Hello, operator?

I’ve got an old bank of data modems dialling out repeatedly to one of our suppliers at the moment. It’s good fun. Since most PBX’s don’t know what to do when you don’t select an option, it transfers you through to an operator. Of course, in this case, the agent on the phone will just get a load of whistles + squeals until the hang up. Probably got 15-20 modems on the go at the moment, all set for auto-redial.

Might give it another 20 minutes or so then call them up and see if we can discuss why my parts ordered yesterday for a 9a.m delivery still haven’t turned up and why I got a load of attitude from some snotty little kid plucked straight from school trying to patronise me about the fact that they don’t handle deliveries personally and so can’t be held responsible for delays.

Yes, sunshine, when you’re dealing with me, it’s all very personal.

A shock a day keeps the bandits at bay

Am really not in the mood to be here today. Whenever you end up having to work such a weird couple of shift patterns, you just feel wiped out. This is the downside to working in IT support and only just about made up for by the additional pay allowance. Still, since I’m unlikely to win any awards for employee of the month, I’m not too bothered.

We’ve actually had quite a few problems with vandalism on machines recently. People have trying to prise the cases open and are breaking the locks on them (yes, most are lockable cases). This is annoying as it means a report has to be filed, I have to deal with the helldesk to get it resolved, and money which should be getting filtered in my beer money or junket fund gets squandered on replacement cases.

So, am running a little 12v battery inside the cases with a wiring loop running to the lock at the rear. Insulated off, this should prevent the entire case becoming live, although to be honest I wouldn’t be too concerned if it did. But, 12v is enough to give people a decent little shock should they try anything.

Pop-ups galore

My attention returned to the intern this afternoon. After a bit of a nap followed by an extended lunch hour and a half, I kept using Remote Support to take control and load up various sites unsuitable for the office, shall we say. Hoping that his supervisor would walk past in light of his performance assessment from last week, this kept me entertained for a good hour or so. Don’t know why he didn’t just logoff. But, I overhead one of the sales assistants talking about it around the coffee machine - along the lines of “and did you see what he was looking at earlier?!”.

Word is bound to spread and get back to his supervisor by Friday morning…

Rise + shine

Truth be told, I’d fallen asleep around midnight and was rudely awoken at 4a.m by the early-bird engineer. A good trick I learnt a while back was to close your office door and scatter a box of paper clips on the floor. Then lie down with your foot pressed against the door and have a nice bit sleep. Should someone walk in, the door is stopped by your foot, you get woken up by the bashing of wood against bone, and it looks like you’re just trying to pick up all the paper clips. Of course, a comfortable floor helps.

Still, my cross-over cabling caused chaos. The early-bird engineer replacing me didn’t perform any routine checks (I knew he wouldn’t), so it wasn’t until a little after 8a.m the problems started. The helldesk were overloaded by 8.30a.m apparently, and they’d actually called me by 9a.m. I managed to wangle an additional call-out bonus since technically I was off-shift, and rocked up half an hour ago to what looked like a scene from War of the Worlds.

All sorted now though. Everyone thinks I’m wonderful by getting it all resolved so quickly. The helldesk look like (even more, if possible) incompetent fools. Plus, it’ll be lunch time in a little over an hour.

Now then, where’s those paperclips…

Keeping an eye open for ghosts

Looking on the bright side, I didn't have to face a Monday morning. Just as well really. With payday falling ever so conveniently on Friday, the weekend was begging to eat (or rather drink) up all my money. Still, having being called last night by our on-call engineer saying he was ill (he better be on death's door), I pulled working the graveyard shift tonight.

For those not familiar with graveyard shifts, it's where you get to sleep at your desk, wander around the building checking through people's drawers for good stuff to steal, and get paid an out-of-hours bonus. A good deal all things considered, except we don't have the 12-hour rule built into our contracts (something that will be changed in a couple of months when it's due for renewal), so I'll be working until 4a.m, then will be back in at 10a.m. It's a split-shift thing which balances out apparently. Not that I'll do much tomorrow either.

But, enough of the explanations. I like the graveyard shift, aside from the previously mentioned pleasures of getting paid extra to steal stuff, as the security guards are always a good laugh. Not uncommon for the scotch to get brought out by midnight and low-grade porn to be loaded up on the security monitors. I also have a good few hours without any of the helldesk around which makes it very peaceful, and loads of time to cause problems.

In fact, I've come up with a good one this evening - I'm about half-way through switching all our backbone patch cables to cross-over cables. I know fine well none of the techies on the rota first thing in the morning will figure it out, meaning I get to ride into work on my steed at 10a.m (well, maybe a touch later...), shout at them all to give me 20 minutes in the server room to sort things out, before casually walking out with everything working.

One worrying thing has caught my attention though. There's a few people reading this now (the more the merrier - tell all your friends, especially those working in IT that want some practical suggestions rather than comic-book stories found elsewhere) and e-mailing me, but a certain Snowman (or Snowball, or something) displays a worrying self-photo on their website. Nuff said about that the better. Keep up the studies young man - you'll get that job flipping burgers in McDonalds once you graduate no problem.