I have an array of 1037 records. The soap service only accepts 100 at a time. So, I write code to send an array of 100 records at a time to the soap service in a loop and get a response back of, "The maximum number (100) of records allowed for this operation has been exceeded." Well, I'll try 99 records then. Nope same error. I'll try 50 records, nope I'll just bang my head on the desk now since the documentation and error say it is a record limit of 100. 😠

Look at my code again. I was grabbing 100 records out of the array of 1037 records and storing it in a new array, but I was sending the original array with 1037 records instead of the temporary array in the loop. 😢 I'm going to bed.

Just a joke I found online:

One day I was facing some issue with Outlook and I raised a ticket to get it resolved. I got a call from the Service Desk lady after some time and it went this way:

Lady: Hi I'm calling from service desk, what is the problem?

Me: (I explained the problem).

Lady: Can you please share your screen and give me the control so that I can solve the issue?

Me: (I shared the screen and gave the control. She solved it!!)

Lady: You may close the ticket from your end, the issue is solved.

Me: Thank you very much, I will close the ticket.

I opened her profile in lync and had a look at her profile. The display pic looked small in size. I instantly messaged her Employee ID to my colleague and asked him to have a look at her. He replied "She looks good in some angles".

I tried searching her FB profile with the help of her name, but there were too many results.

I started searching on Linked In instead, I found her profile this time. I was trying to enlarge the profile pic and suddenly a message popped up - it says

"I'll share my better picture with you on your outlook ID but you may please stop sharing your screen??"
😂

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.

It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.

like, fucking really?

There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?

What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.

But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)

So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.

"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.

Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.

talk about ridiculous.

Had this with a relative. His laptop wasn't turning on, with or without charger so he brought it back to the store to fix it. It ran elementary os by the way (detail for later). Then he got it back after a week and we booted it and it had windows 8 installed (wtf indeed). So we called the service desk to ask about it since the issue was a broken charger (!!!). Their reply: oh yeah there was a weird system installed on it so we thought we'd reset it as well for you.

SERIOUSLY, THAT'S NOT YOUR FUCKING JOB!!

He is not tech savvy and he didn't know much about backups so that was literally about one year of work GONE. Yeah, I setup a cloud backup sync thingy for him right after that.

Fuck me, big fucking security flaw with a UK internet service provider, my head has gone through my desk and hit the floor it’s that bad.

In 2008 I took my first web development job for an agency that's no longer around. There was a Vice President there by appointment from our coke headed owner who really liked to micromanage and invade privacy with key loggers and screencap spyware to "manage" us. I found out because my machine would snag when moving the mouse cursor and sometimes I'd accidentally paste the screenshot into photoshop just before the software cleared the clipboard. Anyway, I wasn't supposed to know I was being monitored so I just unplugged my network cable and killed the service running the jank ass spyware. I'd delete it when no one was looking and wipe out the cache of screencaps it would compile every day. It was basically a troll vs troll stalemate for weeks. Finally they gave in and told everyone what was going on so we collectively decided to seek revenge. We bought a piezo buzzer about the size of a quarter that chirped like crickets at random intervals. We stuck it on the underside of his desk inside of the middle drawer area and let it go. They spent so much time and money trying to get rid of the cricket infestation. We let it go on for weeks. I ended up quitting before the gag was up, but damn was it funny to see him squirm in that office because of those crickets!

I'm currently on my way to Japan on vacation.
This is how it went so far:
😁 - Arriving at airport early and excited
🤔 - Find out our flight is delayed. Oh well it might now be by a lot
😥 - Find out that it's 2 hours delayed and we will miss our next flight
😤 - Arrive at Frankfurt airport, and stands in line for 2 hours to the service desk
😡 - Arrive at service desk to get told that we have to go to a special service desk to get rebooked
🤬 - Get a ticket with our number in the queue. 125 people in front of us.
😴 - 4 and a half hour later, get get informed we will need to stay at a hotel for the night, and that we'll be flying at 6 pm the next day
😑 - Get to hotel and crashes (this is by 1 am now)
🤬 - Wakes up 6 hours later because we have a room right next to a construction site

Pro tips for Lufthansa and the imbeciles in their management and staff:
1. Inform people. You fucking knew the flight was this delayed, and you could actually have given people a choice at the beginning of their travel.
Now you had to put 100+ people in a hotel.

