Boss regrets pointing finger at chilled out techie who finished upgrade early

Not just small companies

Working for a large global outfit a while ago, This was a regular message on a sites VISITOR WLAN setup due to corporate beancounters arbitrarily deciding to pay all small (as in invoice amount) suppliers 45 days (up from 28) after billing and issued revised T&Cs to all.

Telco contract said pay in 14 or cut us off after 30, re-connections happen the working day after payment received, (Revised T&Cs? > toilet paper)

Oddly enough (/sarc) most of the actually small suppliers upped their prices after this according to the local purchasing staff, so the net effect was to cost more money and look bad in front of clients.

Ah yes...

I remember waking into the office one bright Monday morning to find that all of the phone lines were down... Expecting it to be JCB related I called our line provider of the time (lets call them Oxygen...) and asked what was up only to be told that we hadn't paid our bill and had been cut off had we not seen the reminders? No we never got them... One quick credit card payment later all was well.

Then there was the time that our spam filtering company turned off our late payment notifications because we were receiving requests for invoices that we had actually paid. Guess what happened when the person who sent the money transfers was off on long term sick....

Ah the joys of IT!

Porn Fest

I was developing CTI interfaces quite a few years ago and as such was using the companies phones lines to do testing.

Boss came into the office and told me to stop testing as the latest invoice was extremely high.. As my testing was aony a few phone calls using local numbers I was a little dubious at being the cause of the high amounts.

As anyone would do I then inspected the bill and call up our provider in order to have further details..

Reality hit : The expenses were in fact associated with a mobile number within the company that was using SMS texts to pay for Porn..

Guess who's mobile phone was being used, oh yes it was our favorite Pointy Haired Boss...

I confonted him with the fact the someone was using SMS to pay for Porn access without mentioning the number that was being used. He quietly dismissed me from his office and said he would investigate himself as to who was using the companies resources in a such a manner.

I also had the logs from our Firewall which left no doubt about the time spent browsing Porn from his office machine.. ( I didn't tell him about that though)

I was allowed to continue my testing and next months bills were already back to normal....

( I don't now if SMS are still used to make payments because that was several years ago, about 12 and thing have moved on since, thankfully)

I had a client with a graphics design department, back in the days when designers plugged an ISDN line into their Mac in order to transfer files between themselves.

Once internet speed had reached a point where SFTP was a viable alternative, we helped them cancel the line.

When the next quarterly bill arrived, the accountant saw that it still had a charge for "ISDN lines", so called the phone company and tore them a new one, wanting to know why they hadn't cancelled the line when requested and demanding that it be done immediately.

Later that day, their PBX, fed by 3 x ISDN2 lines, stopped receiving and making calls...

Domain name expired

Automated notice ignored. My email ignored. Squatter pointing domain to a page of ads. You can guess the rest.

Working for a multinational PC / Laptop builder pre-internet days we started to get virus infections likely introduced by folks loading up games via the floppy drive. A networked anti-virus solution was installed which notified me via email that a virus had been found on xyz PC. Login passwords were introduced so no excuses like 'it wasn't me somebody else accessed my PC'. Senior manager who was a bit of an arsewipe sent out a company wide email stating that anyone found with a virus would be instantly fired.

Yep, you know what's coming. A couple of weeks later I got an email stating his PC was infected, I kicked this up the chain bypassing him of course and later that day was escorted off the site by two security guards with the contents of his desk in a bin bag. Oh how we laughed...

I wish our cloud systems could respond that quickly

It's 2018 and we're still worse off with Office365 than we were with on-prem exchange. Performance for cloud is appalling.

and there is another reason not to cloud

lol fucking cloud shit again..

I have actually done this to somebody

Way, way back in the heady days of dial-up modems and Windows 98, "Some Bloke Who No Longer Exists" knocked together a custom 404 page that included, among the reasons why the page might not be available, "The customer might not have paid their website hosting bill", just to teach a particularly recalcitrant customer a lesson. It worked, alright. They paid up within a matter of minutes.

You probably would not get away with a stunt like that nowadays; broadcasting the fact that somebody owes you money is almost certainly a breach of the GDPR.

Anyway, the moral of the story is: If you want to play Silly Buggers, don't take on an opponent who is a black belt in that sport.

Could You Just Fix It?

Some of my favorite calls were from irate managers that could not access services hosted well beyond my routers. "Sorry, Sir. I don't really have any administrative authority over Facebook. We'll just have to wait for them to fix whatever problem they're experiencing."

I snuck into work one Saturday with plans to get in a few hours of uninterrupted work. Hah. Phone rings. Apparently the senior managers were all at work as well, and were unsuccessful in their efforts to send important documents to their new partners. Our rather unpleasant CFO expressed his frustration over the situation and ordered me to fix our email system.

Puzzled, I ran some quick tests, did some quick checks, and everything on our side looked fine. A quick scan of the logs revealed the problem. I called the conference room where our managers were assembled.

"Are you on a conference call with our new partners?" I asked.

"Yes," the CFO tersely replied.

"Good," I said. "Inform them that their domain registration has lapsed and suggest to them that their IT Department address the situation."

So, for once, I did actually manage to fix another company's Internet service outage. Never did get any acknowledgement from the CFO. Oh well.

