New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!

I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.

P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!

Today at work, still laugh thinking back to it!

We were on lunch break but the linux support engineers who are on the phones as well have to pick up calls anyways (very small team).

*engineer walks to the table, sits down: Ahhh rest, finally!*
*tringggggggggg*
*engineer pulls a face like 'oh for fucks sake' and walks back to his desk*
*puts headphones on and clicks the answer button just as it disappears*
"really!?! Alright lets finally eat now"
*sits for literally one second*
*tringgggggggggg*
*Engineer seems quite pissed off now. walks to his desk again, puts on headset, clicks the answer button JUST as the call stops again*
"Mother of god, fucking really?"
*stays as his desk for a minute or so, walks back, stays hovering above his chair for a little and finally sits down again*
"Finall......"
*TRINGGGGGGGGGGGG*
"MOTHERFUCKER. THESE GUYS TIME IT OR SOMETHING!?!?"
*walks back to his desk very frustrated this time*
*puts on headphones very quickly and presses the answer button*
*answer works but the call is literally dropped the second he starts it (it was a real client)*

"OH FOR FUCKS FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING SAKE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK"

*walks back to table again and sits down. Takes sandwich and....*

*TRINGGGGGGGGGG MOTHERFUCKER*

"FUCKING COCKSUKING MOTHERFUCKING PIECES OF WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK EVER"

*gives a deadly look to another engineer: "I am NOT going to take it this time! En-fucking-joy."*

We laughed so hard xD

This is Why I give IT support so much respect.

Friend: my computer stopped working can you help?
Me: (porn...again) fine I'll help.
Friend: come over when your ready
Me: Be there tomorrow bro

Next day.....

Me: where is your desktop
Friend: upstairs, I tried everything man
Me: look at the monitor... look at the hp piece of shit.. see green light on... look back at the monitor...no light... look at my friend.
Friend: 😕
Me:😪
Friend:😳
Me: look behind the desk...
Friend: 😰
Me: 😪your monitor is unplugged
Friend: 😅
Me: fuck you lose my number

!rant
A few days ago a friend of mine rang me up complaining about internet issues with his computer. As usual I did the "is it plugged in, turn it off then on again" sort of thing to waste time while my pasta was cooking. After a while he asked if I had another bogus solution, so I suggested flushing his toilet.

He runs off, I hear the flush, comes back and viola - it fucking worked.

The point of this is: if it don't work, flush the toilet. You're welcome, tech support out ✌️

How not to give support..

Me: Creates ticket on support site, letting them know their webservice returns "maintenance" page.
Support: "It works on our end."
Support: *closes ticket*

Euhm.. excuse me?

Me: Creates another ticket with a screenshot and the curl response information..
Support: Sends screenshot back that it works on their end. "Maybe check your firewall"
Support: *closes ticket*

I ain't playing these games..

Me: Creates new ticket with more curl responses from 4 different servers to prove it's not "firewall" related.
Support: ..

2 days later

Me: Sends *friendly* reminder.
Support: ..

6 days later

Me: Creates ticket again saying I'm still having issues.
Support: "I'm forwarding this to our technical support"
Support: *closes ticket*

10 minutes later.

Technical Support: "Here's the manual for our integration .pdf."

Excuse me, you say what now? I KNOW HOW IT WORKS, I'VE WRITTEN THE INTEGRATION ALREADY. THE SERVICE JUST SEEMS TO BE DOWN FFS.. pls..

Me: Sends mail to their project manager who manages the clients dossier with support history and such.
Him: "I'll check it out and let you know."

1 day later.

Support: "We had some issues this and that, wasn't publically availble, works now, .."

What a nice way to waste your time..

First rant.

Managing an app in Canada, came back home to Thailand to visit my parents.

No deployments while you're gone, just bug fixes, boss said.

Landed at 3am, "hey I know we only support desktop but we got new customers only on iPad, make it responsive in a day and deploy." Wtf.

Haven't even seen my parents. In Starbucks.

Mark.

Mark was a support guy who could have been replaced by a robot. Nearly every support request that came in, whether it made sense or not, had a reply saying:

"Thank you for your query, I will escalate with the development team"

...and then I would have a message saying:

"Hi Almond urgent issue case xxx - I think you need to PLEASE CHECK LOGS" (yes, with that capitalisation.)

I'd then look at the case, take 10 seconds to work out the customer had done something stupid when calling our API (often forgetting their authentication details, despite a clear message telling them as such) and tell Mark what the issue was, and how to find it for himself next time. I'd then usually get:

"Thank you but PLEASE CHECK LOGS to see if there is any more info we can provide to customer"

...there would be more back and forth, and then eventually something like the following would reach the customer...

"Very sorry the development team have a major issue they will fix very soon but in the meantime a workaround is (instructions for using authentication details)"

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Undev life
"If I'm ever on life support, unplug me .......and then plug me back in, see if that works"

Rant! I found a bug in payment provider's api. The bug involves sending an invalid (!) Stripe ID to that API, (which I send on purpose btw) Which causes a complete white page when you login to their systems and view the details of that customer. Btw the API will accept that invalid Stripe ID without questioning and returns a 200 status code back.

So I send a mail to there support saying "look I found this bug by accident, this is how you can reproduce it"

And the support team send me a message back saying "then don't send an invalid Stripe ID"...

You don't freaking say... *sigh*

We had the most fucking retarded client today. No, seriously, if you ever beat their level you have a serious mental issue.

They had a mail problem for which they'd need to check at the side of another company since we don't have those fucking logs.

Their statements:
- they entered an email address In the text field of mail-tester.com and were furious that they didn't get the results sent.
Note: it says right on that page that YOU JUST NEED TO SEND THE EMAIL ADDRESS WHICH IS PRE-ENTRRED IN THAT TEXT FIELD AN EMAIL.
- their company has been a reputable 'conservative' company which hasn't done anything wrong since 19xx so the fact that they'd end up on a blacklist was FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS and bullshit.
- our support wasn't willing to help and only willing to tell them outrageous lies.
- the other it company was only reachable at a premium number and thus expensive to call.

Emails back and forth and finally they CC'd the other company. They're reply was fucking priceless:

"we never had a premium number. Feel free to call us on *number* any time during the week between *time* and *time*.

Then he told us that we should just go back to sleep.

It was way worse than that but due to privacy and my own memory this is all I can tell.

Just wow.

Hey everyone - earlier tonight a surprise change in the Apple subscription API response caused devRant++ members on iOS to temporarily lose their supporter status. All should be restored now, and within the next day supporter start date for all community members in this group will be reset back to the correct start time.

We appreciate all of your support very much and apologize for this issue - I have to do some investigation into how this change happened and if there was any warning.

Thanks everyone!

IBM

I have replied to them with scripts, curl commands, and Swagger docs (PROVIDED TO SUPPORT THEIR API), everything that could possibly indicate there's a bug. Regardless, they refuse to escalate me to level 1 support because "We cant reproduce the issue in a dev environment"

Well of course you can't reproduce it in a dev environment otherwise you'd have caught this in your unit tests. We have a genuine issue on our hands and you couldnt give less of a shit about it, or even understand less than half of it. I literally gave them a script to use and they replied back with this:

"I cannot replicate the error, but for a resource ID that doesnt exist it throws an HTTP 500 error"

YOUR APP... throws a 500... for a resource NOT FOUND?????????!!!!!!!!!! That is the exact OPPOSITE of spec, in fact some might call it a MISUSE OF RESTFUL APIs... maybe even HTTP PROTOCOL ITSELF.

I'm done with IBM, I'm done with their support, I'm done with their product, and I'm DONE playing TELEPHONE with FIRST TIER SUPPORT while we pay $250,000/year for SHITTY, UNRELENTING RAPE OF MY INTELLECT.

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

My boss is still forcing us to support IE11. Recently, we started having even more bugs with one of our vendors on IE. We filed bug reports with the vendor to fix it, and they came back with "no. Why would we fix anything for IE11? Not even Microsoft is fixing anything for IE11." Boss's answer: well, let's make a separate component for IE11. Probably using flash and/or silverlight. We asked about redirecting IE traffic to Edge, he said that's "the nuclear option." So, doing the thing that Microsoft suggests, that involves not much work at all is "the nuclear option"; ignoring industry standards and recommendations, introducing well known security vulnerabilities, losing money, and trying to circumvent the vendor that serves out our major product, however, is totally reasonable. Our IE traffic is less than 3% of our users at this point.

Contacted ProtonVPN support few days back.
Issue resolved, the Support guy ended up asking about my username's relation with Call Of Duty...
And that's how I ended up making another friend.

Today someone called about issues with setting up email (they were hosting where I work) locally.

Fellow support guy spend half a FUCKING hour trying to explain it.

Throughout that half our, our activities existed of making gun-to-head gestures, sending meme faces back and forth (derps, fuckthisshitimout's, trololol's and so on).

It was hard to contain our laughter but damn he needed that badly 😆

Phone rings, recruiter: "hi Scott just come across your CV and really want to talk to you about an exciting opportunity"
Me: "Ok, cool, can I just qualify this call, what was the keyword search you used to find my profile?"
Recruiter: "it's for a Java developer role for an exciting employer"
Me: "so you matched me on a Java training course I did 8 years ago?"
Recruiter: "ok, but I see you're fully qualified in c#"
Me: "you mean the support developer role from 5 years ago?"
Recruiter: "yes"
Me: "😑"
Recruiter: "listen it's a pretty bad line can I call you on a land line or drop you an email?"
Me: "sure drop me an email with your contact details and I'll give you a call back"

Still waiting on that email...

Why can't recruiters just admit straight away that they blindly called you without even reading your CV

Paypal Rant #2

Paypal might just be the only company with 98% of their employees being support staff because not a soul on this planet knows how to work with that fucking piece of shit of a company's service.

No really, if there was a shittiness-rating from 1-10 (10 = worst) you would have to store paypal's rating as a string or invent a new data type because no CPU could fucking work with such a big ass fucking number.

If I had to choose between Paypal and going back to manually trading physical goods/animals for stuff I would gladly choose the latter, because Paypal, go suck a bag of dicks you useless fucking shitpile of a "company".

Worst interview is the one that actually got me where I am today.

Its been 15 years ago, but I remember very well. Since it was a startup back then they didn't really have any job titles yet or what so ever. I applied for the role of network engineer, heck I didn't care I needed a paycheck.

