Overheard at the office #20

Dear Lord Baby Jesus, or as our brothers to the south call you, Jesús, we thank you so much for this bountiful harvest of Domino's, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell.

Our day before Thanksgiving lunch spread, inspired by Ricky Bobby.

Overheard at the Office #19

Coworker: They want to move from a workgroup to a full network.
Me: So they only have a partial network currently?  And they still get work done?

Said coworker confuses the terms network and domain.  Well, lots of things really. But today its network and domain.

The Big Black Ball

You may recall Mitch from a previous story involving his double, Box Mitch. I don't recall where this fits into the timeline in relation to Box Mitch, but here's another tale about poor Mitch getting a little more grief about something completely unnecessary.

At one point, Mitch went on a fitness kick. He was counting calories on everything he ate for lunch, counting every step with one of those belt pedometers, and then organizing it all on his phone so he could show us graphs. The worst of it was that he bought one of those big inflatable exercise balls to sit on. It came with a frame to hold it in place and to make it look more like an actual chair, but he was ultimately sitting on a big black ball all day. You know, because it would help him burn off an extra 3 calories a day or something like that.

This is where Daniel enters the picture. Daniel decided it was time to screw with Mitch a little bit. Nothing big and noticeable, in the beginning Daniel chose to keep it subtle. Every day when Mitch would step out go grab lunch or whatever, Daniel would go over to Mitch's desk and let a little air out of the ball. Again, nothing noticeable in one day, but definitely noticeable after 2 or 3 days.  So every couple days Mitch would pump it back up a little bit and complain about how it didn't hold air very well while everyone else tried to keep from laughing.

Finally after a little while of this, Daniel got pretty upset with Mitch (I don't recall why exactly this time, because it happened a lot) and just completely deflated the ball. Mitch had had enough of pumping it back up and just stuffed it into a drawer. He took the frame home, and the deflated ball sat there in the drawer for a few weeks, until inspiration struck again.....

Overheard at the Office #18

So I've got this coworker who insists on calling every single product in a class by a single name. Kind of like how a lot of people in Florida like to call every form of carbonated beverage a Coke. But he extends this out to ridiculous levels. Every printer is "The Printer," any layer 3 device is "The Firewall," and so on. It really comes in handy when you have no idea where to go, you can just blame "The Firewall," regardless of what is actually on the edge of the network.

Earlier today, this coworker managed to waste 2 hours of his own time in addition to wasting 2 hours of a client's time looking for "The Buffalo." According to him, a Buffalo Linkstation (which only exists in his head) went missing in a recent move, and he cannot wrap his mind around the fact that the Seagate Blackarmor that they do still have isn't The Buffalo, never has been The Buffalo, and never will be The Buffalo.  I guess a Buffalo Linkstation is the first NAS unit he encountered, so now every NAS in the world is "The Buffalo."  We did have a lot of Buffalo Linkstations deployed, so I'm going with that.

The same guy once told us in a meeting that grammar and spelling aren't all that important in network documentation. All you really need is completeness. So yeah, you just need 5 different things on that Visio diagram labeled "The Buffalo." Clear as mud.

Overheard at the Office #17 - AKA "The Gum"

This comes from a previous job.

It started out as a joke around the office about this piece of gum that was spit out into one of the urinals. Someone offered up $10 if someone else would pull out the gum and chew it. After a week of the price escalating and the urinal not being cleaned of this piece of gum, another certain someone carefully removed the gum from the urinal (no idea. He didn't say how and we didn't ask), taped it to a piece of paper with a written offer of $50 to chew the gum and proudly taped that piece of paper to the wall right above the urinal.

2 years later when I left that company, "The Gum" was still on the wall with the offer of $50.

Overheard at the Office #16

$COWORKER: We have this one phone that is randomly rebooting no matter which port it's plugged into.
$VENDOR: Is the switch rebooting?
$COWORKER: No, we've checked into that. And the client said no other phone has rebooted, just this one. I've got some logs from the phone.
$VENDOR: Are you sure the switch isn't rebooting? It has to be the switch.
$COWORKER: Yes, I'm sure. Here's the uptime of the switch in figure 1, and here's the log from the phone showing the resets that it's receiving from the PBX in figure 2.
$VENDOR: (ignores the email with the figures, calls in) I've checked the logs of the PBX, it hasn't logged any problems. Therefore it's either the switch rebooting or a bad cable. Can I close this ticket?
$COWORKER: No, you haven't done anything. It's not the switch. We've had this problem 3 other times with this model PBX, and there's dozens of cases of this online if you Google it. And could you stop calling at 3am? I told you nobody is here.
$VENDOR: (Sends three more emails, two of them over the weekend, ignores $COWORKER's reply to all of them Monday morning, closes ticket due to "lack of response.")

At one point $VENDOR was in a webex screen sharing session with $COWORKER and was actively trying to wrestle away mouse control to prevent $COWORKER from pulling up the phone log. Remind me why we pay for this "support?"

Overheard at the Office #15

Me: <troubleshooting an issue and then see a dialog box with a major error>
Me: How long has this been happening? It's probably related.
Client: That's a click-through error, don't worry about that.
Me: A what?
Client: A click through. It's nothing.
Me: OK.....