Working with Idiots - Part II

So today was no different than yesterday really. I came to work knowing that nothing regarding my issues with doing my job had been resolved; rather, they were compounded by the fact that they determined nothing was "unusual" about the latency issues we've ALL been having in the office since they migrated us over to a new network. Right... fuck you buddy.

Moving on, I finally had an experience with Tier 2 for Microsoft that I will never forget, and by never forget I mean a memory that will make me want to have a seething hatred towards any Indian (Pakistani) that works in the IT field EVER AGAIN.

This starts out as a normal escalation procedure, where we at the MicroFail Helpdesk raise an issue to Tier 2 regarding a multi-user problem (5 or more people that are being affected by the same issue). Now to give some background information, latency, lag, or ping times, are the amount of time it takes two points to connect on any given network/internet location. This affects overall responsiveness working online, communication between people/computers, etc..

That being said, normal ping times between people on MicroFail's corporate network is usually around100ms (milliseconds) if they're within the same physical location, more than acceptable for efficient workflow/throughput. Well, this particular group of people located in the Portland, Oregon office called in stating that their latency/lag was awful, taking sometimes close to five or six seconds to send an instant message, time between what you've said over your IP phone has been heard by the recipient, etc.. I take the call, diagnose, and escalate as normal.

A few hours pass then I get into a conversation with one of the Tier 2 agents... who begins to ask me about the issue... so I explain it to him (because apparently he is incapable of reading the ticket and forms I submitted to have the issue escalated in the first place). When I post him the tracert logs, which show that their latency is averaging 3000ms, he replies with: "So?" SO? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I ask him: "What do you mean so? this is completely unacceptable and outrageous that it's causing their work and jobs to suffer for productivity for what they do." He replies: "What do you mean by outrageous?" LOOK ASSHOLE, IF I HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO WHY WHAT OUTRAGEOUS MEANS AND HOW THIS ISSUE AFFECTS OVERALL PRODUCTIVITY IN THE WORKPLACE, YOU NEED TO FIND ANOTHER FUCKING JOB.

I proceeded to explain to him how this works and affects the people having the issue in the first place, why they called me to begin with, and what the resolution needs to be from him, the people that weESCALATE TO to help with these issues because we can't solve them to begin with.

After he contacted the user, he closed the ticket because he claimed he didn't see anything wrong with their network connection... after I clearly and concisely stated what the problem was in the initial ticket, troubleshooting, and escalating paperwork. He then proceeded to ream me out for about half an hour on how we submit outages based on issues we handle from incoming calls.

Are you fucking kidding me? you're going to berate me because you're an incompetent, lazy, piece of shit? are you fucking serious? I had to tell you how to do YOUR damn job, you do not get the privilege of rubbing it in my face about how you believe our process should be run, when YOU can't even bother to read the ticket that's put there because of the process YOUR Tier of help says it needs in order to do YOUR job. FUCK YOU.

I do not understand how these people get the jobs they have. I do not understand how they can sit there and tell me I must be crazy and wrong for submitting an issue that apparently they can't find, when in fact... the proof is in their own documentation they asked for. However, I can understand why people get so upset when they get Indian people on the phone when calling for technical support. Every single one of the people I have to deal with in regards to help on this queue from Tier 2, has been rude, arrogant, pompous, and downright retarded.

A sincere and hearty couple of middle fingers flying from me to you Tier 2 MicroFail agents. Stay classy fuckwads.

Working with Idiots - Part I

I'd like to preface this by saying that I work with a lot of incompetent people Monday through Friday.

Some background information:

1) There are three separate networks we are now using at work to do our jobs - Microsoft (VDI, VPN), Unisys, and the vLan

2) The above mentioned networks do not always get along with each other when we try to use VPN to connect

Moving on... So this story starts out with me going to work as normal today and arriving to work, setting up my machine to begin taking calls, which goes fine and dandy for about the first hour...

Shortly after that first hour of work, my VPN connection becomes unstable, forcing me to disconnect after about 30 seconds... in order to connect back to the VPN I have to tell it to do so, which times out repeatedly for 6 minutes at a time. Well, so now I try to connect using the VDI, that also fails and times out. So this goes on and on for about an hour after which, I decide that something bigger is the problem.

So after some diagnosis between myself and a few other colleagues we determined that the issue is because they changed us over from connecting to the Unisys network directly, to the vLan. Well this creates some serious connectivity issues due to overall latency and simple networking protocols that our connections go through in order to maintain stability, whether that's through VPN, VDI, or otherwise.

Now comes the "fun" bit... take a wild fucking guess who manages our network and where they live? Some guy, named Drew... IN THE GREAT BLUE FUCKING YONDER OF AUSTRALIA! Can someonePLEASE explain to me why someone who would normally sleep during our business hours (where this person lives in Australia is 16 hours ahead mind you) is set as our network administrator? Please, for the love of God and all that is holy, please fucking tell me why they didn't assign our queue to someone locally that we have IN OUR BUILDING?!?!? We have networking admins in our damn building, what's the point in assigning the responsibility to someone not even relevantly close to our location? let alone in the same fucking country?

So after colliding with that first issue of not being able to contact the person we need to in order to get this issue resolved in a timely fashion, I think to myself... hmm... why is it that we don't have administrative rights to perform the actions required to do our job? What is the point to assigning this to an individual who cannot help us?

Now my manager comes back from his 2 hour hiatus to wherever, doing whatever he was doing, and decides to join us back in the land of MicroFail and we have to explain this situation to him. Now, let me offer some insight to my manager: this is the man... who upon moving his computers into our queue area freaked out for five minutes over wondering why he was unable to use the internet after booting them up. Guess why? I'll give you one guess... oh fuck it... HE DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO CHECK TO SEE IF HE PLUGGED THE FUCKING NETWORK CABLES IN. Baby steps here folks... basic baby steps. The bottom line is, the man has no concept how the queue works, nor does he understand what it is we actually do for our jobs. He is not technically savvy by any means and honestly doesn't deserve the position he has. It is not the same type of queue as the rest of the building we work in, it's an entirely different breed of a call center.

So we explain this situation to him and he seems to believe there's a workaround to this, regardless of what we tell him. He doesn't understand that we cannot simply reroute the way our machines connect to the network because we don't have the necessary administrative rights to do so. Upon explaining to him that the person WHO DOES have admin rights to work this out, is 16 hours ahead; I look at his clock and tell him: "It's 2:41pm our time right now, that means it's 6:41am their time." He replies: "Don't you mean 8:41am?" I reply: "No, 2:41pm to 2:41am is 12 hours, plus 4. Resulting in 6:41am." REALLY? IS IT THAT FUCKING HARD TO TELL TIME?! WHY ARE YOU MY MANAGER??????? That's what I want to know...

So after deliberating my fate for the rest of the day, the ultimate decision was to send me home from work because of situation at hand.

My thoughts on the matter? Unisys has no idea how to effectively delegate work and administer their employees. This situation and company is run ass fucking backwards and will probably not be functioning in Rochester for very much longer. Bottom line? Never underestimate the power of a bunch of idiots.