The Grumpy Admin

Once again, I have to help the “ink cartilage” consultant. I dial her up and call my boss into the room. I look at him and whisper, “Explanation point, NOT exclamation point.” I hold my finger up, and make the “just wait until you see this” face. He makes his "WTF are you talking about now?" face. I hit the speakerphone button.

The old lady answers. I ask if now is a good time to train her on the new application. She is ready. I ask her if she remembers her password, since she has already been locked out. She says yep, it’s “love, explanation point, zero, zero, seven.” Explanation point. My boss’s eyes get wide.

I start a remote session and take control of her desktop. On a side note, give showmypc.com a try. It works really well.

I double click the VPN icon on her desktop and explain what it does. I tell her the “Fleegerhoffen Algorithm” will keep her PC safe and secure. I didn't even have time to use the jargon generator. My boss has to step out of the room to contain his laughter.

We then start up the application, which has no business running over the VPN. She asks why it is so slow. I decide to push my luck. My next statement is so over the top, I am sure to get caught. It’s so outrageous that it will never work. I press my luck anyway. My boss walks back just as I go for it.

“Well, it takes a few minutes for the Flux Capacitor to charge up the VPN in my server room,” I lie.

“OK, we’ll just have to wait then,” she says.

Another wonderful email exchange.

Me: Dear VP, does your new employee starting next week need a cell phone or a desk phone?

VP: Yes.

Someday I'm going to push all the server racks out the window and go do my dream job.

If you send me an email calling your laptop a "Lap Top", I am of the opinion that you don't have the smarts to use that laptop sitting on your lap (top). Or perhaps, you need a different laptop altogether.

I’m in my office and I overhear Simone begging the facilities guy to turn the AC off. She is shivering at her desk and actually has a blanket. She says she only sticks her hands out to type. The facilities guy is sympathetic, but tells her there is not a lot he can do.

Why you ask?

Most everyone in the “South Wing” has blocked off their ceiling vents because one person kept the AC so cold. One by one they blocked off their vents, forcing all the cold air through the remaining vents.

Now there are just two working vents: The one blowing into the office of the person that started this mess by cranking the AC all the way down weeks ago. And the one vent in the big open area that blows directly down on Simone, the skinniest smallest (shyest) girl in the office.

She should start TheGrumpyOfficeWorker.com blog if you ask me.

This happened months ago, but I was thinking about it tonight, so I have decided to post it before I forget again.

I'm sitting in my office minding my own business when Martie comes to my doorway with an emergency. I follow her to her desk as she explains.

"My PC is beeping and that usually means it has been compromised," she says.

"Compromised?", I ask, holding back the laughter.

"Yes, it is beeping, which means I've probably been hacked," she explains.

Sure enough, I get to her cube and there’s beeping.

Well, I begin to listen and follow the sound. I leave her cube and head toward the kitchen. The beeping gets louder. I make my way across the kitchen and find the source of the beeping:

The five thousand dollar fancy stainless refrigerator.

Apparently, it beeps if the door is left open for an extended period of time. Beep....beep...beep. Damned refrigerator hackers.

When I first called the database consultant (see Choices), she made me wait until her husband was finished working on the printer. I assured her it had nothing to do with what we are doing with our remote session, but she wanted to be safe.

What was her husband doing you ask?

He was changing out the "ink cartilage".

Today I get saddled with cleaning up after two users who have been using two different versions of an obscure program to create different databases. They want to bring the two databases into one.

Well, as in most businesses the Admin is supposed to know how to fix PCs, teach any application, build servers, know everything Cisco and Microsoft, design webpages, fix phones, install security cameras, and work with databases. Did I miss anything?

One user is a consultant, who I had to start a remote session with to get access to a trashed home PC. To digress, this consultant had "Yahoo for an ISP". I had to explain the address bar in Internet Explorer. The consultant has been using the Yahoo search page for years, that's right f'ing YEARS, instead of the Explorer address bar. Anyway, after about 30 minutes I was able to pull the database back off of this person's spyware infested PC. (Wait until you hear about the ink in the printer......)

Well, I needed to make it clear that I want to help, but don't know what I am doing here with the databases and sure could use some guidance.

To make along story short, here is my email to the full-time user in charge of this mess:

*************************

[User],

I now have both databases.

However, I don’t know how you want them combined. Basically, since I don’t use this program, I don’t know what I don’t know.

Would you like to work directly with [the vendor] to combine the databases in a manner you see fit, or would you prefer to tell me your goals and have me work with them?

*************************

The users response:

OK

That's right. One word. Two letters. WTF does "OK" mean? I don't know what to do anymore with these people.

I look up to see Jan and Snow White in my doorway. As usual, Jan starts off with a question I cannot answer:

“How do we convert it?” she whines.

“How do you convert what Jan?” I ask, trying to hide my desire to kill her where she stands.

“An Adobe back to a Word,” she whines.

After a few minutes of patiently listing to her latest emergency, she needs to convert PDFs to DOCs.

Let me digress. I work in a company where we PDF everything. If I sneeze into a Kleenex, we flatten it out and drop it on the scanner. Seriously, there is a bad habit shared by nearly everyone here that involves an end-user working on a document, printing it to paper, scanning it, having the scanner email it to them, and then usually not saving the original document. I’ve been pretty mad for a while that my mail server is filling up with this nonsense. But I can’t stop it.

Well, it finally came back to bite the end users in the ass on Friday. Now they have realized that they can’t open their PDFs in Winword. Well duh. So, now they need to convert back. This wouldn’t happen if you just saved the original DOC you nitwits.

So, I installed the software to Jan’s PC, and showed her “What button to hit” and it now converts back. I don’t need to tell you how bad of a job even the best programs do. Now she gets to go back through all of these shitty “pdf to word docs” and clean up what the OCR couldn’t. Serves her right though.

I think I’ll head home tonight and copy some of my DVDs to DIVX then to VCD then to VHS and then back to DVD. What button do I hit?