No automatic payments for me

Some time ago there were reports of a utility billing a customer billions of dollars, and when customer service was contacted they couldn't seem to understand what the problem was. Imagine if that had hit a no-limit credit card and how long it would take to work it out. Bear in mind that some wealthy people but huge transactions on their Amex Centurion cards - there was a recent report of a Japanese man who put $100,000,000 on a work of art bought at auction.

I use prepaid gift cards in restaurants esp while travelling, and for monthly type payments which you might want to drop. They *always* get declined when the money is gone. Like an Oyster card: no money, no ride.

A company with auto-payments?

Every company has somebody or department to do payables. Why would it be thought prudent for a recurring invoice to be charged to an executive's or employee's card whether on a company account or not? Those cards are there for misc. expenses, travel and out-of-band purchases. A/P should have no problem with something that bills regularly and should be the department that handles all of that in the first place.

Graciousness doesn't pay

Back in the Nineties, I bought a domain name for testing purposes. Kept a web page up permanently. A couple of years later I got a demand letter from a Swedish lawyer claiming that the domain should be transferred to his client immediately because its name was the name of his client's company.

I didn't fall for this and replied that his client could have the domain for $5000 (I had bought it for $35). He countered with an offer of $3500. I accepted with alacrity, gave him 30 days to pay, and offered to point DNS settings (I ran DNS for this domain) to any IPs he wished and to transfer the domain on receipt of payment.

His client's website came up within days. DNS for mail worked fine. But after 45 days, and an unanswered request for payment, I still hadn't been paid. So I reconfigured DNS to point to my webpage, which had a single, large-font message: "Pay your bills!" And then all hell broke loose.

Frantic voicemails and e-mails, faxes directly from the client, as well as his lawyer. I ignored them. Within 24 hours my PayPal account had a deposit of $3500.

The lesson? Businesses don't want to spend money on services that they already have. They have to feel the pain before taking the medicine.

Using a shit card.

Double miles, go on then. Partner commission, missed that one. #yesbossrightonit

Data Center relocate

The company was always looking for cheaper rents, so our NY office after 40 years got elected to be moved. I was brought in to make sure everything (software/hardware) was working. This process took me about an hour, and I signaled everything was OK, The boss said to me are you sure? I said well I could get to every IO device and the software is working as it should be, He said how about testing out some production jobs? I said well if you want to, my tests although did not execute user code but standard OS interfaces. We got production control to try jobs out and of course no issue. I asked if I could go home and the boss said not until tomorrow as that is when the tickets were good for (typical cheap company). Somebody said lets order pizza. I said no thanks I wouldn't say I like NY pizza. I got razzed on by the group. I asked for a menu and chose a salad. Everybody was gorging themselves on PIZZA. I suggested the network people made sure all the network connections worked; they looked at me like I was asking them to work. The network people came back in 3 hours and assured us that everything was OK. I said fine let's start the lines up between Chicago (HQ) and New York, and we stressed them, and everything was OK. I said well there is nothing left for me to do, I am taking the next flight out, anyone, want to join me? I got a silent stare from the boss. So I took the next plane out and charged the fare difference to the company.

Fast forward two days. There were some strange issues with the lines between NY and Chicago. The hardware said it was a software issue. I started to run traces trying to figure out what was going on. I got IBM involved as we were doing some network stuff that IBM said should not cause any issues. My boss said to up the severity to 1, I looked at him and said I don't think so, he insisted, so I did. When you up a problem to severity 1 with IBM, things happen like people are dispatched from where ever they work to your place. I have seen 10 IBMers show up for severity one issues. IBM took its time, but at least I had a live IBMer on the phone for a solid 8 hours. IBM could not figure it out, but they were leaning towards it being a hardware problem. The biggest issue is that it seemed to happen at random times. One of the NY network people asked if it could have anything to do with the elevator?

That is what is called a bingo moment. We set up a test to see if that was the case (elevator door opening). Sure enough, NY AT&T did not use shielded wiring (although they were supposed to). Once they put shielded cabling in the elevator door did not cause the line to go berserk. I was happy they found it, but it was an exhausting 16 hours for me, and I needed a drink. I went down to the bar in the building and had two drinks and came back up to get my winter coat to go home. I looked in on my boss and told him I would be late coming in the next day. He said sure, and I went back. The following day at 8 AM I got a call from my boss saying I had to get into work as there was going to be a finger pointing meeting and I had to be there to keep any fingers pointed at the software group. I was pretty tired but went in any way. The meeting was held in the boardroom, and people were fidgeting as they didn't want to be blamed. The meeting started, and everybody froze, so the CEO of the company launched the finger-pointing. Some of the people that were in attendance were on the phone. After 3 hours I was finally in the spotlight, and they started in on me. I asked if everybody had their say about the software. They said yes, so I launched into what I did and the results I had gotten, all were positive and no error. Then someone asked why we haven't seen this error before but if we had why wasn't IBM able to fix it months ago? I looked t them and said watch the problem was NOT on my side it was a hardware/network issue that occurred because of a wire not being shielded properly, and that was not a software issue, but a wiring issue and I suggested they blame AT&T. That sort of shut down the meeting and I asked to be excused and left and went home for some much-needed sleep.

re: the photo

He manscaped his pits?

Seen this far, far, far too often. However, why was luca the only one able to logon to the portal to see the big alert?

Did no one else bother (Seen that too!).

Classic

Classic On-Call. Great to see Rebecca nailing it