From: Dylan
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 15:22:27 +0200
To: bofh@bofhcam.org
Subject: Just PFY - Tales from the front

Well, my boss is away so everything should be quiet, yes?

No.

Some background first - my boss (also the MD of the company), an ex
video editor (read: designer - and we KNOW what THEY are like - a dozen
aplications open, stupid roaming profiles must work, the hibernate
function WILL work, even if I use it while playing and MP3 off the
network, and then try and restore at home, the MP3 must continue
playing) used to manage what he calls "the IT infrastructure" here.
Therefore, he knows that everything works.  Including the Pentium MMX
with 192 megs of RAM that runs (well, crawls) windows 2000.  With Office
2000, Pastel 6 and other memory-ravenous, CPU-ravenous bloatware.

The week before he left for Germany on three holiday, I went through
what I shall remember forever as IT hell week.  I work for a TV
production company, and one of the producer's machines went pear-shaped
in the monitor department.  So I replaced the VGA card.  Twice.  The
third time I though there must be another problem, like, maybe the
motherboard.  So I go to my boss with this news.  He doesn't believe me,
so I spend three days working to prove this, while said producer
whines.  (I thought about offering him some cheese to go with the whine,
but being nasty to Lusers while boss is peering over your shoulder could
possibly be a career-limiting move, especially when said Lusers is the
boss's baby brother).

I prove it.  I order a new motherboard from the supplier, and rebuild
the machine.  From the ground up.  After vacuuming assorted dust
elephants out of the casing.  It works.  For about 3 hours, at which
point the video card dies horribly yet again.  I get a new video card,
under warranty.  Two weeks later, the machine is still working.

My boss goes on holiday.

Arrive at work on Monday, expecting things to be nice and quiet.  No
internet.  No email, no web, no ftp.  We're in South Africa.  The web
servers (which also host client email) are somewhere in America. Don't
ask me why - I didn't set it up like that.

Call the ISP, get a recorded voice which says "There has been a
catastrophic connectivity failure in our Rosebank - New York circuit."
Okay, fine, nothing I can do about that.  Except that now every client
who hsots mail on our servers is calling every fifteen bloody minutes to
find out why they can't get mail.  One of them actually says that she
knows that I can't do anything about it, but her boss is watching her,
making sure sure she at least appears to be doing something.  She's the
techie for one of our clients.  I resolve to be nice to her in the
future.  I put my phone on voicemail, telling them that our ISP has lost
its line to America.  They stop calling.  They leave voice mails
instead.  I delete them, unheard.

This lasts three days.  I switch my mobile off.  I then call in sick.

I come back to discover that one of our designers is havign problems
with her FlashMX.  I eventually make it to her machine.  She has around
2000 fonts isntalled, with names like "Group Sex Bold Italic"  I remove
the more obviously unusable ones.  The machine speeds up, she decides to
work in another package.  Half an hour later she is back.  Flash is
crashing again.  When she saves.  To the server.  I look at the
directory.  It is set to read only.  I fix that. It works.

And it's only 2pm...