• My Name (unregistered) in reply to Ted
    Ted:
    I didn't even view the source and knew it was some fag linking unicorns. It's not clever. It's not funny. Just the word "Mad Maxian" with a link under it and the short, useless, one word sentence fragment. That was all I needed to know that you were linking the gay unicorns that most of the programmers iteratively one-up each other on how much they hate them.

    It was funny to click on them when Remy first came out of the closet. It's even funny when clicking on the Random button on a different site and seeing it. It's NOT funny when someone links to it from a one-word sentence fragment and thinks they're so fucking clever to have discovered cornify.js.

    You probably still use lmgtfy and think you're so damn clever.

    It means in real life, you're an unoriginal hipster doofus.

    Fuck off. You're not clever. And you're giving me a funny feeling in my pants. I don't like it.

    You didn't check the code and still discovered the unicorns? You've got JavaScript enabled, you dumbass. Stupido ...

  • (cs)

    I have to wonder why Ted didn't just ask Steve what his password was, then reset the @company.com password to that.

  • notatroll (unregistered)

    People are still using AOL? God help us.

  • ih8u (unregistered) in reply to Machtyn
    Machtyn:
    For those that don't read source...

    [email protected]. No, not really. I did find some mailing lists that had contributions from [email protected], and no, it's not the same person. The original submission had it going to Yahoo, and the name wasn't Steve.

    '"It's a little bit of a mess," Chris, Ted's boss, explained as he showed Ted around the server room.' Also, that sentence is all full of fail. (Too fast fingers, I'm sure.)

    '"It's a little bit of a mess, Chris," Ted's boss explained as he showed Ted around the server room.'

    The first one is correct and makes sense. Your version, however has Chris, Ted's boss, calling Ted Chris. It's called apposition.

    And damn you for trolling me into a response about grammar.

  • (cs)

    Wow. Sounds like working for Apple was a bit more stressful than I had thought it would be.

  • foo (unregistered) in reply to ted
    ted:
    And linking to xkcd is not clever. It's not funny. And it's not original.
    Unless you're frist to link to a new comic.
  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Reminded me of this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z99HZ8KyYYc

  • creepy Austrialian kid with a razor boomerang (unregistered)
    article:
    a creepy Austrialian kid with a razor boomerang

    WooHoo - I got featured on TDWTF, and not in an overly bad way....

  • jim (unregistered) in reply to PiisAWheeL
    PiisAWheeL:
    place holder comment :p

    Addendum (2012-02-21 09:07): place holder comment :p

    Damn... Why do I always get the first comment on the lame ones. Its not even worth pissing off the frist kiddies over :(

    Because no-one else wants to comment on the lame ones?

    I must confess, I didn't quite see this one coming....

  • Some Guy (unregistered)

    OK, maybe I don't really understand this one....

    He saw stevem had been hammering the POP3 server to the point where his account locked... But.....(not sure based on the story) either

    1. He was trying to log on to AOL (so he would have been hammering a different POP3 server) or
    2. He was trying to log on to a non existant account (@aol.com) on this server so he couldn't have locked the account

    or did I miss something

  • CIKO (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Goatie:
    I totally agree. I'd never put up with being talked to like that, no matter who it is.
    "I understand your frustration, Sir. Please hold while I look that up for you...<click>" If they're still holding on after 30 minutes: "Sir, sorry for the delay, we've got some power issues..."

    And no, you don't ever need to take that crap from anyone. The higher up they are, the more you should push back against abuse, because they should know better.

    It's you!!! You BASTARD!!!! Don't you know who I am???

  • Jimmy (unregistered) in reply to PoPSiCLe
    PoPSiCLe:
    If this had been my job, and this was my customer, he'd been very politely told to fuck off.

    First thing one explains to idiots, is in fact that they're idiots. Second, you can explain that you fixing their idiotic mistakes is what keeps them actually being able to work.

    Have I been doing support for years? Yes. Have I actually taught anyone anything? I like to think so.