2. Bring food to people. Spending so much time in an airport leaves people very hungry. (Pssst, chocolate, candy and French potatoes are NOT food)

All in all, just fuck Lufthansa and their handling of this situation.

Fucking great start to the vacation. I'm already more exhausted than if I just went to work...

We recently signed a huge deal with a big, very known vendor. I asked if they had a web interface to the software. Of course, they said, and gave us a link. I clicked the link and was asked to install java. Turns out the web version is just the desktop version wrapped in a Java applet. The applet didn't do well with openjdk, so they asked me to file a support ticket. They gave me another link. The service desk required shockwave flash.

I think having the wrong job can really bring down the quality of life.

My friend has to drive two hours each way to get to and from work. That's four hours wasted commuting.. and his job is service desk agent.
What are the consequences, you ask? He never has a spare second to talk to me, he's quickly developing gray hairs and he has no time awareness.

Having the wrong job is unhealthy and results in a cascade of bad side effects.. When most of your day involves work-related things, that's just wrong. There is no Yin-Yang there. I know because my work life is somewhat balanced.

*tries to SSH into my laptop to see how that third kernel compilation attempt went*
… From my Windows box.

Windows: aah nope.

"Oh God maybe the bloody HP thing overheated again"
*takes laptop from beneath the desk indent*
… Logs in perfectly. What the hell... Maybe it's SSH service went down?

$ systemctl status sshd
> active (running)

Well.. okay. Can I log in from my phone?

*fires up Termux*
*logs in just fine*

What the fuck... Literally just now I added the laptop's ECDSA key into the WSL known_hosts by trying to log into it, so it can't be blocked by that shitty firewall (come to think of it, did I disable that featureful piece of junk yet? A NAT router * takes care of that shit just fine Redmond certified mofos).. so what is it again.. yet another one of those fucking WanBLowS features?!!

condor@desktop $ nc -vz 192.168.10.30 22
Connection to 192.168.10.30 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL?!

Fucking Heisen-feature-infested piece of garbage!!! Good for gaming and that's fucking it!

Edit: (*) this assumes that your internal network doesn't have any untrusted hosts. Public networks or home networks from regular users that don't audit their hosts all the time might very well need a firewall to be present on the host itself as well.

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

I die, go to hell and my punishment is to write software for hell network that is having power problems due to light source disruptions and is running on Windows 95 on FAT32 without any service pack.

Network speed is trough 300bps dial up modem. Protocol is over IPX/SPX.

My task is to write interactive websites that are replacement of modern websites but in VBScript, ActiveX, IE 4.0.

I have 10 managers that tell me what to do and scream when I miss deadline that is set everyday without my knowledge at random times.

They send me an email and 5 minutes later they arrive at my desk to ask me about it.

I must work 16 hours a day before I can leave the place and if I won’t show up police beats me and escorts me to the office.
If I’m late a second I don’t get payment.
I can’t afford to rent a place so I sleep in the sleeping bag.

It doesn’t matter much cause as soon as I fall asleep phone rings until I wake up and my manager screams about the problems he have for about an hour.

Rant.
So I work in the service desk and the moment and one of our clients use Mac's.

One of the end users called up saying that it was being slow and sluggish.
End user: hi my Mac is being slow.

Me: when did you last reboot it?
End user: last night
*Remotely connects*
*Runs uptime in terminal*
Me: are you sure you rebooted it last night?
End user: yes I close the lid every night...

The up time was 68 days...

1. Slack. Pretty good chat app for dev companies, I use it to prevent people standing next to my desk 40 times a day.

2. Unit testing tools, especially when fully automated using a git master branch hook, something like codeship/jenkins, and a deployment service.

3. Jetbrains IDEs. I love Vim, but Jetbrains makes theming, autocompleting & code style checks with mixed templating languages a breeze.

4. Urxvt terminal. It's a bit of work at the start, but so extremely fast and customizable.

5. Cinnamon or i3. Not really dev tools, but both make it easy to organize many windows.

6. A smart production bug logger. I tend to use Bugsnag, Rollbar or Sentry.

7. A good coffee machine. Preferably some high pressure espresso maker which costs more than the CEO's car, using organic fairtrade hipster beans with a picture of a laughing south american farmer. And don't you dare fuck it up with sugar.

