The Whiteboard

12:00 AM

if the answer is more complicated than "Send X a bug ticket" then it's down 100 points out of the gate for me

user15026

The other problem is like....while I know I am an ISP and thus the keeper of your internet, I know how to fix your problems if they are related to our gear. Basically, at this point, my knowledge ends at making your router sign in with PPPoE and setting up your wifi.

user15026

Anything past the router, I have zero knowledge on. (Well, okay, I can set you up with a direct bypassed connection without a router, but that's pretty much it.)

Jimmy Hoffa

@AshleyNunn if you run out of ideas just encourage RMAs until they get off the phone; figure out where they live and suggest a nearby location with mailing services.

Ixrec

the sad truth of tech support, half the battle is figuring out who owns the piece of technology that's actually relevant

user15026

@Ixrec Yep.

Ixrec

12:04 AM

when I'm on bugweek about 70% of the tickets are just figuring out which other group to blame

Jimmy Hoffa

@AshleyNunn DSL?

user15026

@JimmyHoffa Some, mainly fixed point wireless.

Ixrec

(that's probably not true for most groups; my team owns one of the most high profile and complex client-facing functions that depends on dozens of other things)

Jimmy Hoffa

@AshleyNunn what's "fixed point wireless" ?

user15026

@JimmyHoffa Um....rural people internet.

Ixrec

12:05 AM

lol

user15026

Like you have a CPE on your house that recieves from a tower CPE that recieves from a tower CPE that recieves from a tower CPE that eventually goes to our proper backbone servers.

whatsisname

why does the tab completion not work

how am I supposed to get anything done

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ixrec at Employer^ it was the reverse of this- I was on the back-end that everything went through and worked like a charm but everybody blamed everything on us even though it was nearly never out fault just because it was easier to tell us to go figure out what they did wrong rather than figure it out themselves...

@AshleyNunn Gotcha. Where they have to jigger their dishes aboot.

Ixrec

generally if I redirect a ticket to some other group without any evidence, they'll just throw it back to me in "Needs More Info" status

user15026

@JimmyHoffa Yeah, pretty much.

Ixrec

12:07 AM

which is also what I do to the users that just say "it broke today fix it"

user15026

I think of it as a REALLY BIG PtP setup.

user15026

(which it is.)

Jimmy Hoffa

@whatsisname the same way most of the industry does, by using process and accomplishing meta-meta-meta-meta-work so far removed from anything productive you don't have to do anything at all and still get to have a bunch of things checked off your todolist

@Ixrec at Employer^ this would just have the problem continue for a week until someone brought it to the original team who would say "Oh, I gave it to the back-end team but they haven't fixed it yet, talk to them." What a circle-jerk that job was.

Ixrec

for us it varies based on which backend team it goes to

you learn pretty quickly which guys take your ticket seriously (you get regular updates in your inbox for the next few days as they track down and deploy fixes for what turned out to be an absurdly obscure bug) and which guys will completely ignore it for months until you ask your team lead to "escalate the issue"

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ixrec if you don't have office politics, you don't have an office.

Ixrec

12:10 AM

"politics" is literally "how groups of people make decisions"

it's pretty hard to avoid

@JimmyHoffa admittedly, there's one team that does this to us so often that all of our business/UX people know exactly who they are and half the time they'll ask us "is this an issue for that other team?" without us even suggesting it

whatsisname

wtf it's turned off by default

user55340

Any time you have 3 or more people, you have politics.

Robert Harvey

2:48 AM

The word you want is not "abbreviation" but "initialisms". Specifically, linguists sometimes differentiate between an acronym like MILF (because the letters form a new "word") and an initialism like USA (where each letter is pronounced like a separate word, "U", "S", "A".). Colloquially, however, both types of words are often said to be "acronyms". And in some cases it really could go either way. For example, consider "UFO". Some people say "U" "F" "O" as an initialism, and some people pronounce it as "UFO" ("you-foe"). In a programming context, this distinction is really meaningless. — Brandin 6 hours ago

[sigh]

enderland

3:00 AM

do people really say "you-foe" ?

Robert Harvey

F*ck no.

Only programmers would have that kind of conversation with someone else.

user15026

@enderland None that I have ever heard

Duga

4:02 AM

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's more theoretical, as opposed to about concrete programming. You might want to try Computer Science or Programmers. — Doorknob just now

Duga

8:25 AM

Please take the introductory tour. Stack overflow is about programming problems, not problems of programmers. Your question is better suited for serverfault.com Voting to migrate it there. Please do NOT double post. — Markus W Mahlberg 51 secs ago

Duga

11:24 AM

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a broad, high level architecture question which would solicit opinion based answers. Architecture questions are often suited on programmers.stackexchange.com, but be sure to read their How to Ask page first. — Matt ♦ 17 secs ago

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