5 minutes into the interview the smalltalk left the room and they started asking me questions, mainly about me as a person. Eventually it was my turn. After my first question I facepalmed so hard.. Do you guys have any SLA or documentation around here? Heard of ITIL? How is your load balancing?

They stared at me as if I was some kind of alien that had just invaded their little safe planet.. it was hilarious.

An hour later they called me to come back in and sign a contract.. from there on I kind of multi tasked my way around the first year.. bit of network support & design, customer support, sending and packaging orders after 5PM.. god we had long but awesome days.. hence, we were just the 5 of us. Nowadays we've got 150 developers out of 1019 total staff currently.. We also improved interview questions and processes ;)

Girl: hello this is amazon support center, hope you're feeling great today, how are you?

Me: im good...

Girl: glad to hear that, how may i help you?

Me: a few moments ago i was on... sigh, actually im not good im extremely sad right now because i was scammed on my amazon account for $250, im calling to ask if that product can be charged back.

*literally 30-60 seconds of silence*

Me: .....hello??

Girl: ok sir ill give u another line to call please dont hang up ok? stay with me

Me: maam im not doing suici

Girl: +1-532...

Me: ...

Swagger does not send request body for GET calls.! WHAT THE FUCK..! And the argument supporting is get calls should not have any request payloads and rather should have response payloads since its a "get" call. Are you serious?? What if there are parameters to be passed which cannot be accomodated in the params or the header. Even though people are kind of literally abusing on their issues page still they adamantly refuse to add support for this.

Swagger you had high standards in my book. You just fell so deep down there is no coming back.

Guys, I think it's time to fight back!

Whenever a client ask you about IE9 support, tell him to find someone else, because noone the fuck uses IE9 and if someone somehow does, then it's his fault!

Then he will search for other dev, but if we all do so, we can forget about supporting stupid old shit again!

When I left university I got a Graduate Developer role at a local start-up. For the first year there i did html and css, second year I was in the support team.

Not a problem because sometimes you have to eat some shit to get where you want to be. But third year I got moved into the Dev team properly.

A month in, the Support team, without someone with a devs brain and a "devs" knowledge of the product, started falling really far behind and struggling and the MD told me I'd be going back into Support for another 6-12 months. So I told him to fuck off, and if he did I'd just leave. They never did and I stayed. 👍

My wifi was hacked two times last year, so I decided to change the factory credentials. Some months ago a tree fell on top of the cables on the street, cutting my internet connection. I call the ISP and when they get here they say I have no right for costumer support as I have altered my own connection.
WHAT. THE. FUCK
I had to revert the credentials to admin/admin in order get my internet back. These ISPs live in the fucking stone age. How the fuck do they force me to fucking have my router exposed with a fucking "admin/admin".
Fuck them.
I hope some day we have a cable revolution and finally have some rights over the networks we pay for with both tax money and excesive fees with low fucking speeds. Fuck them. Really.

Around 27 hours at new customer location.

They had a server failure due to incompetence.

They had fired their own IT guy and called us 6 months later because the server stopped responding.

First diagnostic. 2 drives are dead in a raid 5 with one hot spare. Raid controller then proved to be broken once the disks was replaced.

Waiting for new raid controller and installing.

Backup non existing, no one changed dat tape during the 6 months without IT. The tape was just a transparent plastic band, no media left.

Raid config is stored in static ram on controller, no backup!

Several hours in tech support to find out how to rebuild raid config from existing disks.

Proves to be impossible to rebuild raid set due to some checksum failures.

More hours with support to enable some diagnostic read only mode to mirror low level content to external drive.

Then many more hours to copy parts of the tree until it gets an error, restart after that and go on.

In the end we got around 70% back.

During this time I manage to be in contact with the raid manufacturers all support centers, one in europe, one in the us and one in Taiwan, switching each time one if them closed for the night.

The customer later declined a steady support contract due to us being to expensive ;)

Some just don’t want to learn.

I once worked Tech Support for a point of sale software package. There was really no internal help desk, so we got all of those questions as well.

One day our front receptionist that her computer is being really weird and she can't type - it keeps inserting 3s in the middle of what she is typing.

I take the short walk down the hall to her desk and see that, indeed, a never ending string of 3s is being input to her screen.

"I can't figure out what's wrong." she says.

Then I reach over and remove the edge of an open binder whose edge was resting on the 3 key and enter key on the num pad.

"That should fix it."

Walked back to my desk.

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

When the client asks why you billed them for something that was supposedlly your fault and takes a defense when you turn around with the emails and documentation to support that the code is working like it should and was requested by them... Awkward silence... And they still come back with well could you knock off half the hours. Client==fired

Side note.......have been having issues with this clent for a year so it was their time coming.

I see a trend here.

Posts of people with good number of ++’s get more ++’s than the posts of people with less number of ++’s. Even if the post of person with good number of ++’ is just a normal conversation starter and post of person with less number of ++’s is an actual good fucking rant.

It’s not a bad thing, per se. I hope nobody gets offended. All in good spirit.

To people with good number of ++’s:
Let’s not hold back and ++ the good content of people with less number of ++’s.

To people with less number of ++’s:
Don’t hold back your thoughts. Be free. Write free. Don’t try to make your rant to look a certain way to get more ++’s. We are all here to support.

Let’s grow together and spread positivity.

Peace.

I need your support guys... It's been long time since I last posted, but this is a really awesome community and I was little busy. But now I'm back with a bang.... @dfox

My work laptop (windows) updated yesterday. Today my monitors keep flickering, hanging, and going black for a few seconds then come back with an error that my display drivers crashed. Since I have basically zero access to anything admin on this machine, I put in a help desk ticket with all the details, the error message, even screen shots which took forever to get because of all the crashes.

They finally respond after about an hour, and tell me that my computer does not support 3 screens so I will have to use 2, and that is what is causing the crash. Well I have been using 3 screens with this computer since I started there in 2014, and it has worked perfectly until the update, so I asked if they could revert the update.

He told me that they could not revert it, and not only that, but I couldn't have been using 3 monitors before because the computer doesn't support it and never has. REALLY??? I just freaking told you I have been doing that for over 3 years so obviously it does support it you deaf, stupid retard. Try using your brain for 2 seconds and work on a solution instead of calling me a liar and dismissing my issue without thought.

After going back and forth for about 5 minutes I gave up and hung up. Finally I fixed it by switching out my docking station with another one I found laying around. Not sure why that worked, but I'm back to working on all 3 monitors. I called the guy back to tell him it's working and sent a picture of my setup, his response: "Well I don't know why that works because your laptop is too old to support that."

Useless...

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

I didn't scream.. just told him to jump off of terrace..
What ticked me?! He was a support guy..slowest mofo ever..
I was in the middle of fixing major fuckup on prod, when our VPN to client disconnected. I rushed over to support to ask if it is 'just' an expired session (which he was in charge of renewing but constantly fucked up) or if there is some other problem, so I know how to proceed..do I need to contact our sysadmins, client's support guys etc..
He
started
to
slooooooooowly
explain
I
am
not
the
only
one
with
VPN
problems
...
Was that what I asked you?! // he had an annoying habit of slooooowly talking and explaining unrelated things & personal stuff that bothered him & most of the times he chose the most time sensitive period to drone off..
So I cut him of saying, that others were probably not 'tinkering' with production and that I need this back ASAP, so if he could tell me when the session will be renewed or if there is something else problematic..
He said he will check..I didn't move.. he looked at me insurprise, you want me to check *NOW*?! Yeah, it's urgent.. He proceeded very very veeeery slooooowly, taking the support phone../* he was even eating sandwich during that, so only one hand free, typing one letter at a min */
I was finaly notified that the session expired and that he will fix it soon (meaning in 15-20mins o.O which should not take him more than 5).. and was like 'can I do sth else for you'?! Yeah, do the backflip.. you know the rest..

Finally it was my turn to receive a call from the now infamous Indian "Windows Technical Support Department" from a spoofed out of service 1-888-425-6866 number. My wife and I are on vacation we had just gotten back from the beach and she was taking a shower so I had all the time in the world to play along with them. It is too long to type out but it was extremely entertaining especially the bits that happened after I finally informed them that I own a Mac. The final thing he told me on the phone before hanging up was to go fuck my sister and I felt I must have performed well to deserve that.

fucking hostgator!

go suck a cock you developers!

everything from their payment system to their support is crap.

a few days ago, i purchased a website from hostgator, with a year of hosting during black friday weekend. i had obtained a black friday coupon code that entitled me to roughly $160 off its usual price. that said, i filled out the registration form and clicked the 'checkout' button.

right after i clicked it, i saw i forgot to put in the coupon code, and pressed the back button on my browser. then i put in the code and proceeded with checkout.

guess what?

those MOTHERFUCKING GREEDY ASS BITCHES charged me TWICE, one with the coupon and one without.

i contacted customer support and told them what happened after waiting about double the time i was supposed to be connected to support.

of course, they asked for my fucking "security" pin over the customer support live chat (totally not ironic).

they sent a confirmation email, and cancelled the payment without the coupon.

then ONE FUCKING DAY LATER, I tried to connect to my website.

MY SITE WAS FUCKING SUSPENDED.

die in a hole.

i contacted customer support once more, and after explaining the story, I had to wait four to eight hours.

i'll see how it turns out tomorrow.

die in a hole hostgator🖕

My company got another contract to support a research institute. My current contract has shitty leadership that won't back us against our boss (different company, same contract) without proof. The fact that 3 of the 4 of us dread going to work isn't enough?

Anyways. Talking to the other site about transferring. Need to gtfo to a less toxic environment where I won't be made to work fucked up hours with a boss who doesn't like women in tech, and thinks he's something special because he's vegan (but had real leather jackets and bike seats, but that's an entirely different story) and does yoga and plays the guitar.

Meanwhile, he resents his kids and seems to regret getting married. All because he used his military education benefits to pay for their school.

The blue icon is back on VSCode and multiple root directory support! Finally!!! This is now my full time text editor. Goodbye Sublime!

So, boss asks for support on sunday, I say sure, no problem. I arrive, get to my station and suddenly my nose, eyes and throat become itchy. The goddamn building's been fumigated. Fucking assholes. I'm going back home dizzy and nauseous.

N: Me
M: Mother

M: Can you help me? I can't update pages.

N: Sure *Checks problem* it looks like you installed it with the old apple account, you just need to reinstall it using your new one.

M: What about all my pages documents on icloud?

N: *Compares documents on mac to her other Apple devices that never had the old account* See? The documents would have to be on the new account.