8. Some high quality bars of chocolate. Not to consume yourself, but to offer to coworkers while they wait for you to fix a broken deploy. The importance of office politics is not to be underestimated.

So at work with the Macs we use, we have some guy come in after hours to service the Macs, and that means the security risk of leaving our passwords on our desks.

Not being a fan of this I tell my boss, he knows it's a risk and despite that he doesn't want this guy coming in while we're here.

Though my main problem is the Mac guy Steve is arrogant and thinks he's a know it all, and with the software I have on the Mac may end up deleting something important, I have git repo and all but I feel off just letting someone touch my computer without me being there.

I tell my boss about the software and stuff he just says contact Steve and tell him about it, to ignore the software and such, I say alright, I write up an email telling him not to touch the software listed and the folders of software documents (again it's all backed up).

No reply, I tell my boss and he says call him, I call him and he hangs up on me on the second ring!

Not sure if he's busy, but I left him a message, asking if he got my email, no reply and it's coming close to the end of the day (going to service Macs in the weekend)

I'm just not going to leave my info because if this guy can't check emails or even get back to someone why should I bother with this bullshit of risking my work.

From all the info I hear about him and my previous rants he's an arrogant prick who loves Macs.

Can't wait to leave this company, pretty sure leaving my password on my desk is a breach of our own security policy, and since 8-9 people are doing it, it's a major risk.

But he's friends with the CEO so apparently it's fuck our own security policy.

A coworker told me this a little while ago and I cringed.

"Coworker installs windows partition o n a Mac, not sure what utility he used but he's handled every IT issue, people in our company for years but googling and researching ways to do things.

Steve comes along to do a service on the Macs (apparently) and sees what my coworker did and says "get rid of that it's a security risk", coworker had a legitimate reason to use Windows, plugin for Excel only works in Windows, so Steve could have totally done checks to ensure security wasn't a risk, but he's a Mac elitist, what can you do :/, lucky coworker though gets to use a windows PC and never looked back xD."

Honestly scared of Steve doing that so called service seeing I have tons of things I need to use (source tree, Android studio, some tools to test push notifications) and just down right deleting them because of his reasons, that and the whole he does services after hours without much warning (last time it was a leave password on desk for the next "week" and Steve will come in and fix the Macs) I can't defend my argument of why I use something like Android studio (to develop the app for the company LOL)

Another Developer: bro, shit hit the fan. The x web service is throwing some error. Can you take a look please. I want to go home. I'm tired.
Me: Yea sure bro no worries.
Another Developer: I go pee, after that I will delegate the ticket to you.
(Another Developer goes to the washroom)
Me: (04:59 PM) Oh time to pack-up and get the fuck out of here
Me: (05:08 PM) Receive a message on Viber from Another Developer. It reads "Fuck you, I'm going to rub my balls on your desk"

Since we announced our product yesterday, the bots have started emailing our fuckin support system (which automatically ends up in our Jira Service Desk).

Pound salt you halfwit marketing fucks, you're cluttering our bug reports

Conversation yesterday (senior dev and the mgr)..

SeniorDev: "Yea, I told Ken when using the service, pass the JSON string and serialize to their object. JSON eliminates the data contract mismatch errors they keep running into."
Mgr: "That sounds really familiar. Didn't we do this before?"
SeniorDev: "Hmmm...no. I doubt anyone has done this before."
Me: "Yea, our business tier processor handled transactions via XML. It allowed the client and server to process business objects regardless of platform. Partners using Perl,
clients using Delphi, website using .aspx, and our SQLServer broker even used it."
Mgr: "Oh yea...why did we stop using it?"
Me: "WCF. Remember, the new dev manager at the time and his team broke up the business processor into individual WCF services."
Mgr: "Boy, that was a crap fest. We're still fighting bugs from the mobile devices. Can't wait until we migrate everything to REST."
SeniorDev: "Yea, that was such a -bleep-ing joke."
Me: "You were on Jake's team at the time. You were the primary developer in the re-write process saying passing strings around wasn't the way true object-oriented developers write code.
So it's OK now because the string is in JSON format or because using a JSON string your idea?"

SeniorDev turns around in his desk and puts his headphones back on.

That's right you lying SOB...I remember exactly the level of personal attacks you spewed on me and other developers behind our backs for using XML as the message format.