    How Naive.

  • Jimmy (unregistered) in reply to Machtyn
    Machtyn:
    For those that don't read source...

    [email protected]. No, not really. I did find some mailing lists that had contributions from [email protected], and no, it's not the same person. The original submission had it going to Yahoo, and the name wasn't Steve.

    '"It's a little bit of a mess," Chris, Ted's boss, explained as he showed Ted around the server room.' Also, that sentence is all full of fail. (Too fast fingers, I'm sure.)

    '"It's a little bit of a mess, Chris," Ted's boss explained as he showed Ted around the server room.'

    I thought the intent was more: '"It's a little bit of a mess," Chris (Ted's boss) explained as he showed Ted around the server room.'

  • sdrfyh (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    If most/all of your revenue is dependent on one client, and you aren't a brand new startup that has just went to market or just been formed, I would argue that you've done something terribly wrong and probably should go out of business.

    There are many, many small companies out there who have one major customer. Is it the ideal situation? Obviously not: if for any reason you lose that customer, you're in deep trouble. But does that mean they're incompetent morons? No. I'm sure you've heard the statistics on how the majority of new companies go out of business within 3 to 5 years. One big customer who keeps you in business is a whole lot better than no customers and going bankrupt. There are many companies who produce specialized products with a small market. Like, I once did a consulting job for a small company that made toothpaste tubes. They had one customer: a major manufacturer of toothpaste (whose name rhymes with "Toll Gate"). But who else were they going to sell to? Car makers? Furniture manufacturers? Accountants? Who wants to buy empty toothpaste tubes besides toothpaste makers? And there aren't all that many of those out there.

    Macleans? Sensodyne?

    Also, couldn't the same tubes be used for paint or something like that?

    Finally, while I take your point that sometimes 1 major client is all you have need, I suspect in IT (as opposed to the 'real world') it does show a bit of a problem to only have a single customer. Part of the reason is that IT specialisation is a little bit the opposite to other industries

    [ranting] that is, we have people who specialise in the 'ingredients' of our product, while other industries have experts in the 'recipe' . We still have experts in recipe, but a lot less, because we believe we can do anything with our ingredients so we aren't tied in to specific recipes

    Work with me here....

    In IT we are experts in what we do, not what we create - if someone says "can you make me a system that does all this things" our first reaction is "shit yeah". If (OTOH) you asked someone in a pallet factory whether they could make a kennel they'd uhm and ah, and say "I suppose, but I really know about making pallets".

    Unlike other industries, which specialise in the end product, we specialise in the technology going into making that product. Other industries might research the ingredients a little bit, but always with the idea of making the same (or equivalent) product, not in terms of making something different

    Another difference is that everyone wants software, whereas only car makers and hobbos want car doors...

    I think it is very rare in IT to be specialised in a way that you could only ever work for a single client. [/ranting]

  • (cs) in reply to Merus
    Merus:
    that's the country next to Germany, right?

    Me, to guy with thick German accent, "You must be from Austria, right?"

    German-accent-guy: "Right, how did you know?"

    "Because my wife said you're from Australia."

  • Mick (unregistered) in reply to Larry
    Larry:
    Something mysterious happens to even the world's greatest minds when they get near computers. Something that suppresses all their logic circuits and makes them think:

    If I don't understand it, it must be easy.

    And, now that we know it is easy, the only reason you would refuse to help them is that you must be a stubborn slacker who doesn't recognize their clout. Hence, they need to shout louder and throw their title around.

    I had a guy get furious with me because I didn't know his password -- to his home wireless router.

    This, yes, this.

    Sometimes smart people realise that they're so tuned to see the complex stuff that anything they miss might actually be ludicrously easy ("Why a child of 4 could understand this....run out and get me a child of 4" Groucho [paraphrased]). It's like the day a Software Engineer/Programmer realises that some problems are trivial and some have already been solved (even to a degree); that perhaps we don't want to implement our own date class; that perhaps the designers of the Java API understood more than us and make a more efficient tree than we ever could....etc - and yet the kid around the corner has been using these inbuilt API's since Jesus played full forward for Jerusalem.