M: Are you sure? I don't want to lose any documents.

N: I know, don't worry their on your new iCloud.

M: *Calls apple support*

N: *Talks to apple support who after an hour of chatting to her through me because I translate customer support to mother confirms what I was telling her*

N: Reinstalls pages and everything is fine.

I was originally going to make a post talking a bit about how people love to second guess anything I say but thought this story provides a decent example. When it's something of a personal nature or someone is asking for my opinion in genral then it's perfectly reasonable to ask multiple people. It doesn't bother me when someone asks for my help, it bugs the shit out of me when someone asks for my help and then doubts everything I say in this case even after providing some evidence to back up my claim and wasting a solid hour. If you ask for my help your trusting that I have the knowledge necessary to assist, if I don't know for certain I'll try googling the problem but even in that case calling support doesn't bother me because I clearly don't know how to help.

P.S. This was my first story, how did I do?

Support elevates a ticket.

Ticket: customer is getting a weird error uploading photo.

Can’t recreate. Tell support to call them back. I’ll sit in on the call.

Watch the process. Noting extraordinary...

Hmm.

Me: can you get the customer to open the pic in photo viewer?

Support asks as much.

Support: uh, he says he gets a similar error opening this photo in the photo viewer.

Me: 🤦‍♂️ that is a corrupt file!

Me:
Totally riffing to my new playlist....
the ideas are just flowing.....
Code flying...
changing in my brain....
I think I've got I might have it.....
...... RING RING ITS THE MOTHERFUCKING BOSS,
Boss:
Why is the whole website down?

Me: WTF, looks fine here, all logs are clear.

Boss: I just got an email saying the whole thing is fucked. Stop everything and fix it now.

Me: but we just agreed dev is taking priority over any support issues within sla and I've checked from everywhere there are no issues, just data issues probably from user error.

Boss: Just get it back and figure it out!!!!! Why are you being difficult?

Me: okay whatever, let's patch each of these shits.

COULDVE SENT THIS ANYWHERE BUT NOW MY IDEA IS GOOOONEEE!!!!!! NULL FUCKING DATA FIELD ON A SINGLE FUCKING EMAIL....FRAAAAACKKK THIS

Comes back to hometown for easter holidays.
(Not so close) 'friends & family' tech support requests start rolling in..

!rant !dev
True story. Some years ago I worked, for a network manufacturer in the support department. One of me jobs was to help end-customer (private people) over the phone, who could not get online.

One day a 60+ year old woman called the support line, because se could not get on the Internet. And because our name was on the router, she called our support.

A colleague of mine took the call, and we could quickly see by his expression the it was "One of those calls". The minutes went by and they had gotten no closer to a solution after 45 min.

That was when I herd my colleague say "Well from what you tell, all the settings here are fine. Can you please close all the windows, so we can look at other settings". My colleague the looked weird and said, "She just told me it takes some minutes to close all the windows, so please hang on.".

After 2 min time the woman came back to the phone and said "I have now closed all the windows in the house, except one ceiling window that only my husband can reach. Hope it doesn't matter".

So my client wants to stick with their current hosting provider (Bell) because the company is "big" and "won't go anywhere anytime soon." I just said, well okay it can't be that bad. Bell charges about 10x more and gives you about 10x less compared to other options, but it's not my money so whatever. Well, Bell has the absolute worst customer service. They have an online support form where I can type in my questions and they will call me within a day to help me. They called me during work hours and I missed the call, so they sent me an email to let me know I missed the call and gave me a number to call. I called and I might as well have called my dog because the support didn't even know what a .htaccess file is. I emailed them back and asked if they could forward my email to someone in the hosting department that could help (because the phone support I got was shit). I got a reply saying they "can't"... yup, they used the word "can't", they can't forward the email and that I would have to call. Is everyone at Bell a fucking dick chugging brainless pile of moldy-ass shit biscuits!? YOU CAN"T SEND AN EMAIL? Turns out they do have a dedicated hosting support email, let's hope the email I send ends up in front of someone at Bell who at least has a slight clue how to use a keyboard.

!dev but definitely rant

Here's a fucking thought:
How is holding women over different standards at events and (non-physical) competitions (hackathons especially, somehow) NOT widely considered sexist? I don't even mean towards men - yes, of course.
But also towards women: By preferring their results in some competitions in order to "support them", you implicitly degrade them to be small children in need for praise. You imply that you expect them to perform worse. By "women-first" PR bullshit, you do what you claim to be against. Fuck you.

Why can't we just hold everyone to the same fucking standards? Women can be just as good in tech as men, when interested. I would even make a point that these different standards hold back women from trying to get into any tech-related career.

Being asked (or more accurately made!) to travel Mon-Fri (i.e. staying away from home) for at least 2 months to a customer's site to work on a completely insane project that had no design, formal requirements, preparation or support. It was just a "friendly side project" 2 friendly managers concocted.

After some research, the project wasn't actually technically possible, but the customer wanted it so I had to try to find a solution.

The complication for me was that my wife was almost 8 months pregnant with our first kid and I made it clear I really wanted to be at home. Was left to feel I had little choice but to go. Project runs over but damnit I'm taking my 3 weeks parental leave entitlement.

Day before I'm due to go back to work, I get an email saying "You'll be travelling tomorrow for the next few weeks". At that point, I replied with the most angry work email I've ever sent and threatened that if that was the case I wouldn't be back. Plans were changed.

I ended up leaving within a couple of months anyway.

So, I found this :

Dear Tech Support:
Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0. I soon noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and resources. In addition, Wife 1.0 installed itself into all other programs and now monitors all other system activity. Applications such as Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0, HuntingAndFishing 7.5, and Racing 3.6. I can't seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run my favorite applications. I'm thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but the uninstall doesn't work on Wife 1.0. Please help!

Thanks ...Troubled User
-------
REPLY:

Dear Troubled User:
This is a very common problem. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking that it is just a Utilities and Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its Creator to run EVERYTHING!!! It is also impossible to delete Wife 1.0 and to return to Girlfriend 7.0. It is impossible to uninstall, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is designed not to allow this. Look in your Wife 1.0 manual under Warnings-Alimony-Child Support. I recommend that you keep Wife 1.0 installed and work on improving the configuration. I suggest installing the background application YesDear 99.0 to alleviate software augmentation.

The best course of action is to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE because ultimately you will have to do this before the system will return to normal anyway.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but it tends to be very high maintenance. Wife 1.0 comes with several support programs, such as CleanAndSweep 3.0, CookIt 1.5 and DoBills 4.2. However, be very careful how you use these programs. Improper use will cause the system to launch the program NagNag 9.5. Once this happens, the only way to improve the performance of Wife 1.0 is to purchase additional software. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Diamonds 5.0, but beware because sometimes these applications can be expensive.

WARNING!!! DO NOT, under any circumstances, install SecretaryWithShortSkirt 3.3. This application is not supported by Wife 1.0 and will cause irreversible damage to the operating system. 

WARNING!!! Attempting to install NewGirlFriend 8.8 along with Wife 1.0 will crash the system.

(see Wife 1.0 manual, Apologize, High Maintenance & Secretary with Short Skirt)

Me (junior) working on something specific/concrete; actually doing something. Gets stuck and goes to lead with specific question.
me: hey lead, if we have x, does y need to be included as well?
lead: yes, no, maybe, random bla.
me, tries to summarize and extract a to-do: oke... so based on 'yes, no, maybe random bla' you suggest adding y right about here?
lead: maybe bla and we have to think about it, yes, random bla. Try whatever feels right to you.
Me walks back to desk. Decides to support a charity, help refugees and homeless people CAUSE THAT FEELS RIGHT!

two days before I complained of lower back pain. raised a concern in office as its due to long sitting hours and got a chair today with great lumbar support. :)

Been a while but I'm back with fresh rants.

If you look in my history you will see support wanted us devs to start paying for writing bugs. Now the release presentation has passed but we're still in crunch time because we can't put clients onto the new version yet. And in the meantime our coffee machine broke. So support has started to manually pour coffee, which was actual real nice of them.

Now yesterday I'm in a hurry and the coffee is out so I decide to pour a quick cup for myself with the leftover grounds. When I'm back at my desk I get a call asking if I just made coffee. I'm like yeah something wrong? Proceed to get chewed out for being selfish and that they see how it is with me, then get hung up on before I can even explain.

So yeah not only is my company too cheap to get a new machine, the lack of one causes drama.

Today however our network guy, who was present when my colleagues asked what was with the weird phone call, brought in his own machine and let me have coffee from it. Meanwhile suport can keep their crappy manual pouring. And I don't need to go into their office anymore.

Out of necessity (or rather: lack of support) I've been neglecting my test suite for the past ~month. Now that one of the beta versions of RSpec has better Rails 6 support, I can finally get back to writing tests. Yay!

I just merged staging into my testing branch, and it's now 344 commits ahead of origin! eep.

So, I've got lots of tests to write. yay.

My personal AWS account just got suspended and it was the most terrifying thing ever.

It's back up now and reactivated once I paid up. Just a bounced payment on an old account caused it but for any of you out there who have this fear this what happens:

1. Amazon email you with reminders every few days.

2. The emails change to give a shut off date.

3. Your account is then locked after that date.

4. If you want imminent attention you have to pay $49 to talk to them.

Bonus tip : go to their billing page on your account, this isn't locked and allows you to pay up without paying the support fee.

Good luck!

Damn senior guy from storage background worked for a big company, he wants to learn git and so I told him to install git from git scm portal.
Well he did and came back saying its not working. I wondered thats not possible to curiousity I when to.his desk and found he was using fucking windows xp sp3 on his laptop.

I told him can you install windows 10
Well he tried but his fucking hardware doesnt support.

Wondered seriously why on earth this guy still using windows xp

So I was talking to the support engineer at PayTM regarding their integration in my app. Idiots!

Many users in my app want PayTM as the payment option. I am using their API and after trying for a few hours, when it was just not working even though I followed their guide and docs, I decide to call the support. After I described him the errors I was getting, he asked me to follow the docs which, being a developer myself, I already did. When I told him that I have done everything exactly as mentioned in the docs, he asked me to hold the phone. Came back after 1 minute and said, "Sir, I discussed the issue with my TL and he says that our API does not work in PostMan."

I hung up.

I managed to make it work by trying evening I could possibly do. But I am amazed what kind of people are running such a giant company. PostMan is made to test APIs. Idiots!

