The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

Hunderd and frist?

I feel sorry for poor David O'Connor, who must have to deal with a lot of "issues" in that company.

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

Anonymous Cow-Herd:
I feel sorry for poor David O'Connor, who must have to deal with a lot of "issues" in that company.

I'm sure his issue was nothing those girls couldn't sallow.

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

F***ing troll magnates, how do they work?!

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

z00n3s!$:
Anonymous Cow-Herd:
I feel sorry for poor David O'Connor, who must have to deal with a lot of "issues" in that company.
I'm sure his issue was nothing those girls couldn't swallow.

FTFM

I'm surprised I would spell swallow incorrectly - I say/shout it all the time.

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

z00n3s!$:
Anonymous Cow-Herd:
I feel sorry for poor David O'Connor, who must have to deal with a lot of "issues" in that company.
I'm sure his issue was nothing those girls couldn't sallow.

Google:
sal·low/ˈsalō Verb: Make sallow. Adjective: (of a person's complexion) Of an unhealthy yellowish color.

You mean the assets made him of an unhelthy yellowish color?

Nagesh · 2011-09-28 Reply Admin

bob:
F***ing troll magnates, how do they work?!

You make post. troll folows you and smurches your good name. It speled as magnet. Like magnet atract iron filing, i atract trolls on internets.

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
For all the well-justified facepalming going on at "it was marked with your initials", this does point out that sometimes you do have to train people. These girls are not just pairs of boobs, they are now co-workers, and investing a bit of time in explaining the technology will probably pay off.

This. While it is an extreme case and training is a pain in the rear sometimes you've just got to accept the burden and make an effort.

If you make the effort and they prove to be untrainable then you give them the boot.

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

Why does this story feel contrived?

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

ac:
z00n3s!$:
Anonymous Cow-Herd:
I feel sorry for poor David O'Connor, who must have to deal with a lot of "issues" in that company.
I'm sure his issue was nothing those girls couldn't sallow.

Google:
sal·low/ˈsalō Verb: Make sallow. Adjective: (of a person's complexion) Of an unhealthy yellowish color.

You mean the assets made him of an unhelthy yellowish color?

Well, if his issue was of an unhealthy yellowish color, I'd say they probably shouldn't be swallowing it, or he might have been tapping two lines at once (quite a feat IMO).

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

Any role for me?

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
These girls are not just pairs of boobs, they are now co-workers...

My favourite combination!

Maurits · 2011-09-28 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
... The girlfiend is writing a thesis on the subject - and I can tell you that according to her research there has never been a time in the history of modern computing when women have not made up a significant minority of the IT workforce.

I'm having trouble parsing your sentence ("history" and "modern" seem to be fighting it out, and the adjective "significant" could be taken as "small" or "large" depending on your point of view) but I can't resist pointing out that at least one point in the history of computing women made up 50% of the computing workforce.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/matthew_van_eerde/archive/2011/05/26/translating-ada-lovelace-mathematical-science-is-an-instrument.aspx

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

Stan is right though, you really can't have your developer team provide first line support if you actually want to grow as a company.

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

"The New Hire's a Bust"

Ha ha ha, sexist jokes are so funny. Not.

Matt Westwood · 2011-09-28 Reply Admin

Katastrofa:
"The New Hire's a Bust"
Ha ha ha, sexist jokes are so funny. Not.

They are when bimboes have big tits.

DaveK · 2011-09-28 Reply Admin

z00n3s!$:
Cellmate:
justsomeprisondude:
Mmmmmpphhh mmmmm *gargle gargle* *slurp* mmmmphhhhh ssttttppphh *cough* *yack*
That's what she said!
A vista such as this plays out in my head, repeating endlessly. Why daddy, why?

[image]

DaveK · 2011-09-28 Reply Admin

Jimbo:
FFS:
lucidfox:
Oh, and as always, mention women in a WTF story and suddenly the comments are filled with stereotypes. Good to know there are some constants on this site.
http://xkcd.com/385/
And the ultimate anti-stereotype has arrived.

In line with "Anon"'s post above...

Is the world portrayed in that xkcd how it is, or is it how women perceive the world to be?

False dilemma. Those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

The real WTF is they have no supervisor who should be deciding which developer should be assigned the tickets, instead of leaving that decision up to the front line IT support...

