In my day job, as in life, basically all I see is 95% of the time people come along, look at an issue, and then proceed as though the actual issues and a theoretical issue that just happens to make life easiest for them are one and the same thing.
I had a job recently, they told me I was about the 17th site visit trying to fix their problems, which I soon realised was a simple case of the 16 before me using the attitude I just mentioned (also in AfORisms https://wimminz.wordpress.com/01-intro-and-stuff/) “fuck it, I’m doing *this* and getting my ass out of here“
So, in this case there were in fact three or four separate issues, we *think* we got it licked, but only time will tell, which is what happens when one problem is actually three or four, it used to be one problem, but the 16 fuck it types that preceded me added three more and made the original one worse.
One of the remote guys at one of our big clients knows me as “the serial number guy”, because we are doing an upgrade roll-out where boxes A and B and being replaced, but, you have to do this in a VERY specific order and way, or best case scenario is you take the entire site hard down, worst case scenario is you take the whole corporate WAN hard down, and this is for a fortune 500 type company.
I am the “serial number guy” because I insist the remote guy reads me the serial number he has on file for old box A & B, *before* I touch anything, he used to laugh at me for being anal, last week he stopped laughing, the serial number he had for old box A, and the serial number on old box A did not match, turns out some fuck swapped it out a while back and it wasn’t documented… *he* got the credit for this, I don’t give a fuck, I did *not* get the blame and my ass was covered.
In the recent job where I was #17, one of the previous guys had put a replacement box in, but it lacked a plug in card. So he pulled the card from the old box and slammed it into the new box… shame he forgot to copy the driver software for the card over too… as it happens the card itself was dying, so it all just makes things more complex and time consuming to diagnose.
I have walked in to places to fuck around with patch cables to diagnose why VOIP phones aren’t working that worked last week, only to meet an in-house guy with a REAL cable tester in his hands, one that does attenuation and shit and can calculate the length of the fucking cable and log and record results, he knows it ain’t the patch leads, I know it ain’t the patch leads, but the client’s outsourced to India tech support guy insists we spend an hour fucking with cables before agreeing to move to an unused port on the switch, which is what they were told in the first place… and 2 days later it stops working again… why? because the doofus in India didn’t update the documentation, and scanning software found what was supposed to be an unused port in use, and disabled it…. duh…
and….
though at first glance it may seem completely unrelated, I just can’t fucking stand wimminz, because after putting up with this crap during the day, I got no time for it on my own personal unpaid time, but, this is exactly what wimminz are.
If I had a dollar for every wimminz of whom I have thought, you know, she could be fucking great except for glaring flaw exhibit A, I’d be richer than Bill Gates, so really, what are the odds that exhibit A always involved treating me like a cunt, are all down to me?
About the same as the jobs described above where the faults I walk into, which were already there, are somehow down to me.
Of course, the outcomes are the same, when things work out, well, it was just that their attitude didn’t exceed the inbuilt stability threshold, and that goes for the wimminz too… but, the times they are a changing, as we get to a critical mass of don’t-give-a-fuck in each and every process chain.
Thing is, what sets the good, the bad and the ugly apart are not such things as the sheer number of cisco or microsoft or whatever certifications the person has, sure, there is *some* correlation between the good guys and the certification, but it is fairly loose at best, give me a conscientious, thinking, observing, methodical bastard any day over the elite certificated apex dude in the field, the methodical mother will rarely if ever make anything worse, and can always tell you what he DID do, and what effects it had and what he observed.
The guy who said fuck it and didn’t bother to think long enough to load the add in card drivers from the old box has all that manufacturers certs, fucking gold accredited partner status, he can whizz bang the exams, he can spec your corporate network from a blank sheet of paper (in theory) but in practice in the field he can’t even stop to think that add in card hardware = drivers or it presents as a fault…
Many years ago in my marine engineering days we used to build, into shipping container and smaller format, complete hydraulic power pack systems.. the head of the company was a fucking hydraulic genius, and his designs were awesome, except, when you tried to build them, he’d lay out a bunch of pipes for a manifold and put them so close together you couldn’t actually get a spanner on the unions, so, we used to use his to + or – 0.1 mm spec designs as a sort of artists impression, and build it so you could actually build it, and in the two years I worked for the asshole he never actually spotted that what we built and his designs were different.
Pity the poor fucker in the field who tried to fix a repair by having a part CNC’d up according to his designs, and you wouldn’t believe how common that is in engineering… nd of course some of THAT shit is deliberate, trade secrets and branding etc, so Volvo (penta) used to buy Peugeot diesel parts, and make subtle changes so you couldn’t go out and buy a pug part at a tenth the price, which was doubly hilarious because the only reason the expensive volvo penta part died was the deliberate design changes, tow examples were cracking between the valves on the straight six diesels, and making the mechanical fuel lift pumps sealed and non-serviceable, so when the diaphragms went they leaked diesel into the sump, voilà, dilution and runaway….
For about 10 years in Spain you could buy standard UNF and UNC thread bolts, with metric head sizes because the fitters had metric spanners, not AF sets… I’ve seen that cause more “What the FUUK!!!” than chicks with dicks down Bugis St.
Old Joe was a semi retired Morris engineer who made a nice living in spain as a small garage, what with this AF and whitworth spanners and whatnot, fixing all the english cars and tractors and stuff that found its way to spain..
At the time I had a DKW (Audi) diesel truck, imagine what a cunt I looked when the clutch went one day and I looked and saw the cable was broken, so went to the auto factors to ask for a deek truck clutch cable… no señor, there is no such animal… me waves clutch cable in my hand at them, they shrug, oh dear, looks like a previous owner did a mod…
But, 20 years ago this shit was the exception that was a good tale to tell over a beer after work on a Friday, nowadays it is par for the fucking course, no greens or holes, all sand traps and bunkers.
Reminds me of a joke Fred the alky used to tell about Hell, which was full of bars and lewd wimminz, “you see all those bottles of beer, well, they all have holes in them, you see all those lewd wimminz, well, they don’t”