Had no internet for hours.
Called the support.
"We will fix it!" they said and they actually did. So maybe there are competent people working there as well???

No. Of course not.

Two hours later I receive a call from them. "It was not our fault. There was an update so we had to plug the cables back into the right ports."

Software update
Physical connections

Wat

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

Built a Media server using emby and then realized that one of my old TV shows with only 5 seasons was taking 129GB of storage space and I would need to transcode them, did my research and decided to use VP9 for the codec (YouTube, native browser support, etc.) found that it reduced my shows size to 51GB with great quality still. And then found out that emby doesn't allow direct play of VP9 on browsers and it's transcoding back to H264 Everytime I watch it. Submitted a issues, we'll see what happens now.

If you're the alone maintaining them, you learn a lot.... But they increase responsibilities.

I started with 1 open source project 2.5 years back. Today I'm maintaining more than 20 OS projects. And believe me it's really difficult to support them, maintain them

On my last project the customer gave really high reviews and asked me back as a senior engineer. First day back I meet the new PM and ask what I'll be working on.

He responds, "We have a printer that's not working..."

Of course I'm like wtf but then it quickly becomes apparent I'm writing the interface instructions between the software and printer....

Still, I'm back as over priced tech support to fix a printer!

I'm an advocate of free software, debian specifically, hell my business runs on it!
But sometimes you just can't get around to use proprietry software. One of those is nvidia....

WHAT THE FUCKING MESSED UP NAGGING NARK SHIT NVIDIA!!! YOU FUCKING BREAK MY SYSTEM! YOU WONT PROPERLY COMPILE YOUR KERNEL MODULE, YOU BREAK MY X, AND ONCE I FIXED ALL THOSE THINGS MANUALLY(!) YOU HAVE THE FUCKING GUTS TO NOT EVEN DETECT MY SCREENS PROPERLY

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT!!! NVIDIA YOU SUCK!!! MOTHERFUCKER DO I REALLY HAVE TO FALL BACK TO INTEL GRAPHICS??? FUCK YOUR FUCKING COMPANY AND ESPECIALLY YOUR LINUX SUPPORT

And no i am not planning to use ATI since they dont support EGL, what is a dependency for the gnome desktop...

I once had to deal with GoDaddy customer support telling me their servers only support putty for SSH.
Well, fuck you! I use Linux and I SSH with a single command in terminal, no doubt putty is great but get your senses straight that putty is not the only way to SSH when you are being customer support for a tech company, don't just fucking recite a phrase list. Besides, they should understand Windows with putty is not the only way to SSH into servers, juicessh via Android, openssh via Linux, etc...

*btw, before you all rant about me buying from GoDaddy, I was lead dev for a startup few years back and they had already bought it from GoDaddy. Ofcourse they also provide free offers along with an order, which often includes email addresses, annoying support, gut-wrenching quality of service access...

A fight story (separation of concern) : work vs life

IT Director (IT'D) forwarded a client message (false detection) to my whatsapp (personal number). I am sitting next to his cabin.

After an hour,

ITD : what was the issue with the client x?
Me : (proved false detection),
ITD : did you emailed client?

Me : no, don't send me these in WhatsApp, if any issues, email me since I won't check whatsapp and there is no guarantee that I will reply you back.

ITD : why, don't be negative. Either you have to or me have to do it.

Me : Tell them to email.
ITD : That is not right.

Me : I don't care if you provide support via WhatsApp. But I don't. Unless you provide a separate mobile and connection.

End of story.

I asked the VMware crew at work when we were going to virtualize our network. This was about 5 years ago. I got basically laughed at for suggesting it. I asked when we were going to adopt Azure AD to ensure us being ready for moving to teams etc. Got insults back with how bad the cloud is.

Guess what two projects are getting finalized now? Glad I left that company. Going to enjoy some nice mellow weed, enjoy my 30 day x-mas vacay and jump fresh at a new position. New upstart with a security maker for the maritime sector. A company that embraces new tech by making it them selfs. New day with aiding in the development of an IoT based solution with cloud support.

Happy holidays peeps.

Tfw you accidentally chmod'ed the entire root of your cloud server, because you've misplaced a "/".. Thank god, that there is such a thing called a 'backup'.

The amount of sweat and stress I had when the SSH disconnected and I couldn't log back in, the Apache and MySQL services that began to throw failures..

It's on moments like this, that you really appreciate the 24/7 customer-support! 😂

And all this while I was at my job, working for another company..

Internal mail form CIO's office:

"Thank you for being part of the internal trial for NPMe, we have decided to remove this tool in favour of Artifactory because of its support for multiple platforms and tools. We are sorry for the inconvenience, here is a link to migration scripts ..."

Migration "script" readme, please clone this repo, create file A, and B, and install these 2 dependencies.

Dependency 1:

- "install via homebrew ..."
- .... homebrew needs to update, checking for updates
- 10 mins later = Update failed, please upgrade to Ruby version 2.3
- Installs ruby version manager
- GPG signature verification failed
- Install GPG v2 + accept keys
- Install ruby version manager
- "please execute this command before running rvm"
- execute command
- "rvm install ruby-2.3"
- Install failed, please see log file
- Opens log file
- "Xcode on its own is not sufficient, please install xcode cli tools"
- Install xcode tools
- 5 minutes later -> "rvm install ruby-2.3"
- 10 minutes later "brew install jq"

Ok back to read me, "login to Artifactory, go here and copy paste XXX."

- Login to Artifactory
- Eventually find repo
- Login again to actually see credentials for some reason
- Screen doesn't match instructions in readme
- Click around
- Back to readme
- Back to artifactory
- Login again
- Execute command auth / setup command
- Copy contents to npmrc file .... now all my scoped packages are going to point to 1 specific repo

Fuck the migration, Fuck these shitty instructions, i'll set them all up again manually. See tags below for further opinions on this matter.

Me: We have a new research project for you. We need you to test these 2 new services, see how they will fit into the new application, look at alternatives if necessary etc. At the end we need you to write a report with your findings, showing how you would integrate them to achieve X, Y and Z, and how much it would cost each month.

Dev: sounds good, I'll come back to you when I have it.

*2 and a half weeks later*

Document paragraph 1: The new language translation service doesn't support the languages we need.

Document paragraph 2: Here's my proposal for integrating the new language translation service.

*review*

Me: So I had a look at the doc and it says it doesn't support the languages.

Dev: yeah unfortunately not.

Me: Ok, so when you discovered that, why didn't you look for an alternative? Or come back to me and say it's not going to work.

Dev: I dunno, I thought you'd want to see the rest of the research first.

Me: ... not if we know for 100% undeniable fact that it will never function.

Dev: Ah ok, I didn't think of that. I'll do that next time, don't worry.

... aw how sweet, he thinks there will be a next time. Poor guy.

ComputerToucher: *opens Jira ticket* Dev team needs tokens for the APM for a new app with multiple tenants. Ezpz. Hey, developer. Do you want one golden token for all of your app tenants or would you like us to generate one token for each?

Developer: Let’s have a meeting to discuss it.

CT: It’s…an exceedingly simple question. One token or 4? Which does your app support?

Dev: Yeah I think we should discuss with this with the platform team, can you set up the call?

CT: (Internally) I am the platform team? Do you not know how your applica-never mind I’ll just ask the PM directly.

CT (in chat): I’ll ask PM to schedule the call.

*Goes back to Jira ticket, changes priority to 4, removes ticket from sprint entirely, picks something else to work on*

I hope and wish that a big company will support/back up VueJS. Maybe then VueJS can be commonly seen as a job requirement.

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk?

this.isrant = true

Visual studio YOU BITCH!

2 hours of struggling to enable VT-X for docker but never seeming to be enabled when I boot back from the BIOS, turns out the motherfucking IDE sneakily enables hyper-v when I install Windows phone SDK, which I apparently need for xamarin. Well Microsoft? GO FUCK YOURSELF. I ONLY USE YOU FOR THE SUPPORT! I hate Microsoft and it's sneaky background shit that I don't know about and would probably freak out about if I did. I'm swapping to Ubuntu with MSSQL and MonoDevelop ASAP

I've worked in a lot of customer service jobs and the more i have to deal with client, the more story starting to pile up. But something always come back and it's frustrating. The entitlement people have. I work as a Technical Support agent and for the most part i'm actually happy to help people with fixing their problems. But once in a while i always get that idiot that doesn't do anything i told him, blame me because "my fixes" don't work or just straight up don't listen to me and think they know better. Why the fuck do you call me if you need help if you're going to ignore everything i say and act like a fucking children. I'm not the one that call for technical support.

I know this place is more for Dev, but i'm sure those kind of things happen all the time when a client think he know more than the dev themselves...

We have a badly out of shape but functional product , the result of a "if its not broke don't fix it" mentality. The only thing manangement cares is our next release and making meetings to plan other meetings...

Now comes the time of the security Audit (PCI)...

Manager : oh noooo the audit will fix this issue, quickkk fix it !

Us : welllll its a lengthy process but doable, we just gotta do a,b,c,d,e . Part a is essentially what we need the rest are refactoring bits of the system to support part a since the performance would be shit otherwise

Manager: can you do part a before the audit starts ?

Us: yep.

Manager: do it . Oh and pop those other issues on JIRA so we can track em

Audit completed....

Manager: so we got through ok?

Us : 👍 yep

Manager: okayy, take those other issues..... and stick em at the bottom of the back log...

Us : huh ? *suspicious faces*..... okay but performance is gonna be poor with the system as it is cuz of part A....

Manager: yeaaahhh * troll face* ....about that.... roll it back and stick that too at the bottom of the log. We got to focus our next release. Lemme schedule a meeting for that 😊

Us : faceplam

When customer support calls with a complex issue and wants a guaranteed fix date for a defect you haven't even investigated because "they need to get an answer back to the customer TODAY."

Best dev experience of 2017:

Being able to support my family with my work.

Knowing that all of us have health, vision, and dental insurance solely because of me.

Finally being able to give back to those who have helped me over the years.

Choke on a fucking narwhals horn you pieces of shit, 28 days no ticket answer, then raised the issue again and again and again, still no answers, tried their email added in all github support readmes - got that in return, all their issues are closed except for the python wrapper, just fucking send me back a notice of your death already.

Today was a good day.

I was told to use in-house BitBucket runners for the pipelines. Turns out, they are LinuxShellRunners and do not support docker/containers.

I found a way to set up contained, set up all the dependencies and successfully run my CI tasks using dagger.io (w/o direct access to the runner -- only through CI definition yaml and Job logs in the BitBucket console).

