The Big Black Ball Part II

After leaving the big black ball in the drawer for a little while (days, weeks, I don't recall), inspiration struck Sven again. One afternoon while Mitch was out, Sven grabbed a coney dog that was otherwise going to get tossed and put it in the drawer under the remains of the big black ball. It went unnoticed for a few days until it started smelling. Then Mitch started digging through the top drawer, trying to locate the source of the smell. Unfortunately for him, he never found it.

A couple weeks later, everyone else started noticing the smell of the rotting coney dog, so Sven took it back out. Before tossing it in the trash, he talked Cynthia into eating it for $20. But Daniel overheard what was going on and put a stop to it before money could change hands.

Overheard in the Office #40

I'm sure to the user, this made perfect sense. But to us in IT, it was a good chuckle.  Sven took this call one day.


User: I'm not able to send my .pdf attachment.  Outlook is saying the file is too big.
Sven: OK, let's take a look at what's going on here.
<remotes in>
Sven: See, here's the problem.  This .pdf is 25MB in size, and the person you're sending it to can only receive 20MB.  The message is saying that their server is refusing to take it.  Unfortunately, while we control your server, we have no control over theirs.  Is there another way you can transfer the file, or can you break it up into 2 smaller files?
User: But it's only 3 pages!
Sven: Yeah?
User: Yeah, I sent a .pdf yesterday that was 7 pages and it went through just fine. And this one is only 3 pages.  How can it be bigger when it's 4 pages fewer?
Sven: <opens file and sees 3 pages of full page, full color graphics>  OK, here's what's going on........


You can say a lot of things about Sven, but the man has plenty of patience with users. Especially when the user is an attractive blonde.

Overheard at the Office #39

I've been through this before with a couple other coworkers, so I gave Mason the low down on how this would go.  Since you don't know what the hell you're doing, you're probably going to call GoDaddy support from the beginning, and they'll walk you through the process of moving a DNS zone from somewhere else to our GoDaddy account.  Since its moving from one GoDaddy account to another, they'll probably even tell you that all the records in the zone will just transfer over.  But they wont.  You'll come in tomorrow to an empty zone.  Record everything now and recreate everything as soon as the zone is available to edit in the new account.


So what happens?  Mason comes in the next morning to calls from $CLIENT that the web site isn't working.  Hmm, wonder why.  His ticket update:  "GoDaddy said that they would copy over all the DNS settings but they didn't. I put everything back in now.  Give DNS a little time to update and then the site will be fine."  If only you would have known this would happen and put everything in last night, right?

Overheard at the Office #38

Not too long after Steven Richard came onboard, I couldn't help but think of that scene in Talladega where Dennit says "Ricky Bobby? He's got two first names!" So I informed Sven that we were giving him the nickname Ricky Bobby and why. Sven was immediately onboard and started calling him Ricky Bobby directly. Steven eventually rage quit after making a lot of threats, in no small part to being called Ricky Bobby constantly. A few weeks later, I was debating the relative merits of a particular firewall line in a Facebook group, and because of my expressed distaste for said firewall, I got a private message from another member of the group who worked for the manufacturer of said firewalls and wanted to talk about my distaste. And I'll swear on a stack of Holy Books of your choosing, his name was Richard Steven (well, reversed from Steven Richards real name of course). We still keep in touch on Facebook, but he has thankfully moved on to bigger and better things since.