Keep your fat ass in your seat and shut the hell up.

0. The conference room TV has no sound.
1. I submit ticket to Facilities.
10. Facilities closes ticket saying that's up to Service Desk.
11. I submit ticket to Service Desk
100. Service Desk closes ticket saying that up to Facilities
110. ???
111. Profit

In my previous company we developed a CRM web app for the company to use internally and it was in my humble opinion really easy to make sense of, but for some freaking we kept getting calls whenever someone got an error, and our default response was always to send us an email, then we will get back to you, as it was mostly stupid things they called about, for example, a customer might have to be status terminated, before you can click button A, button A would then be disabled and employees would call asking why. Apparently, people got annoyed by our response and went to the management, to get some guidelines as to when they could call the "development apartment" for help, so the management sends out some guidelines as to when they could call, write or whatever... The following was done without consulting us in any way ANY WAY AT ALL!... Because we all know management knows fucking best, and why bother asking the people that sit with it every day, and the way it was done was by saying:

If the background color on your error is red, it means the error is fatal and you can call the developers immediately, if its orange send an email and they will answer within 48 hours LIKE WTF... Seriously???. That was basically it, and honestly we had just been using colors, without much thought to it ofc red, was an error etc. But they we're not "OMG EVERYTHING IS BREAKING" alert, so we decided to use a couple of hours refactoring the color of the flash errors, and after that, we did not have many red alerts(None, yes none what so ever) We changed all the red ones to orange, and introduced some new colors. That worked for some time around 6 months or so, but then people obviously started calling again like, why even bother... So we created a simple service desk, blocked all incoming calls to our phones that were from regular employees, heard a lot of complaints about this from the employees, management was mad, we had so many meetings with those top paid management fuckers that know everything (way better than you and me), about how to handle this. As it took way too much of our time, that people couldn't bother trying simple things, or make some sense as to why a button is disabled etc. We ended up "winning", was allowed to block calls for some time, till the employees had learned to use a freaking simple service desk, it's not fucking rocket science Okay, stop being a pain in the ass... And it actually fucking worked! Most relaxing time after people got a hang of using the service desk instead of calling life was good after that... <3

So last week I really fucked up

I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.

So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.

Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.

Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.

Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert

Hey devs, really need some help here. This is driving me crazy...

We're currently taking issues from the company via mail. We've got a group mail that goes to the three of us at the IT department. Problem is, colleagues just forward customers emails without event trying to help, which means that we get stupid issues like "I can't sign in", and no further information. We're currently using Jira, and I was thinking perhaps we can set up a Jira Service Desk? Then we could have an internal help desk where issues could be submitted, and require some important fields, and perhaps add a checklist. Have you had any experience with Service Desk? Do you think it would be a good idea to have a "normal" person have an account there as well to filter out the normal "Have you tried restarting your computer" stuff? Is it suited for non-developers?

Any other ideas?

Yeay, messy question, but I'm fucking desperate...

I technically joined just after this guy left(fired) but the stories are to good to tell!

The guy was clearly off but It wasn't his fault he had to of had aspergers

He would demand! To write with two pens in one hand he said it was faster and the only way he could write neatly... (Nope)

I don't think it was to weird but he would put on music and play death metal stuff full volume, because he couldn't hear anyone the team used to make paper planes and fire them at him when they wanted his attention.

Another thing he was into furry ... Stuff but was super open about it had. Wolf's and shit like that on his desk and always had a wolf shirt.

But he was fired, he wasn't great at his job.

I came in to help sort out the mess it was the government's setup for servers and nurses and doctors computers for the NHS over in england.

He effectively skull fucked the entire system.

He magically (I to do day can not understand how) did forced updates and installed to a newer version of Windows servers the problem being the programs wouldn't work on newer windows at the time.

Most were on XP at the time and they used windows servers back then.

Luckily not nation wide just in my local area but still thousands of computers affected.

The issue became this ... You see they had this program on their computers that let them get patient documents and update etc

He removed code or added code that made it update all the laptops and desktops to a new service pack which they didn't want... Then he upgraded the servers to a new windows version I don't remember the specifics

But the updates and new version of Windows made it so the laptops etc couldn't communicate with the servers.

... The next day he got fired and I was brought in for a few weeks to help sort out the mess.

