help desk rant..

I'd love to know how you connect a printer diretly to a database  I think HD just asked you to bring back a bucket of steam, LOL.  if the printer is already on the network it will have an IP adress.  If it has an IP adress you can print to it already.  if you would like Oracle to print to it directly you do need to supply IT with the IP adress of the printer you wish to print on.  easy 'nough.  just print a test page from the printer, or its network hub, and it will spit out a page with a lot of numbers on it.  just look for the one labeled "IP Adress" and you're there,

when i used to work help desk i got a call from a guy:

guy: "Hi, the computer at this station wont turn on.  I've pressed the space bar and turned on the monitor and nothing happened." (the computers were set upt to turn on with the space bar.)

I get there and observe the following: a monitor, a key board, and a mouse...  guess what's missing?    the computer...  dee-de-deee

The head of the IT dept here has some balls.  I was observing a meeting and the issue came up that a "critical hold" couldn't be removed from a person's profile, so they couldn't go into containment.

The IT Head said, "Well, I told them how to do it once.  They should have written it down.  If they can't figure that out, I can't help them."

I just smiled inside because this wasn't "manager speak" that they were all use to.  She was being serious.  It took about 5 min before someone said, "So he needs to write down the directions?".

Vastly humurous...for me.

I'm sure they have a list of IP addresses.  One for every computer and printer in your company.  But, that doesn't mean they know what computer is associated with what IP.  We're supposed to have static IPs here, but people change their IP addresses all the time when the network is broken.  So, you usually can't assume that the IP that was given to the computer when it was set up is the current IP for that comptuer.

Being tech support SUCKS!! 

When I worked in tech support some smart arse came up with the idea of giving each piece of equipment a name. Granted not very meaningful names. More just a combination of letters and numbers. But these names were what you would see if you pinged the ip address. They were also written onto the external box of the equipment in clear view for the user. Then when people rang up with a query/problem we simply asked them for the name and we could easily resolve the ip address ourselves.

The next problem came when tracking the equipment down because the user had told you the 3rd floor rather than the 4th where it actually was!!!!!

don't get me started on IT.  Except my issues lie with my IT department, not the other way around.

First off, someone in the state legislature decided that all state campus networks need to be interconnected and that active directory is the best way to do that.  This of course means that any Linux machine on the network is crippled and cannot access network resources such as network drives or printers.  Too bad 90% of my work is on linux systems....  Secondly they decided on this system and have no idea what it takes to run it.  So the network is a giant hack job.  I have a home network running better then this thing.

i should have had a clue as to the problems I had when I started there.  As soon as I found out I was doing web development, I was introduced to the 'head web designer' on campus.  He promptly touted that the campus had the cutting edge web development software availible on the network.  He then opens up Frontpage to show me how to use it....

The latest installment has actually been with our help desk.  I'm attending a conference next week for which I have to have a large format poster (34x44).  Campus has a plotter capable of printing this size.  So I design a nice poster in FreeHand and head down to the help desk to ask about the printer, so I can make sure I set the margins and the resolution right.  The conversation whent something like this:

Me: "I just need to know the margins and resolution of the printer and if it is post script enabled.  I'm assuming it's CMYK, right?"

him: "ummmm, not sure." walks to printer and reads label "It doesn't say here.  We can print 33x34, is that what you need?"

me: "not really.  What format are you most comfortable printing. I'd prefer eps as I developed it in CMYK and don't want to deal with conversion loss.  You can do that right?"

him: "ummmm, eps?  Is that a macintosh format?  This printer is only configured to print power point documents, so you're going to have to save it as a ppt."

the grand finale is the actual code i'm working with.  It was origionally developed over the course of a few years by a few different people (alarm bell 1).  One of the developers speaks broken english (alarm bell 2).  This program is a collection of about 70 individual procedures which are not commented and do not follow any form of logical flow.  They were written in a language called IDL, which has implicit pointers.  AKA if you load a variable in a child procedure, it is loaded to a common stack where ANY procedure can access it.   I get the job of going into this rat's nest and pulling out the pieces I need.  Wouldn't be bad except for the fact that there is no documentation, the function names look like they are written in Borat-ese and they are fragmented to hell.  There are some functions called 4 layers deep to set a variable that is needed later 2 layers into another call; there are variables declared and quantities calculated that are never used; there are blocks of declared variables that aren't used followed by a whole set of variables declared on the fly.

sometimes I just want to smack people