2011-09-29 Reply Admin

DaveK:
z00n3s!$:
Cellmate:
justsomeprisondude:
Mmmmmpphhh mmmmm *gargle gargle* *slurp* mmmmphhhhh ssttttppphh *cough* *yack*
That's what she said!
A vista such as this plays out in my head, repeating endlessly. Why daddy, why?
image cut

I want to let you know that you're a horrible person. You probably can't even imagine what I went through and now that I'm being made to relive it.

On the other hand, I've never had problems with constipation, so... whatevs.

2011-09-29 Reply Admin

And the alternative is ... what?

A major reason for NOT directing all service calls straight to the developers is to avoid having highly-paid developers spending all their time on service calls rather than doing development.

If your help desk people are as technically sophisticated as the developers, they will (a) demand the same salaries you pay the developers, and/or (b) get bored doing tech support and quit.

2011-09-29 Reply Admin

Jay:
And the alternative is ... what?
A major reason for NOT directing all service calls straight to the developers is to avoid having highly-paid developers spending all their time on service calls rather than doing development.

If your help desk people are as technically sophisticated as the developers, they will (a) demand the same salaries you pay the developers, and/or (b) get bored doing tech support and quit.

Help desk staff need to be technically competent, they don't need to be developers. They also have to be capable of communicating with users all day, which is not a requirement for developers. They don't need to be good developers - if they are, as you say, they're a bad fit for the position.

Are there people out there that fit this bill? I think there are. Some of them are about twenty feet away from me right now - they can manage permissions, install software, diagnose faults in equipment, and generally fix problems that users encounter. They can also recognize problems that they can't fix, and get the information needed to fix them, so the developer doesn't have to spend a lot of time quizzing a user.

It's hard to find people like this, so we typically manufacture them, starting out with clueless interns.

2011-09-29 Reply Admin

FOAR:
I guess when they said "...never had a D- in the classroom..." they didn't specify that they'd actually taken any classes that might somehow qualify them to think they know something about IT...

I guess you didn't get that the quote above was just one of a bunch of boob-related double-entendres:

"[...]so I just picked the pair that I thought would be good front-end support. The kind with a well stacked resume. Smart kids, the kind who never had a D- in the classroom anyway."

"D" in this case referring to cup size....

2011-09-29 Reply Admin

Oh, and to everyone saying, "Give these girls a break; they had no training," or words to that effect, may I direct you to this part of the article: "He overheard others struggling to teach the girls what a ticket was, and explaining why they couldn't use an iPad application to enter tickets, and he ignored it."

Translation: people TRIED to train them. The girls were just plain stupid.

Matt Westwood · 2011-09-29 Reply Admin

FOAR:
trtrwtf:
For all the well-justified facepalming going on at "it was marked with your initials", this does point out that sometimes you do have to train people. These girls are not just pairs of boobs, they are now co-workers, and investing a bit of time in explaining the technology will probably pay off. It's fun to make fun of the stupid people, and I do that too, but if you treat people as though they're capable of understanding things, and you take the time to help them understand things, they often end up understanding them. And then they're not stupid people any more, they're co-workers who can make your life easier. And because you took some time to help them do their jobs well, they're motivated to help you do your job well.
I know this site isn't about serious answers to serious issues, but really, until you take the time to get someone up and running, you have no grounds to complain that they can't do the job right.

(one of the best tech support people that I know has an awesome rack and a fiendish mind for math - these are not mutually exclusive)
Nonetheless, you do have to wonder how anyone can think it might be a good idea to hire people on the service desk who don't even know/understand (reasonably common) file extensions...

I guess when they said "...never had a D- in the classroom..." they didn't specify that they'd actually taken any classes that might somehow qualify them to think they know something about IT...

Non-Technical people on the servicedesk make life difficult, but Technical people on the service desk often make life harder (if they don't move on very quickly), because they either speculate on cause (rather than giving the raw facts as reported) or they attempt to fix things they have no business touching. Sadly, 1st Tier servicedesk really needs to be a simple triage that refers issues to appropriate groups without doing too much thinking (and perhaps resets a password or 17).

Oh yeah, and you spelt your username wrong, it should be "Phwoar".

redundantman · 2011-09-30 Reply Admin

I'll take Famous Titles for $500 Alex.

2011-09-30 Reply Admin

A week later, two young and aggressively female assets joined the team. "All these college kids were the same," Stan explained, "so I just picked the pair that I thought would be good front-end support. The kind with a well stacked resume. Smart kids, the kind who never had a D- in the classroom anyway."

