Month: December 2007

A morning in the life of UltraMegaCorp…

DA: Hey Matt. Matt: Hi DA, what’s up? DA: Are you aware of a ticket raised by BO about XQAH003 being down? Matt: Yep, we had a power outage in that data center that affected a large number of machines. Matt: AP tried to repair them, but they had changed the security codes. The guard, rather than escalating to AP’s manager, told AP to just go home. DA: OK, somehow the service request ended up in our Windows queue. DA: I’ll send it back to the Operations team if you guys are already aware of it. Matt: Yeah, we have dozens of tickets in our queue about this, too. Matt: On the plus side… boosting service request counts for teh win! DA: LOL DA: If there’s already a ticket for XQAH003, maybe I should just close this one. Is there? Matt: Yes, there are two tracking tickets… one moment. Matt: YQ-38205728NB Matt: Use that one 🙂 If the user doesn’t have access to the appropriate queue, then just know we are working with all haste… Physical security is the problem at this point, AP is one of the few admins with data center access and they changed the locks. Matt: …and security won’t let him in 🙁 DA: Thanks. Matt: LOL… I just got an email. The Logistics and security teams are also locked out this morning! DA: If it wasn’t so sad, that would be funny! 😉 Matt: Just got the update from KW… even the security guards can’t get into the data center right now… DA: LOL. Wow, now that’s tight security. Matt: They should throw a fire extinguisher through the window and climb in. It would be cheaper than thousands of people standing around talking about why they can’t get their work done. DA: Probably get fired if they did that. Matt: Yeah.

I said I’d never deal with this bloody company again… but now I have to. Even though I am the person who wrote the (in)famous “Qwest In The Dumper” blog entry the day I finally got rid of them and went to Vonage, I’m now buying a home where the only high-speed internet service is through Qwest.

Double damn.

I have dealt with customer service for the last two hours, trying to explain to them using very small words what it is that I require. They refuse to understand. This reminds me why I am glad I do not work in customer service.

I am glad, on the other hand, for the lessons I learned from my friend Matt, the master of dealing with customer service. Keep reiterating what it is you want, and if they refuse to help you out, talk to their supervisor, and their supervisor above them if necessary to get what you want. Eventually, they will relent. Usually.

My experience with Qwest before, though, is lies, runarounds, and more lies to placate me. Then lies on the customer service record when I call again… and then they send me to another department.

So I gave up. Screw ’em. If they don’t want my business badly enough to understand why I want two separate DSL lines to my house, they can do without more of my hard-won dollars. I know the number of the beast, and it’s 79378 (QWEST on your touch-tone dial).

I decided to give a company called Digis a try. Reviews are mixed, but at least my technical support and sales people speak American English, give me what I want, and have a time frame for when I can get it. I’m a little concerned about negative reports on the ISP at dslreports.com, but I find it interesting to note that most of those are 2-3 years old, and they’ve changed from 802.11 (UGH!) to Motorola Canopy in that time.

Wish me luck!

Today is moving day. I spent many hours last night loading a twenty-six foot U-Haul truck with all of our stuff… It’s stacked to the ceiling, and this morning we get to unload it in sub-freezing temperatures.

So much for my plan to do nothing this week.

In keeping with my ongoing theme of “do as little as possible in the week after Christmas”, I bring you this quote. I have been reading a number of reviews and comparisons on various e-book readers in order to determine first if I want one, and second which one I’d prefer. Referring to a few half-assed programs on the Sony eBook reader, Nate Anderson had this to say:

Let’s be clear: I would rather have these features than not have them, but it would have been nice to make them a bit more fully-assed.

In keeping with this week’s theme of “I don’t want to be bothered writing omnibus blog entries”, I give you the following quote from Penn Jillette:

Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.

Given that it’s the week after Christmas and nobody wants to do much of anything they don’t have to, I give you Engrish.com.

What I really want for Christmas this year is to not have any toys require assembly on Christmas Eve. Thank you, Santa!

Thought I’d share..

My Family’s 9th Christmas CD, produced by yours truly
CLICK HERE FOR CHRISTMAS MUSIC

Warning.. these are not professional singers.. but its fun.. Older songs available below..

OKAY.. here’s a fun question.

I have an external hard drive. I have recently moved it from one computer to another. I want to use it as I always have.

The problem? I made a bunch of shortcuts to help me navigate around the drive, but now they all point to the wron drive.

On one computer the drive was F:. All my shortcuts say “F:/data/bla bla bla. On my new computer, the drive is K: and the shortcuts still say “F:/data/bla bla bla.” so each time, I have to redirect each shortcut to point to K, not F. Is there a one-step way to do this? I need the shortcuts to work, but don’t want to edit the LITERALLY hundreds of shortcuts manually.

Thanks!

http://www.informationliberation.com/?multimedia Umm…okay, another startling bit of reality intrudes itself into our perceptions please watch this movie… it’s kinda boring, but it has a lot of interesting facts bound up into it It’s called ‘Zeitgeist’

and yah, I know a lot of people are going to think it’s a lot of tinfoil hat stuff, but so far all of the research I have done on them proved out to be true. but then again, don’t trust me, research it yourself and find out 🙂