Turns out, my endeavour triggered some alerts for the Infra folks.

I don't care. I'm OOO today. And I hacked their runners to do what I wanted them to do (but they weren't supposed to do any of it). All that w/o access to the runners themselves.

It was a good day :)))))
Now I'll pat myself on my back and go get a nice cup of tea for my EOD :)

What was wrong with the major updates and clean modern UI? It was the only reason that made us happy.
Now buggy and not surprising minor updates, doesn't really support touch like 8.1, poor animations, poor etc. that looks like a quick without-love development to just "release quickly".

Anyways, who else liked the modern metro UI in 8.1 and sad about going back to traditional desktop on win10?

Oh man, I fucked up...
I was doing after hours work for client, setup website with https.

Can't work over sftp with current user,so I give it the same user ID as apache, get files transferred and shit.
Go back to change uid, set wrong uid, now my user is ntp, I can't get into root, can't set password...
I fucked up

Tail between the legs, sent email to clients support, asking them to fix my user fuck up, waiting for reply

story time:
I use onedrive for sharing some files and shit. So one day one of my folders, which I got from a downloaded zip, caused an error "files couldn't be synced because of unallowed character in the title".
Turns out there was a space at the end of the folder title. I change the name, I get some error.
"Okay, no problem, I don't need that folder anymore anyway" So I delete it, doesn't work, the error message reads "Can't delete folder because it no longer exists.". "What the hell" try deleting it some more. Emptying it before deleting. Deleting the parent folder. I try formatting it before deleting. Nothing works.
Deleting from the online onedrive client causes it to briefly disappears but refreshing places it back right where it came from.

So I resort to my last hope, customer support.
I explain the whole thing.

I get a reply. Oh boy.

I get explained that if the recycle bin is full, the file will be placed back.
After that, I get an explanation on how to remove a file xD

Thanks OneDrive Team, really helpful.

I feel guilty for using YouTube Vanced and being unable to support content creators.

Shouldn't there be a feature that allows you to toggle ads on certain channels you want to support?

I really want to support such folks who are creating valuable educational content but Google being the biggest piece of corporate shit, makes me angry when it comes to compensating the creators fairly when they make Billions off their hard work.

The world is a better place because of such teachers who spend time, energy, and efforts to create valuable and useful content for rest of the world.

Funnily, back in days when we had awesome stuff, the tech was shit to document all of it. Now when we have advanced and easily accessible tech, we have shitty TikToks.

Why can't the creators of good content get more visibility and why is the world so fucked?

Me: Why are we spending time building reports for Support? AFAIK they never read or use them.

Boss: Seems they expect you to do it.

Me: Then what exactly are they supposed to be doing? All the issues seem to just escalate back to us.... We should just make sure issues never get into PROD

Boss: I agree, they're always firefighting... we gave them more funding so eventually they should catch up **Me: I highly doubt it, you should just stop hiring monkeys** esp. if we prevent PROD issues.

Me: Yea... we should prevent production issues because someone always has to pay off the (technical) debt and interest rates in PROD are very high

If microsoft developers were ever on life support, we should unplug then plug them back in and see if that works!

Never lose your sense of wonder when it comes to working with clients. Client berated us saying her data were outdated. Ok. Check the file the third party that generated the data is sending us.

Outline all stated discrepancies in the data back to the client, showing that everything lines up with what we are receiving.

Client is frustrated. Contact the third party in their behalf.

Third party support: “oh yea, client had us start sending data to your competitor like a month ago”

Bruh. Bruh. Bruh.

Fortunately the client wants to stay with us and is getting their data pointed back but how in the hell do you forget that. The reason the client when looking at competition (at least guessing looking at previous call records) is to get faster processing of the data coming from the third party. How are you gonna forget you turned off the sending when you are so worried about speed?! Most of our clients are running 7-8 figure businesses by the way.

We pay 10's of 1000's of $/£ to these companies for support and either they don't get back to us or don't listen to the problem or come up with dumb suggestions. More often than not you get a valid answer on Redit or openstack before the supplier has even understood the problem.

OK Mr CEO/President whatever self aggrandizing title you want to call yourself today, where the fuck is your spine! You want to have support help boost your sales but don't tell sales that you are letting support handle some sales and sales is mad. Now you are quivering under the thumb of the Lead of Sales. What the hell. You are the leader of this company.

Why did you not stand up for your decision to begin with? I'm not going to get into whether or not it was good, but if you are going to make a decision to experiment with new things fucking stand by it and let everyone in the company know.

You've exacerbated the division between departments and ton this company further apart. If you don't start standing up for things, you are going to destroy all that you've helped build! Furthermore, I will not simply be your loyal vassal and watch all the people doing support for my products get fucked over. I will leave you high and dry if needed. I really hope you don't make it needed. You gave me a great shot to be honest, I'd hate to have to turn my back on you in anger. But don't think for a second I won't do it.

Your entire programming department has also been put in the cross fire of a fight you just made so much worse. You are the only one who can clean this up. Are you going to stand up for us? Are you gonna stand up for your self? Or will you just break and show us where the real power lies? We will find out soon.

Headhunter: "For this new role you would be the first developer in the company responsible for both the back and frontend, you will also have to test your deliverables, give support to users and report to the..."

*CLICK*

Had to hang up on dat shit 🙉

Idiot mode: on

It's bad when you realize you are the most idotic person you know. I just bought a wifi card replacement for my laptop only to find out that one of the screws on its back was completely unscrewable. I foolishly decided to force my way through by forcing the plastic. I tought I got away with it as I only damaged a plastic support tighten to the laptop base but now, my laptop screen isn't showing anything.

When I first booted it up after this, it was working, but it started showing troubling signs shortly after. Now, all I can get out of it is a completely black screen, no backlight at all.

What should I do? 😥

When you are the only web developer of the company... You do front, backend for the website, web development jobs which come every time for stopping you to work on the 3 websites that you have to build. Every sites and database are different that's something that my boss don't understand I cannot include stuff just like that with my magic power because i have already done it. And of course the two designers of the company have the time to spend an hour for a colour. Well a week to build a 15 custom pages website with something which is close to the CRM for the back is not enough. Not enough when you also have to spent 2 hours each day on management stuff because there is 20 hosted website and the clients need support... Stressed and pissed off.

Just spent literally six hours trying to get my aunt's enterprise-grade 20 mb fiber optic Internet back on tracks.
Two hours trying to reach the technical support, two hours to explain that I was "unexpectedly" hung up by the previous attendant, and honest to hell, two more hours trying to explain what "latency" is.

Seriously, how much do they pay these technicians nowadays?

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

When I became a dev my parents said: "it's not rocket science, or chemistry or anything good, but at least it's not stressful, or dangerous and we can get free tech support. I hope you are able to pay your own bills and find rent"

A few years, a degree and finding a supportive woman who is now my wife and and I make 4 time as much as my parents make now they want me to move back so they can get their tech support and see my wife I guess she is more social than I am

"Your next computer is not a computer" says Apple. Have you tried connecting your iPad to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor? If you're lucky enough to only use apps that natively support this setup, then more power to you. If not, I encourage you to try it. I made it 30 minutes before I got frustrated and moved back to my laptop.

Getting high during work sounds cool, but once it caused me real trouble.

So, I was just finished with the service I was building and I had files ready to be uploaded on server but I was high at that time and I completely forgot to secure my backend files and BOOM.
Server stopped working. Server support was shocked because overnight we utilized 300GB bandwith .
It was some WORM and it kept coming back.
We were helped in the end though and provided fresh IPs.
P.S. Dont do important stuff when stoned

As many of you are, I am too a 24/7 IT support for the whole family.

One time I was going back to uni for the week on a bus when my mom calls that her facebook is acting wierd. You guessed it, it was a virus. Then after 10 minutes of struggling I asked my sister to take the phone because she would understand the technial terms more easily and I didn't have mobile net or wifi at the time to use teamviewer. After 10 more minutes the virus was gone and I explained what happened and what not to do next time.
Later that day her friends got the same virus and my mother proudly told them that she already gotten rid of it and helped them remove it too.

!dev but tech related...

Got a device configured in a location that is fairly far away from me. It operates only through a cloud service specifically for these devices, with one of the most unreliable web interfaces and smartphone apps I have ever used.

I email my issues to the tech support who don't seem to understand the problems and can't fathom the difference between "reset settings" and "restart device".

Eventually they need to log in to my account to find out whats wrong. I explicitly state that under no circumstances should any settings be changed.

Today I find that the device has been removed from the cloud account. I physically must be near it to register it on the account again. Tech support don't seem to know what happened and the best explanation is that it is "a glitch". They have no way to add it back themselves. I have to travel to the device.

Funny how this happened after I let them access the account...

I was a Project Manager, studied my a$$ off at 38 to become a mobile developer. Built production apps in Java, React Native. I've studied Kotlin and Flutter. Then my company almost went belly up and I had to scramble to find a job to support my family. Back to being a PM which I hate. Started with Swift because my son is old enough to play with Swift Playgrounds and thinking about making a break back into dev. Every post I see on Twitter is about Flutter, maybe RN, but not much Native iOS. Is it wrong that I'm loving it thus far? What's the future for Native iOS and Android developers?

Bittrex is "amazing"...

I had lost my 2FA a long time ago (as my phone fried) and missed the account ferification deadline which caused my account to get disabled. Off we go to support!

0. Nothing to rant about at this point. I just created an account in their zendesk, logged in and logged a ticket to reset my 2FA and reactivate my account. They asked me for info, I provided it to them and got my 2FA disabled. Hooray!

1. I then asked to reenable my account. They sent me a link to restart the verification process. I open up that link and log in. I'm asked to upload some photos. I select requested photos from my galery and hit [UPLOAD]. An error pops up saying that smth wrong happened and I need to reload that site and reupload my photos. After page refresh they are telling me they are validating my uploaded info (w/o any way to resubmit my info, which, according to the error seen below, was not successfully submitted in the first place)...

2. So I reach out to the support guy again. Guess what he replies! He says he's sorry but he cannot help me any more and I need to create a NEW ACCOUNT in their support site with the same email <???!!!???>

3. I try to log in to the support portal and my access no longer works. MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DELETED! WTF!!!