But apparently he was a super interesting guy but with way to many quirks.

It costs the tax payers a fortune! Literally a few million to sort his mistake out people were working round the clock for two weeks straight.

Desk inventory(not counting computer hardware):

-Three interlocking polished high density particle board squares, cut by an industrial-grade 3d printer at the office of an architect friend. I use them as coasters.
-A roll of toilet paper, as I have a deviated septum and blow my nose so often that proper facial tissue would be wasteful.
-A landline phone, for work. I'm thinking about getting rid of it though, as I can do the majority of my work phone calls through Google Hangouts and our company's webrtc client, and because it costs me about $7 a month for the service, through ooma.

What's on your desk? No computer hardware, please. Also, please try to use your words, because it's a lot of fun to imagine the layout rather than see it.

My client installed a new proxy that severely blocks out most of their own intranet, including their IT service desk. We can't raise tickets to let them know and their email just redirects us to their service desk. Fuck me these guys are idiots.

In PC World yesterday after reserving an item online for "Collection within minutes". Took about 20 mins to get there.

Went to the collection desk and gave them my reservation number. Staff member (very friendly and nice) went to go get it. Waited 10 mins for them to come back and say "I'm having trouble finding it...".

I said thanks anyway then went next door to maplin to get what I needed.

Just annoyed they promise a collection in minutes service and the item doesn't even exist in the store.

Maybe as they don't specify the minutes it's actually ready to collect in a million minutes.

So, this morning was crazy.

I had the Service Desk, first ticket of the day: A notification for Updates in Windows 10 from a concerned co-worker who hasn't seen this.

We distribute our updates with a WSUS and install them automatically and haven't approved any of the creators and fall creators updates.

After checking I saws that the client had the Creators Update already installed!

This means, this Client ignored our WSUS Updates and installed direct from Microsoft!

MICROSOFT YOU MAKE ME MAD!!!

So after multiple hours of wrestling with Jira I finally managed to autofill fields in the service desk. How? By installing a plugin to show message boxes and injecting JavaScript through it, what else?

Fucking wonderful piece of crap :)

Next up: automatically capture errors triggered by employees with Sentry and raise Jira requests. "A button didn't work" isn't enough god damn it.

Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.

During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).

Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.

I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.

30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.

I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.

Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :)

> Can you help me make this excel document more readable when it's printed? *looking to change the text size and column widths*

Who do you think I am, Mr fucking clippy? Why are you printing it anyway? Step into the millennium and email it to them you fucking nugget, save the planet.

This was after three people already approached my desk in a line, five minutes after I got in. All asking stupid questions, which not only do they have a service desk for but could quite easily Google.

Can anyone else spot the irony of this mail about the new Jira Service Desk?

My answer to their survey -->

What, if anything, do you most _dislike_ about Firebase In-App Messaging?

Come on, have you sit a normal dev, completely new to this push notification thing and ask him to make run a simple app like the flutter firebase_messaging plugin example? For sure you did not oh dear brain dead moron that found his college degree in a Linux magazine 'Ruby special edition'.

Every-f**kin thing about that Firebase is loose end. I read all Medium articles, your utterly soporific documentation that never ends, I am actually running the flutter plugin example firebase_messaging. Nothing works or is referenced correctly: nothing. You really go blind eyes in life... you guys; right? Oh, there is a flimsy workaround in the 100th post under the Github issue number 10 thousand... lets close the crash report. If I did not change 50 meaningless lines in gradle-what-not files to make your brick-of-puke to work, I did not changed a single one.

I dream of you, looking at all those nonsense config files, with cross side eyes and some small but constant sweat, sweat that stinks piss btw, leaving your eyes because you see the end, the absolute total fuckup coming. The day where all that thick stinky shit will become beyond salvation; blurred by infinite uncontrolled and skewed complexity; your creation, your pathetic brain exposed for us all.

For sure I am not the first one to complain... your whole thing, from the first to last quark that constitute it, is irrelevant; a never ending pile of non sense. Someone with all the world contained sabotage determination would not have done lower. Thank you for making me loose hours down deep your shit show. So appreciated.

The setup is: servers, your crap-as-a-service and some mobile devices. For Christ sake, sending 100 bytes as a little [ beep beep + 'hello kitty' ] is not fucking rocket science. Yet you fuckin push it to be a grinding task ... for eternity!!!