  • (cs)

    Been there, done that enough that my second question on any call about e-mail (after "Have you looked in your spam folder? Really?") is "This is your work account we're talking about, right?"

  • noland (unregistered) in reply to Merus
    Merus:
    "a creepy Austrialian kid"

    that's the country next to Germany, right?

    Give us an L an we sell you some kangaroos!

  • eric76 (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Ted's right- linking to Cornify is not, in-and-of-itself, funny. But the outraged comments from people like Ted make it downright hilarious. When you wonder why I would do such a thing, the answer is that I do it for Ted.

    I didn't have the vaguest clue about the reason for Ted's rant until I saw your mention of a link and went back and found it.

    And you are absolutely right about the comments making it hilarious.

  • Theodore (unregistered)

    I wonder if it occurred to him to shoot back, "And you made it to the post of CIO of PubConq without knowing the difference between aol.com and pubconq.com?"

  • foo (unregistered) in reply to Some Guy
    Some Guy:
    OK, maybe I don't really understand this one....

    He saw stevem had been hammering the POP3 server to the point where his account locked... But.....(not sure based on the story) either

    1. He was trying to log on to AOL (so he would have been hammering a different POP3 server) or
    2. He was trying to log on to a non existant account (@aol.com) on this server so he couldn't have locked the account

    or did I miss something

    What you missed is that the stories here don't need to make sense anymore. Just throw together some concepts most readers are familiar with (usually in negative ways), whether stupid email users today or long, dumb SQL queries yesterday, and fantasize a story around them.

    Well, it's actually an inverse CAPTCHA test. Those who try to make sense of the story are obviously neither robots nor trolls and have no place in this forum. (Or they're Borg and will get caught in an infinite recursion trying to analyze the story and bring down the collective.)

  • (cs) in reply to ted
    ted:
    [Re: my attempt at trolling] It's not clever. It's not funny. ... I sometimes write flamebait anonymously when I'm having a bad day and never go back to read the responses. ... Slashdot is the other place I frequently do this.
    You're just loved all over teh intarwebz, eh?

    (At the forum I help moderate, one ex-member told us that he was being trollish as part of his anger-management program; better (safer?) than annoying his mates at the pub, he said. If you're at all like this, why not [STFU|stay away]?)

    And linking to xkcd is not clever. It's not funny. And it's not original.
    Clever is in the eye of the beholder. So is funny. (In many of our eyes, for instance, you're funny, as has been noted.) And it doesn't have to be original to be useful. (Ever used a built-in library?)
  • Bub (unregistered)

    I don't need a job that badly I would ever take that kind of abuse.

    I'd drive over to that fscker's office, mash a fresh turd into his face, then set fire to his Porsche on the way out.

    Assclown.

  • Some Guy (unregistered) in reply to foo
    foo:
    Some Guy:
    OK, maybe I don't really understand this one....

    He saw stevem had been hammering the POP3 server to the point where his account locked... But.....(not sure based on the story) either

    1. He was trying to log on to AOL (so he would have been hammering a different POP3 server) or
    2. He was trying to log on to a non existant account (@aol.com) on this server so he couldn't have locked the account

    or did I miss something

    What you missed is that the stories here don't need to make sense anymore. Just throw together some concepts most readers are familiar with (usually in negative ways), whether stupid email users today or long, dumb SQL queries yesterday, and fantasize a story around them.

    Well, it's actually an inverse CAPTCHA test. Those who try to make sense of the story are obviously neither robots nor trolls and have no place in this forum. (Or they're Borg and will get caught in an infinite recursion trying to analyze the story and bring down the collective.)

    Tanks for clarifyingI thought I was getting smarter now I could do a "but this doesn't make sense" but now I realise the stories are just getting less cromulent, and my intelligence is staying same (or perhaps decreasing, given I'm still here)....