4. I do as I'm told and create a new acc with the same email. Now I can log back in. So I'm raising a new ticket saying I still cannot finish my verification process due to the same error. It looks like it's going to be a fun ride with them so I can't wait to see what they'll reply.

var _self = Object.create(Rant);

Hello devs I'm back

A few months ago I joined a software development company and I was pretty specific that I wasn't going to do support or maintenance only feature development, well, this past 3 months I've been doing dev helping stablish good practices and a better architecture for the app, but guess who is joining a support team tomorrow, they sold me the idea of a refactor team, I was trilled and accepted, now they tell me it's a legacy bug fixing team, damn I hate this crap, hope y'all doing better

Why would some companies advertise a job post as Software Engineer, and only to find out deep in the process after doing multiple interviews, that it’s actually a support job??

Seriously why the fuck do that? That’s disingenuous and misleading as fuck?
And why would a dev be dropping a dev job and experience to do tech support ? Is it even worth it?

Even if it is, can you easily switch back to an actual dev job afterwards?
Wow the things some of these companies do 😶🙄😑🤦🏾‍♂️

Wanted to test whether my card worked online or not (was having some issues with it) and decided to try becoming a devRant supporter, and it worked!

Gotta say, I feel really happy to be able to give back to devRant and show my support by doing something as small as this. Loving the darker theme too.

Thanks for everything so far, devRant, and happy to be a supporter.

!rant.
I think i joined devRant back in October and since then it has become my most used app. Its so great to be under the same of its kind! And even though I don't have something to rant about at the moment, I am gonna support all those ranters with my ++'s! I already ++'t over a thousand rants and won't stop!

Selenium++

Woke up at 6am today and couldn't go back to sleep...

So I my Watcher app to support Selenium and provide it to all the extensions (plugins) via the common Interface.

Now I don't need to check the Anime site manually when they release movies or blurays...

And have 1 hr to eat breakfast and get some coffee as I have a release at 9... And now I'm sleepy...

Do you all remember the dark ages of DVDs when honest customers made a worse deal than pirates because legitimate media was packed with unskippable advertising and PSAs about piracy?

Well, looks like video game publishers are on their best way to recreate that mistake. Why do games nowadays need to be forcefed with storage-consuming, unappealing and technically nonessential launchers that all look and do the same? And why for God's sake do very old and offline-only games need to go through this sodomizing procedure?

prime example: GTA 3 was released back in 2001 and capable of running on Windows 98SE/2000/XP. There's a Steam-only release out there that requires you to install community-made patches if you want the game to run smoothly on modern hardware. Steam itself as a requirement for this atrocity to even launch the executable dropped support for XP more than two years ago. If you'd wanted to play this game on original hardware, you would rely on a real DVD that was made back then, but there are even better options if you know what I mean.

When a multimillion-dollar industry relies on communities of volunteering enthusiasts to make its products work, it won't receive a trace of my empathy when customers and non-customers alike try to download their games from more reliable and honest sources.

Finally making it.
I'm now closing down my company due to way too high costs and way too much work to try to stand those costs.

Good things will happen, now it's time to simply pay for the debts I now have just because I tried to dream too big without having enough financial support to sustain those dreams.

Hopefully I'll pay my debts in less than a year.

I really wish to go back in time, do stuff differently or even just don't do anything at all.

What a fucking year, I didn't even feel covid, lockdowns and such as I was too busy working at home.
Completely destroyed various relations in order to try to keep things up, now I just can't stand this stuff anymore.

!dev.rant

So in just a matter of minutes my job security has crashed and any week could be my last again all because my jobs head office decided to change everyones positions in management...

So once again I'm back to square one in yet another useless fucking job search with barely anything to offer other than 5 years of retail experience and 3 years of IT support... Fan-fucking-tastic, would almost be more survivable to just go on centre link at this point -,-

When you're trying to solve a problem and you're spinning your head around then you check your phone and see the co-founder of a service you love just liked your rant.

You feel like: awee!! thank you 😍

Then you get back to work with some good portion of dopamine in your head to support you

Thanks again for this service 🙏

FML I am an idiot.. might end up in a rant here (well deserved!!) //if you are here reading this I'm so sorry again!!

I wrote to our support I need DP/HDMI cable.. they asked me to take a pic of the cable I'm currently using.. WTF?! Don't you know how connectors look?! Just get me the damn cable.. :/
Ok.. Took a picture.. sent it back.. At that time I still didn't see the problem with what I wrote/demanded..
Got back reply this is not HDMI connector... FML, I was so convinced computer had HDMI ports so even when I took the pic I wasn't paying attention.. Fuck.

And before when I was switching cables behind the computer below desk I was just blindly feeling around, it didn't even occurr to me to actually check what connectors are used..just knew both monitors had the same connector (and not aure why I thought HDMI :/)...so yeah, I'm the idiot who is not paying attention to stuff.. Fuck.. Was on a scavanger hunt for a wrong type of cable the whole time.. Sorry again!! And please don't kill me next time you see me.. o.O

Going back home for the holidays means becoming tech support for pretty much the whole family, unluckly.

As soon as I enter my grandparent's home, my grandpa says "Could you print some emails?". I open his laptop, and I start sweating as soon as I see the Windows XP logo popping up. He (obviously) doesn't remember his password, and the only way to access his (mostly defunct) web mail service is Outlook 2003. For some reason, the web mail provider's POP3 server dies, and i spend half an hour trying to explain it. I ended up leaving with him saying "Why are you even going to a computer engineering university."

Ah, family.

When you’ve been warning of how much stuff needs work to support TLS1.1 depreciation but now all that stuff broke because he had you working on a bunch of other random less important stuff. Now he is saying back to me the exact things I said to him about why we needed to work on this stuff months ago.

Continuing my rant from Yesterday....
As I was strolling though Walmart yesterday...
Tech Support 1: $Customer is having issues with their tablet they bought from us.
Tech Support 2: tell them to shut it off and shut it back on
Me: ❓

So on top of my Windows update frustrations, I just found out that Microsoft has been scamming me out of money for two years!
I bought an android tablet in 2016 which came with a free 1 year subscription to Office365. They demanded credit card info, so I made sure to pre-cancel it to avoid getting charged when the year was up.
Today I find a line on my bank statement that just says 'MICROSOFT', and I think to myself: 'What the hell is that?!?'
It takes some digging for the email adress I used and trying to navigate various MS sites until I realize that those bastards have auto-renewed the subscription twice now!
I missed it last year, but luckily since I caught the latest one within 30 days I can get a full refund.
Will contact their support tomorrow to get the rest of it back. Too tired right now to deal with their support jungle of circular links and virtual assistants...

Back in the old days, ie. before facebook, I used to save all my funny email attachments to a folder. I got talking to one of the support guys. Seemed a nice fella. So, I network shared my folder and told him to how to connect. I did suggest that he probably shouldn't share it with everyone else in support as some of the material was a tad risqué.

I realised he hadn't taken notice of this advice when I walked in the office and all the support PC CD drives were randomly opening and closing and the PCs playing farting noises. (Anyone remember that?)

I had to go round all the PCs and kill the process.

I then returned to my own machine and disconnected the shared drive.

When you realize support ended for .NET 5 back in May 🥴

🤡

My phone just died. Got a new phone on recommendation of friends and flash Jolla on it. The OS is super nice but the "Android support" doesnt work. No lastpass, no netflix, no prime, signal works half, no banking app.

I really need my windows phone back. It just worked without issues. After two android phones and now a Jolla in about two years im kinda done with all this shit.

God, the dude who "assisted" me today can go and fuck himself with a cactus.

I need to configurate and integrate some cms into a project. But since the documentation is utter horse shit and superficial, it's fucking torture to do so!

So after creating an issue on their helpdesk, i get an answer from some employee there. Instead of actually posting something useful, he decide that he could instead quote the fucking documentation.

Of course, he also quotes the very page i mentioned in my issue for being COMPLETELY USELESS. This goes back and forth. And he keeps just quoting the fucking documentation.

So i decompiled their product and painstakingly worked out how the feature worked that i needed.

Fuck you support asshole. I hope you get to maintain a legacy VBA project!

I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.

But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.

And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.

People treat me like the adult that I am.

I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.

I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen.

Ffs, HOW!?!? Fuck! I need to get this rotten bs out.

RDS at its max capabilities from the top shelf, works OK until you scale it down and back up again. Code is the same, data is the same, load is the same, even the kitchen sink is the same, ffs, EVERYTHING is the same! Except the aws-managed db is torn down and created anew. From the SAME snapshots! But the db decides to stop performing - io tpt is shit, concurrency goes through the roof.

Re-scale it a few more times and the performance gets back to normal.

And aws folks are no better. Girish comes - says we have to optimize our queries. Rajesh comes - we are hitting the iops limit. Ankur comes - you're out of cpu. Vinod thinks it's gotta be the application to blame.

Come on guys, you are a complete waste of time for a premium fucking support!

Not to mention that 2 enhanced monitoring graphs show anythung but the read throughput.

Ffs, Amazon, even my 12yo netbook is more predictable than your enterprise paas! And that support..... BS!

We're now down to troubleshooting aws perf issues rather than our client's....

IT jobs explained with a broken light bulb 😂

Language Warning

There year is 2019, and down here in Australia we have a fuckup called the NBN (National Broadband Network). We all have to switch to it, from ADSL2. Promised dreams and joys, only to be fucked again and again.

Paying $89 AUD per month for 25mbps, however only getting 0.61mBITSps at times. (Literally can see it at home.danferg.com)

Call up support. "Have you rebooted your router?" Yes. "Have you done a test?" Yes. "Can you send me the screenshot?" No, I did it through the CLI. "... What's a CLI?" Fuck.

"So.. have you got a test?" Yeah, I have 7000 of them, from each minute of the day for the past while. *Silence* "oh.... Ok well, we'll have to see if you qualify for a discount" DISCOUNT?! GIVE ME MY FUCKING MONEY BACK.

I just contacted the support of one of our service provider for virtual tours. I told them that the iframe will open the website (in target self) instead of playing the tour, and that our clients will most likely not come back to our site, when they don't see a "go back" or something. Best would be, if the iframe plays instead of opening a new tab.

Supports answer: "I sent you a video, there you can see how to get back to your website"

*sends a video of themself opening his browsing history and clicking our site*

A dream of every UX developer.

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

For all the cheap-ass sys admins:
I wouldn’t pay 100$ a year to apple just to have push notifications when my server fucks up or an user fill my support form but I want to know that in real time but I have iPhone(forget about FCM).

So I downloaded pushbullet to my phone and integrated its API in my server and when something important happen I get completely free notification which (thanks to url schemes in ios) redirect me to my server administration app.

