's a... ten or so year gap from around 25-35 (±5 years) right now. Everyone in that gap understands the jist of most standard technology, there are a few niche things we don't get but given a few minutes tinkering we can figure out the basics. Because we had to. Before us, there wasn't anything the average person needed to know about tech, it was all niche stuff. After us, everything already worked so people didn't need to really learn about it.

We had to build kits and test shit.

[Ganymede]

@insomniac7809 said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I'm peeved that my laser eye surgery does not mean surgery to get laser eyes like Cyclops.

On the upside, you're not Cyclops.

[insomniac7809]

Retail whining:

"I want to return this item." Cool. Do you have the recipt?
"Yes!" Okay, no, that's a packing slip. A recipt is something else. This piece of paper says nothing except that we sent you that item.
"Why can't you use this?" Because it has no information about method of payment or cost at time of purchase. But that's fine, I can look up the purchase by email.
No, of course you wouldn't give an email address when we asked you. Okay, let me see if I can dig up this purchase by name or ZIP...
"I have the credit card!" Of course you want me to have access to your credit card but not your email. For our customers' securiry, I can't access credit card information at store level.
"Target can look up purchases with the credit card!" And Target couldn't keep that shit from getting hacked, and we're no goddamn Target. We barely keep the registers working.
"Why is this so difficult!" Because you didn't keep the recipt or give us any information that would make this easy. I'm gonna need to call the people who can look this up with what wr have-
"Give it back! This is ridiculous!" True 'nuff.

[Miss Demeanor]

@insomniac7809 I got this so much at Walmart. The sheer dichotomy of not wanting to give out their email address, but being perfectly willing to give up their credit card information is stunning. I had a woman try to give me her Social Security Number once, as if I were the IRS or welfare office.

[Aria]

We have no internet for the second night in a row.

Works just fine during the day, but somehow, there manages to be an outage that starts before I get home.

"Fuck you, Comcast," she said from her teeny phone keyboard.

[surreality]

@aria Ours comes and goes a hell of a lot. It's not often for a long stretch at a time, but it drops us on the regular enough to be a giant pain in the ass.

[Arkandel]

@miss-demeanor

[Packrat]

@surreality My internet is on the whole awesome, but it does on odd occasions drop mid day for unknown reasons, from a few minutes to a few hours with no exploitation or reported service outage.

I have no idea how it happens overall but it is supremely annoying if it manages to happen on a day when I am working from home and really do need consistent internet access.

[Tinuviel]

Hullo, this is @Tinuviel reporting from the colonies. What is this internet you speak of, over. We're still using RFC 1149.

[Packrat]

@tinuviel Well that is your fault for fleeing civilisation to live away in the far reaches of the world instead of remaining somewhere sensible!

In other news, the sun came out for a whole twenty minutes earlier today, sending me scurrying from the unnatural brightness as the sky failed to maintain it's customary grey half light.

[Tinuviel]

@packrat In my defense, when I fled there were more pressing issues than internet connectivity.

ETA: I am reminded of a joke. Why wouldn't anyone want to get an internet connection with Virgin? Because they want their packet to go all the way.

[Auspice]

Honestly, just a few years ago in SC, the best connection I could get was about the same as @Tinuviel's there.

Hell, I'm still kind of stunned I have over 200Mbps down right now.

[Auspice]

About once a week, I have this scenario. One of my clients is supporting ebook software. Most people login to their library (if online) through the primary website, but some people will login through publisher-specific portals. If they login through the latter, they only see the publisher's books.

Makes sense.

So about once a week, at least, I get this:

User: 'If I login to the app on my tablet, I see all my books. If I login to the website, I don't see <specific title>.'
Me: 'Are you logging into <our link> or <publisher specific link>? Please send a screenshot of what you're seeing.'
User: 'I always login at <our link>! <screenshot clearly shows publisher specific link>'
Me: '...You're logging in at <publisher specific link>. If you login at <our> link, you can see every book. Please try this.'

Usually they won't email back. A few especially stubborn ones will, trying to argue that I am wrong and just trying to make them look bad. I don't know why they don't just, from the very first email, go 'oh let me try this other link mentioned and see what happens.'

[Tinuviel]

@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

just trying to make them look bad

That's literally my IT career in a nutshell. Always trying to make people look bad.

[Packrat]

@auspice That kind of connection (@Tinuviel 's one) is pretty typical here to be honest if you do not live somewhere with fiber outside, you would be lucky to get that speed with ADSL or a good 4g tether.