    Cheers and Beers

    Some Guy

  • Just Quietly (unregistered) in reply to Silverhill
    Silverhill:
    ted:
    [Re: my attempt at trolling] It's not clever. It's not funny. ... I sometimes write flamebait anonymously when I'm having a bad day and never go back to read the responses. ... Slashdot is the other place I frequently do this.
    You're just loved all over teh intarwebz, eh?

    (At the forum I help moderate, one ex-member told us that he was being trollish as part of his anger-management program; better (safer?) than annoying his mates at the pub, he said. If you're at all like this, why not [STFU|stay away]?)

    And linking to xkcd is not clever. It's not funny. And it's not original.
    Clever is in the eye of the beholder. So is funny. (In many of our eyes, for instance, you're funny, as has been noted.) And it doesn't have to be original to be useful. (Ever used a built-in library?)
    He's doin; no 'arm. Perhaps if you object to his post you should be the one who [STFU|goes away]
  • Bill (unregistered) in reply to foo
    foo:
    ted:
    And linking to xkcd is not clever. It's not funny. And it's not original.
    Unless you're frist to link to a new comic.
    I am so voting for FRIST in the next election - they always seem to be on TDWTF....
  • (cs)

    Is it just me, or did Ted not pass his BOFH class in college. He MUST take a refresher course and fight back.

  • foo (unregistered)

    Ted just should have configured the local DNS server to point aol.com to the local mail server.

  • J (unregistered)

    I think i understand how he was hitting the POP3 server with his work account while trying to log into AOL. If both allow you to just enter your user name (without the @domain part), then he might have been trying to log into his AOL account using the login form for his work account.

  • (cs) in reply to Some Guy
    Some Guy:
    OK, maybe I don't really understand this one....

    He saw stevem had been hammering the POP3 server to the point where his account locked... But.....(not sure based on the story) either

    1. He was trying to log on to AOL (so he would have been hammering a different POP3 server) or
    2. He was trying to log on to a non existant account (@aol.com) on this server so he couldn't have locked the account

    or did I miss something

    My reading was that he'd been trying to log on to his work account as stevem, but using his AOL password because he actually wanted to log on to his AOL account.

  • (cs) in reply to Just Quietly
    Just Quietly:
    He's doin' no 'arm.
    He's just pinin' for the fjords....

    No harm, indeed, and even a bit of amusement. Still, there are better ways of venting your frustration from a bad day.

  • A nony mous (unregistered)

    It seems plausible that Steve was trying to log on to his AOL mail, and his system was also in the background trying to log on to the work mail account.

    Since Steve is probably only there because he's friends with the CEO, the fact he hadn't been able to log on to the work email all day (and possibly for longer) was a) not noticed by Steve at all and b) not noticed by anyone else in the company.

    Actually, it's quite likely that the CIO not being able to access his work email led to a productivity increase in the company, and likely was done deliberately.

    Every few weeks he notices he's not receiving work email (because he's missing out on the company tipping pool, or something) so they reset the password and let him access it, then after a few days change the password again and wait a few weeks for him to notice.

  • Mathew (unregistered) in reply to Scarlet Manuka
    Scarlet Manuka:
    Some Guy:
    OK, maybe I don't really understand this one....

    He saw stevem had been hammering the POP3 server to the point where his account locked... But.....(not sure based on the story) either

    1. He was trying to log on to AOL (so he would have been hammering a different POP3 server) or
    2. He was trying to log on to a non existant account (@aol.com) on this server so he couldn't have locked the account

    or did I miss something

    My reading was that he'd been trying to log on to his work account as stevem, but using his AOL password because he actually wanted to log on to his AOL account.

    Well, no, because in that case, Ted would have seen an attempt to log in.

  • jc (unregistered) in reply to Maurits
    Maurits:
    > Ted confirmed that stevem had been hammering the POP3 server for most of the day

    "... You're trying to log in as [email protected], right?" "What? No. [email protected]..."

    Hmm...