Note: I used xamarin for my management app to be ready for the moment when I switch back to android.

I allowed my previous employer to move me from a developer position to a support role and I didn't even complained about it.

This 3 day weekend couldn’t come at a better time! Today has done everything it can to delay it and everything has been a superb annoyance!

It started off with our internal systems going down, a frustratingly tedious project proposal process, our phones went down, off the wall calls to support all day causing them to ask me junk.

As a parting gift the pending windows update and it completely crashed my development VM and corrupted my install of virtual box. I had planed in only working a half day, but worked 6.5 hours, hit traffic al over. Was late to the event.

Not I get here and there’s a bunch of smokers outside and I could reallllllly use a drag. But I’m not gonna. 😒

Just ready to kick back and do non computer things til Tuesday. 😎

I'm BACK! (Just haven't used DR in a looong time cuz I had other jobs and kinda forgot about it).
But now I am back and recently got hired as the IT-support guy for some health centers. The best part is that they had some old systems that needed updating so here I am trying to wrap my head around PHP before throwing myself in someone elses code, someone got any tips for learning PHP?

Bought myself a standing desk (one that rests on top of an existing desk), a new chair with good lumbar support and a few other office bits and pieces before the end of the tax year in the UK. I didn't think I'd be able to put them through my Ltd Co next year because of IR35 changes, but they have been delayed now.

The only thing I don't have yet at home is dual monitors. Otherwise the setup feels great. 30 Mins sitting followed by 30 Mins standing is doing wonders for my old back

So I gave my younger brother my OnePlus One since he is now using an even older Google Nexus and don't care much for phones. The camera is slightly better basically.

Asked him to test drive it:

Me: so did you set it up yet?
B: nope, what's the rush?
Me: well you see it's running a custom OS (Lineage) as it technically doesn't support it. You need to test drive it and make sure it works with your SIM? May need to change some configs
B: sounds like a pain, should I just get a new phone?

Me: ... yes probably...

He's a just graduated CS major that doesn't like tinkering with tech...

(Well can I have it back then so I can play around with it?)

I can’t believe I am getting closer to 2000 upvotes after only 2 months of coming back.

Thank you for the support!

PAID for a support call,
dude's answering could barely be understood while speaking English and didn't know a thing about the topic of the call itself (it was very very specific).

The call lasted 5m and was only used to schedule another one on Monday to let them understand what we're asking and come back at us with a solution.

Fucking waste of time.

Took a day off and came back to find my team and I were moved from frontend to backend (which I always wanted to be).

Manager says we get to learn Java, Mongodb and even Hadoop.

I am so so excited.

But the only little hold back is, there is limited support for Java in sublime text and I should instead use eclipse. I had dozens of shortcuts customised with all those beautiful themes in sublime, but eclipse takes the fun out of coding(no offense to eclipse lovers).

One of our servers had a disk fail this week. Luckily it's 1 of 3 in a RAID5 array. And, luckily, it was our mostly-dev box and didn't have any production stuff on it, except for some support things. We scheduled a disk replacement with the hosting company, took everything down, waited. Somebody at the hosting company apparently didn't know we'd scheduled the replacement, saw the machine was down, and brought it up again. Sigh. Finally they did the replacement, got it back up, but now we're seeing an ethernet port flapping, suggested they have someone go in and make sure all the jacks are fully seated, maybe one got loose when they were doing the disk switch. Bureacracy reared up again and we got the boilerplate "if there's a hardware issue suspected please boot into rescue mode and run the tests"... sigh...

So i work in support (do dev stuff in my own time). Spent 3 months seconded to another team supporting in project clients.

First issue i had in that team was a client with serious data issues which took about 30 hours +/- to diagnose and write some scripts to resolve.

After they went live and got handed over to support they had the same issue again but instead of support picking it up they sat on it till i came back on Monday.

Ive spent about another 10 hours or so picking through audit logs. I get all the shit no one else can either be bothered or capable of doing and to top it off i didnt get the promotion i was going for because i hadnt closed enough tickets, because they keep giving me all the shit to fix for everybody else

"So, my company made a Mother's Day video, with photos from mothers around the company, with their children and stuff. A while ago they sent an email asking for replies with photos from those who wanted to participate, blah blah.

Then the video came out, and some people were missing. They complained.
HR then complained to IT Support that 'some emails didn't arrive'.
Support then replied to the ticket with screenshots of the person's own email inbox, with all the so-called missing emails.
HR then called back, apologizing for having screwed up with their own email inbox."

And this is another story of injustice with the poor IT department.
Or another story about people who can't properly manage their inboxes.
Or both. Your choice.

I just received it from a friend (I guess I should bring him into DevRant).

My conversation with Avalara support (API for taxing):
Me: Hey I'm implementing your API for a client. The requests are going through, I get a valid response back but all goods are taxed with $0. Can you please give me a hint what I might be missing?
Sup: You're using Salesforce Commerce Cloud, requests might be blocked through their firewall
Me: I don't think so, here are some sample requests and responses I just created. The object returned matches the one in your API Doc.
Sup: This isn't a system controlled by us, no support.
Me: So how in the world can it be you don't control your own endpoint?

Seriously, if you don't want to help, next time just say fuck you...

My monday started with boss calling me at 0730 asking if I could do a support-mission at the offices of the local landfill - this because 2 of the support people had called in sick and we where short on manpower. RIGHT! I said, with a sense of dread and disbelief. ended up spending much of the day there. fixing everything from default reader of pdf to calibration of mouse sensitivity.

It's not like I need to code or anything, since I am working on two different projects and in competition of a third. Finally came back to the office after been at the landfill until lunch and got another support mission; this time internal mission. namely write out from our companys database and import the data to an absolute atrocity called PowerBI so our accountant get the numbers......... FINE!!! I'll do that too, but dont come to me and cry when the project delivery date gets postponed into eternity!!!

whining

So I'm sitting here, working my ass off developing something far above my current skills.

On the opposite side of the table sits relatively new guy, working as a part of support "department". Relatively new means that he's with the company for around 1 month.

The guy started speaking to me. I took off my headphones and listened, while still reading code. He told me about how he'll have to carry out the recruitment process for the support department today. And that he was told to present himself as a leader of the department, blah blah blah.

To be honest, I stopped listening at that moment. I got really pissed. And it's not because of the absolute lack of the professionalism of the company (srsly, make a new guy do recruitment work?). It's because I asked boss to get someone to help me half a year ago. He did employ around 3 new support people (4th today). But no one for me.

And he has the balls to tell me that I NEED to work harder to make it for deadline that he imposed. That he won't employ anyone new for me because new people could stole his "idea". Because MAYBE in a month one guy, a junior like me, will come back (he's on a break to finish his master thesis).

Product I'm working on is probably the main reason other companies are even buying the system he's reselling. As a student I'm working only half-time, so those deadlines are almost impossible.

I wonder how he'll manage if I'll get accepted for the work I'm currently applying.

Got my iPhone 7 today an directly proceeded to brick it. Got an issue open with 2nd line support that are going to get back to me tomorrow.

I wrote a blogging platform around 3.5yrs back in PHP. My friend uses that, and apparently wants me to update the code. To which I refused saying that I am too busy. But the real reason is that it is one of the purest form of cancerous shit I ever wrote. I can't even look at that code now. Its like abandoning your own child, because it is too ugly... Here's a snapshot of the code, I don't even know what this does anymore..

Moral: Don't give your code to your friend no matter how shitty it is, you will end up providing lifetime support for it.

There are days I imagine what my life would be like as a farmer instead of being a developer.
Two major sets of fully manual tests due on one day, after I've been alone in the office for two weeks handling all development, testing and support requests; inbox full of dumb questions that are answered in docs; people at my desk asking for shit that won't get done; and although the other devs are all back, one is "working" from home, one has no permissions to SVN, and the other is still learning how to do anything useful.
To top it all off, I've a meeting in twenty minutes, and I've managed to get coffee on my shirt and in my ear buds in a curious incident involving my headphones getting dunked in my coffee and going towards me at high speed.
Oh, and my wife just called saying the baby is screaming like a banshee at home, so I have that to look forward to.
Ugh...

More tales from University Tech Support:

Haven't been able to get ahold of this staff member for weeks to do required maintenance. Emails, VMs, surprise office visits, she's never anywhere to be found.

Finally my boss emails her with the subject line "Free Money", and gives her some sass in the email about calling IT back.

Yeah, she responded in minutes...

A few months ago I applied for an IT Support role managing computer systems for a smaller manufacturing corporation. Now some back story, I'm a recent college grad looking for work and this hit my radar. I did well in the phone interview and really enjoyed the in person interview as well.

However, if I was offered the role I'd be the only person working on their infrastructure. The person who I interviewed with was leaving and thus his position was available. It was kinda strange to interview with the person you'd be replacing.

I started asking questions about their critical infrastructure and how they manage it. Short answer is they don't know.

I asked about off-site disaster recovery. "Oh we back everything up to a 2TB disk and I take it home every day."
I asked "What if that backup fails?"
Their response was "That would suck."

The company decided to go with a managed IT solution instead of me as I don't have the required experience in their eyes. The previous guy left because they we're stuck in their ways.
Yah, no thank you.

I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...

IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"

**breath in**

Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"

IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"

**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**

Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"

IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"

OMFGGGGG

I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!

Needed my Windows 10 vm for parallax propeller development again. Should be pretty straightforward:

Start VM. Very unresponsive and Interface glitches with 2GB RAM so I give it 4GB to get on the desktop. Bruh, off to a good start.

Turns out that there are a few updates. So I try to install them. After two fucking hours Virtualbox screams at me for being out of storage. FFS Window$ updates managed to take up like 20GB extra.

Had to install it from scratch since my drive is full. Now my key won't activate because it is already activated. 15min support hotline, because 6*8 characters are necessary for a f*cking Phone activation.

Damage assessment:
1h of my life I will never get back, a barely viable operating system and I'm not even sure if USB passthrough works.

PSA:Gnome-Boxen has a superb unattended installer.

Okay, where do I even fucking start.

Today, my account been hacked by some prick because i wouldn't send him fucking nudes. I quickly emailed discord and they keep sending me automated emails. I got so fucking pissed and then they emailed me "how did they get your info?" BITCH HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUCKING KNOW? THATS WHY ITS CALLED HACKING IDIOT!

I sent them 5 fucking emails, no response.