... lost count of the double-entendres.

2011-09-30 Reply Admin

I don't even understand IT anymore. I think I'm too old for this sh**.

2011-10-01 Reply Admin

Edith McAlister Cortez-Simmons would be /great/ for this (perhaps any) job.

2011-10-02 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
ogglefloggled

I am hereby resigning all coding uses of "foo" and "bar" to be replaced by the vaguely Muppetesque "oggle" and "floggle", Henson be damned!

2011-10-04 Reply Admin

SWEET! They said they may be able to use me in a few months!

2011-10-04 Reply Admin

Harold Terrence Meyer Lansing the 5th:
SWEET! They said they may be able to use me in a few months!

Umm... why's everyone looking at me all of a sudden?

2011-10-05 Reply Admin

justsomedudette:
Remy, where's your comments? My unicorns aren't working either :(

I support this.

2011-10-06 Reply Admin

bob:
F***ing troll magnates, how do they work?!

..they stand at street corners and pimp trolls for money..?

tgape · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

JJ:
Oh, and to everyone saying, "Give these girls a break; they had no training," or words to that effect, may I direct you to this part of the article: "He overheard others struggling to teach the girls what a ticket was, and explaining why they couldn't use an iPad application to enter tickets, and he ignored it."
Translation: people TRIED to train them. The girls were just plain stupid.

Or the people who tried to train them were plain stupid.

Most of the time I've seen people trying to train completely untrained people, they made no attempt to understand what the person did know and understand, to be able to use that as a basis for training. Instead, they assumed proficiencies in several things with which the new hire was unfamiliar, and so they failed.

I've had to work analogies to football, shopping, and makeup, in order to train people. Most attempted trainers don't seem to be able to do that - or they'll do one of those, for everybody. (Hint: when I was a new hire, none of those analogies would've worked for me. I only researched these topics to be able to bridge training gaps.) I've found, if you make good analogies from what a person knows, frequently, you can train people most others think are untrainable.

That having been said, there are still people who can't be trained. Usually, a good sign is that they don't seem to understand their area of greatest expertise even after they're at least 18 years old. If the only thing the person knows is shopping, and they still can't understand that a 50% off sale is better than a 40% off coupon on the same item, don't waste my time with them. (Yes, I know: that's math. But if they don't understand the math of their own interest, send them to a 4th grade math teacher, not me.)

2011-10-21 Reply Admin

The problem will start when they need a John Allan Von Austin, a Robert U. "Bob" Yankovic, his long-lost cousin, Grin Rupert Olsen & Olsen Von Yankovic, and such...

2013-04-04 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
For all the well-justified facepalming going on at "it was marked with your initials", this does point out that sometimes you do have to train people. These girls are not just pairs of boobs, they are now co-workers, and investing a bit of time in explaining the technology will probably pay off. It's fun to make fun of the stupid people, and I do that too, but if you treat people as though they're capable of understanding things, and you take the time to help them understand things, they often end up understanding them. And then they're not stupid people any more, they're co-workers who can make your life easier. And because you took some time to help them do their jobs well, they're motivated to help you do your job well.
I know this site isn't about serious answers to serious issues, but really, until you take the time to get someone up and running, you have no grounds to complain that they can't do the job right.

(one of the best tech support people that I know has an awesome rack and a fiendish mind for math - these are not mutually exclusive)

...and what would be this wonderful young woman's contact information?

captcha = eros "Eros is absolutely behind my interest in the math/boobs girl"

2013-04-08 Reply Admin

I can sympathize with Stan's "reasoning" here; it may not be professional, but it's not really a WTF. TRWTF is that John and his co-workers took the attitude of resigned apathy characterized by this line: "He overheard others struggling to teach the girls what a ticket was, and explaining why they couldn't use an iPad application to enter tickets, and he ignored it." First and foremost, I'm sure they could enter tickets using an iPad application-- they just have to build one that interfaces with the ticket system first. This was a perfect opportunity for John and friends to turn two already beautiful young women into two beautiful young women in engineering. Teach them some Objective-C/C++ and have them build a mobile interface to the ticket system. It'd be a great learning opportunity for them and a great flirting opportunity for the lucky sod who got to teach them :)

2013-07-23 Reply Admin

You forgot to include the unicorn generator! "Uncaught ReferenceError: cornify_add is not defined The-New-Hires-a-Bust.aspx:144 onclick"

The New Hire's a Bust

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