    Yeah, that was my reaction, too. But there are email services that want you to enter your full email address, so he could have connected to the pubcong.com server and tried repeatedly to log in as [email protected]. But that wouldn't show up in the logs as attempts to log in as [email protected], so it doesn't explain the inconsistency. Maybe he was trying to log in as stevem with his aol password, but then you'd have to explain how his email had worked up to that day. Maybe he'd been using the same password for both accounts, and just changed one of them. Nah, that doesn't explain it, either.

    I guess there's just not enough evidence so that we mere readers can diagnose the problem. That's a normal support problem too, of course. I've chased any number of problems from people who "couldn't get in" to an account, where the logfile showed no activity at all, and it took forever to get from the user the exact character strings being used to connect.

    Just last week, I had a confusing exchange with a user who "couldn't connect to your server", where I eventually found that she was connecting to a URL at a site off in another country. I checked that site, and sure enough, they had a page of links that included our site, and they'd just rewritten that page to look different. The user had bookmarked that remote page and had always indirected through it to reach our site, but couldn't spot the link in the new page layout. I gave her the direct URL to our site, and she hasn't bothered us since.

  • A Boss (unregistered) in reply to Larry
    Larry:
    Something mysterious happens to even the world's greatest minds when they get near computers. Something that suppresses all their logic circuits and makes them think:

    If I don't understand it, it must be easy.

    Well, that stuff's all *details*, right? Small-picture, specialist, we-have-people-to-do-that territory? :-)
  • not from AOL (unregistered)

    I took a different approach.

    I thought that when he was just continuing the abuse and was being sarcastic when he said AOL rather than company email.

    Making the whole story about an abusive person rather than a stupid person.

  • (cs)

    TRWTF is misspelling "misspelled".

  • geoffrey, MCP, PMP (unregistered)

    Ted could have just helped his CIO, instead of running to TDWTF with the story. You don't get to C-level by wasting your time sorting out which e-mail you're supposed to use for what. And Ted has the opportunity to work in high technology thanks to the abilities of the managers and officers above him. This hardly seems gracious to me.

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey, MCP, PMP
    geoffrey:
    Ted could have just helped his CIO, instead of running to TDWTF with the story. You don't get to C-level by wasting your time sorting out which e-mail you're supposed to use for what. And Ted has the opportunity to work in high technology thanks to the abilities of the managers and officers above him. This hardly seems gracious to me.

    Hilarious comment, sirrah!

  • (cs) in reply to briverymouse
    briverymouse:
    TRWTF is misspelling "misspelled".
    Please show some sensitivity. Miss Pelled is a close personal friend of mine. I want more than that, but she keeps telling me that she really only wants to be friends. If she knows how I feel about her, which I have explained to her on many occasions, why o why does she torture me so? I assure you, this is tearing me up inside.
  • pouzzler (unregistered)

    I never tire of pointing out TDWTF has gone down, and doesn't even try to fill its mission anymore, which is why I have to spell it for you:

    a luser being a luser is hardly a "curious perversion in information technology".

    Best regards

  • Luiz Felipe (unregistered) in reply to West
    West:
    Coyne:
    "But it's my work computer! You're supposed to be able to fix it. So how come you can't correct my password to hotchi.xxx?"
    Obviously, when you install the OS on any work computer, you're supposed to put a keylogger in there to capture all passwords, including the one for hotchi.xxx. Send them to a database, and test them regularly. It's just part of your professional customer service duties.

    You mean professional customer baby service duties.

  • Your dad (unregistered)

    I had a superior calling me a moron and yelling at me like that once, wish it had happened on the phone... i ended up in jail that night and he, at the hospital, totally worth it.

  • Spike (unregistered) in reply to Ted

    What's your problem with Princess Celestia?

  • lollan (unregistered)

    That was painful to read. Really.

  • Erewhon (unregistered)

    So this problem could have been solved by assuming the user is non-technical and asking 'What is the email address you are having a problem with?'

    This is a failure of IT support, as much as it is of user stupidity

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