Discord Support- Actually, DISCORD IN GENERAL IS A FUCKING HORRIBLE APP!

Message from discord: I am isabe*******@Gmail.com. I'm fucking pissed how your damn support team won't fucking just give my goddamn Discord account back. KEEP IN MIND I HAD A YEAR OF NITRO, A YEAR AND DISCORD CLEARLY DON'T GIVE A SHIT! YOU GUYS ARE SO FUCKING UNFAIR! LITERALLY YOU GUYS DON'T SOLVE ANY DAMN SITUATIONS WITHOUT IT TAKING MONTHS, OR YOU JUST DONT FUCKING REPLY!

I told my new Director that I am not one for going with third party vendors. He claimed that I was biased. I am really.

But I told him that support and troubleshooting are the main reasons why I dislike third party vendors as well as the request for X software to do Y non supported thing, they always state during a sales call that they can accommodate, they never do.

As an example, I send them the logs of a support ticket for one particular piece of software that we have, for which I detailed the situation, only for them to NEVER respond and then after 5 days close the ticket stating that I never replied back to them, even when they never replied back.

A custom made in house solution will always be superior to your run of the mill all encompassing app. But try and make a non dev understand this. I wish my old director was back. I miss the fuck out of that dude. Loved working for him.

I love 2:30 am support calls, especially for a system I know nearly nothing about and when I'm supposed to be 4th in line for a call.

Hopefully I made the right decision. Now let's see if I can fall back asleep.

Support run checks on our core VMS twice a day and report back their findings. We had big problems.

So, apparently, in 2015 our webhost (ixwebhosting) was purchased by Site5... This week, they finally migrated us to Site5 servers without warning, taking my email down in the process...

Today, after following the instructions in their own KB article (that tells you to click an icon that doesn't exist,) and chatting with support for over an hour, I was told that the new system they migrated us to doesn't support catch-all email accounts... At all... It's simply not possible to receive an email that was sent to your domain, unless the email address exists in the system somewhere... Despite the fact that it's a standard cPanel feature, that the old and new systems both use cPanel, that every other webhost I have ever seen that uses cPanel has this feature available, AND the fact that this is an important feature for a lot of websites, because they pipe all of their emails to a script for processing... It's simply not possible... They won't be providing that feature anymore. Nor for that matter is it possible to be migrated back...

They migrated accounts to a system that has a basic email function intentionally disabled, without warning... And we can't afford to open an account with someone else ATM... So I can't get any email until we get migrated... FML

Our customer accrues vacation time in January. The retirees will take all of their vacation starting in January and retire when they get back. This year, their ops teams have multiple retirees. Some software we support now runs on abandoned servers.

My coworker had something go seriously wrong in the financial software over Christmas and there is nobody to call to help him access or fix the running application.

I hate it when companies got 5 payment options while 4 of them basically lead to a credit card payment.

I'm renting some servers from Vultr and they recently changed something in their payment protocol. Now you need a credit card, even while paying with PayPal, and I don't have a credit card. Using their BTC option doesn't work either since my wallet tells me they are using an incompatible payment protocol (error reason, address & amount) . There is not even a wallet address shown through their BTC checkout to which I could directly send the amount to. You need to open the website on the device your wallet is stored on and then make the payment (so no address is required from their side). Account management is taking a look at it now, I got very quick replies back from their support but this is the first time I'm having such an issue with them.

Oh well, hope they won't take down my servers in the meantime.

Oh man, stands out first in my memory. Was going ok until my original boss got transferred in to another department... The first replacement was one of our HR managers 🤔

The person she then made as similar to a team lead had issues with me when I had just a bit of a different perspective about a problem to solve - I soon found myself in technical support. Go figure...

I'll never forget what one of the directors said to me a little while after they shifted me:

"Not everyone can do what they want to do if they are not good at it..." I look back on that heart breaking moment and say with pride: FUCK, YOU.

For a back-end, Java engineer, It's really sad when you are so bored at work that you get excited at the thought of designing SQL views/procs to make prod support easier.

I work for a particular tech company doing chat based support where I troubleshoot a certain email application.

And one of the most common phrases I get is: "Hey Mister IT Guy, I am suddenly missing all of my contacts and Calendars. This super sucks! I had to rebuild my email profile to make my email work again!".

I really wish when they teach computer literacy in school they drilled "Learn How To Back Up Your Junk" more so when stuff like this happens I can get them back up and running in 10 minutes instead of telling the user they are going to have spend hours rebuilding their calendar and contacts.

I was waiting in a queue for Adobe support for over an hour, decided to go for a smoke. I come back, and a representative had entered the chat and closed it because I didn't reply within like 2 minutes ... FU

The old method of how to deal with semi close friends needing support still works:
1) Redirect their call to voice mail.
2) If the mention computer problems, ignore them for now.
3) Call back in at least 4 hours. By then, they've probably solved it using Google.

(Why "semi close friends"? Because if they're close, I take their calls and if they're not close, I'm not their free support service. And if they're close and want a lot of free labour, they'll soon find themselves distant.)

Most interesting bug caused - created printer driver for vietnamese diacritical marks for old matrix printer without VN support by switching to graphics mode and plotting the dots and dashes. Print speed reduced about 200x and printer shook itself to pieces by rotating the cylinder back and forth. Oh well... Ended up buying two new laser printers instead.

Monitoring tools madness: quest foglight.

So, setting a blackout for an FMS "HA cluster" (which does not work due to a bug infested custom jboss implementation) can bring the servers down... And no way to bring them back up.

This brilliant piece of enterprise APM software costs 600.000€ for a 5year license.

I,ve added more drama (logs, threaddumps, support bundles and screenshots) to the support portal...

45 cases now in total, oldest case still open date 2017...

Fuck you quest software

A little story which happened my SECOND day on the floor after getting hired to do customer-facing phone support for my current job (can't mention the name, NDA). Customer from Detroit calls in:
Me: "Thank you for calling (company), my name is Guru, how can I assist you?"
C: "Uhhh, yeah. I need to get back into my ID. I can't backup my tablet or phone, and y'all are kinda holding my data host-" <Loud gunshots>
C: "oh! Shit!" <sound of running feet>
Me: "Everything OK sir?"
C: "Fuck! Naw! Hang on!" <more running, jumps a fence, skids to a stop>
C: "Ok, I'm safe, I'm safe... So what I gotta do to get y'all to let me back into my shit?"
*MUTE* Me: "First of all, what the fuck are you doing on the phone with me when you should be either A) calling the cops because, I dunno, just maybe some trouser stain is attempting to kill you, or, B) FIRING BACK, MOTHERFUCKER!!"
*REAL* Me: "OK, first you gotta… (outlines step 1,2,3... etc)
C: "OK, that sounds easy enough. I'll try it when I get to the office, I'm on my way there now- shit. Hold on again..."
(talking to someone on the street): "what, him? That dude? Over there? That dude... In the shirt?What the fuck!? Are you sure? Hold on, sir! I'ma call you back..."
Last thing I hear before the line lets go is a large BOOM!

Sometimes it's best to just sit back and sip your coffee...

Is there is an extension in VSCode where the ";" is added (when needed) if the file extension is for the programming language which support ";" ?

I been switching back and forth from the python and C++ and my sub-conscious is killing me.

Now it's a C++ I need a ";" , moment later I am coding in python and python don't need ";" .

Sometimes I really wonder about the elites supporting the woke culture, BLM movement, to the point saying "All lives matter" they go nuts is rather sinister. ie push the needle too far beyond the cringyness and use reverse psychology mechanism to bring maximum hatred as possible to the opposing group to the point of creating wars and conflict

There is a saying that goes "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change." So could be that to bring back the war economy.

I mean history is filled with such tactics on a grand scale: Nero, Hitler, Neocons such as strauses, Wolfowitz (lookup wolfowitz leaked doctrine), drumsfied, nuland leading the Iraq war (it did bring people together for a while before they realize it was a sham). And now same thing with China and Russia.

It makes no sense otherwise for the elitists to support it.

A few years ago a client who sold printer ink on eBay and Amazon wanted to branch out to another store, so I grudgingly began to implement the new API, I followed all the API docs but no matter what, I couldn’t get it to work, eventually I contacted their support and was told it should work. Turns out the test API was faulty and that they had no interest in fixing it instead suggested we tried test data on their live account. I refused and for once the PM agreed with me and went back to the client saying the problem was the retailer.

Fuck HttpClient

Once upon a time there was WebClient and WebRequest, everything was simple and life back then was just 3 lines of code. But Microsoft came and decided to ruin everything with HttpClient. WHY IS HTTPCLIENT AN ASS TO DISPOSE? why cant you just close the connection and not fucking leave us with a TIME_WAIT. oh yes it doesn't support ftp and you'll recommend us to use a third party lib? fuck it if you want us to move to something better don't leave us with a half-assed HttpClient. but what about if you have 1000 proxies? oh boy I do love to initialize 1000 HttpClients with different HttpClientHandlers, want only to use HttpClient each request? goodluck filling your ports with TIME_WAIT seriously microsoft

I tried...
I failed...

I give up...

Just going to go back to being selfish now... trying to change others and rally support just ain't my thing and isn't worth my time or energy.

Guess good thing I didn't start on the Collab idea... Not many people would use it...

After two years of being in (metaphorical) jail, I once again was given the a privilege of unlocking and rooting my phone. Damn. Frick Huawei, never coming back to that experience.

I gotta say, rooting... Feels a tad less accessible nowadays than when I last practiced it. All this boot image backup, patch, copy, reflash is crying to be automised, only reason I can think of why that changed and magisk can no longer patch itself into the phone's initrd is that it's somehow locked? Was it a security concern? Or can sideloaded twrp no longer do that?

Oh, and the war... The war never changes, only exploits do - fruck safety net... Good for Google that they now have an *almost* unfoolable solution (almost). The new hardware-based check is annoying af, but luckily, can still be forced to downgrade back to the old basic check that can be fooled... Still, am I the only one who feels Google is kinda weird? On one hand, they support unlocking of their own brand of phones, but then they continuously try to come up with frameworks to make life with a rooted or unlocked phone more annoying...

On the other hand, I do like having my data encrypted in a way that even sideloading twrp doesn't give full access to all my stuff, including password manager cache...

Any recommendations what to install? I do love the basic tools like adaway (rip ads), greenify (yay battery life!), viper4android (More music out of my music!) and quite honestly even lucky patcher for apps where the dev studio practices disgust me and don't make me want to support them...