You know what, you should invent and require another, new, useless key-value called 'Registration API Key Plugin ID Service' that we have to generate and sync on two machines, everyday, using something obscure shit like a 'Gradle terminal'. Maybe also you could deprecate another key, rename another one to make things worst and I propose to choose a new hash function that we have to compile ourselves. A good candidate would be a C buggy source code from some random Github hacker... who has injected some platform dependent SIMD code (he works on PowerPC and have not test on x64); you know, the guy you admire because he is so much more lowlife that you and has all the Pokemon on his desk. Well that guy just finished a really really rapid hash function... over GPU in a server less fashion... we have an API for it. Every new user will gain 3ms for every new key. WOW, Imagine the gain over millions of users!!! Push that in the official pipe fucktard!.. What are you waiting for? Wait, no, change the whole service name and infrastructure. Move everything to CLSG (cloud lambda service ... by Google); that is it, brilliant!

And Oh, yeah, to secure the whole void, bury the doc for the new hash under 3000 words, lost between v2, v1 and some other deprecated doc that also have 3000 and are still first result on Google. Finally I think about it, let go the doc, fuck it... a tutorial, for 'weak ass' right.
One last thing, rewrite all your tech in the latest new in house language, split everything in 'femto services' => ( one assembly operation by OS process ) and finally cramp all those in containers... Agile, for sure it has to be Agile. Users will really appreciate the improvements of your mandatory service.

One hour of Jira Service desk workflow configuration complete

Network Support is the worst place to work in especially when you done all your work in the first hour. Also, when managers are pain in the ass.

Might as well call it a call centre rather than Service Desk

The following piece of advice will be for those aspiring for an IT service desk position:

When companies are looking to hire service desk agents, they're primarily looking for socially skilled people with strong communicative skills, rather than primarily technically skilled people. When I first joined the IT world, I went on different interviews for that position and across all of them there was one truth: all the interviewers were eyeballs-focused on my social and communication skills and a mere thin layer of technical skills was required (depending on how technical the service desk). In fact, I immediately got aggressively dismissed twice for two of those when I filled in a Myers-Briggs personality test according to my Sheldon-type personality (selfish, condescending etc). Conversely, when I applied for a new position and I faked that test into answering everything focused positively on the social aspect, I was an immediate top candidate.

Here's a definition from the ITIL Foundation course, chapter Service Management: Because of how lateral the function of the service desk has become today (not only used to solve technical issues, but also company-wide issues), the most important and valued skills when hiring a service desk agent are fully focused on empathy and soft skills and none of those are technical skills. This is because the service desk has people that are the front window of your company and thus you can't make social mistakes as to protect your company's reputation. That risk has to be minimized and you need the ideal people. The people who in fact solve the technical problems are behind a back-office and they are contacted by the service desk agents.

In the beginning, when I did my first service desk job, I also thought: "Oh, I'm going to have to convince them I'm this technical wizard". In the end I got hired for being able to explain technology in human language and because in the interview I successfully communicated and explained ideas to both the team manager and the CEO, not because I knew what goes on inside a computer. This is a very important distinction.
My friends have also been in service desk positions and ironically they were the most successful when they were empathetic slimeballs (saying: "of course, anything for you" while not meaning it, constantly making jokes), rather than people with integrity (those got fired for telling the customer they were wrong while being unfriendly).

I hope this helps.

We have to use this shit service desk simulation software that runs on javascript and a classmate legit just went java == javascript. almost jumped him

But for things this system is so shit i rather work at a service desk for a day than use this shit for half a hour

-- Have you ever self hosted a Linux/Free Bsd server at home?
-- What was the maintenance like in terms of operation and cost compared to an online service?

I and my partner are planning to self host our Ubuntu server locally because currently though we spend less than $1100 a month on Azure with moderate CPU usage but we plan to scale out with believes that the server cost might sky-rocket.

We made a budget of $25k for the setup which includes cost of hardware, bandwidth and power.

We also made some research concerning most used hardwares for home servers because we really are newbees talk of hardware. What we found are options related to the Intel Xeon as CPU, some others say use NAS, while some are more of advertising.

$25k on the desk,
we care more about speed than of space. How can we make the setup totally worth it? You don't have to spare us a change, just some headlight and way to go.
Your advice are needed. Thank you.