In this episode of 'Things That Piss Me Off'.........

[helel ben shachar]

Maybe I'm channeling my inner Andy Rooney, but yesterday was a good example of things that piss me off. Feel free to share your stories of things that piss you off as well..

Yesterday, I go to the local convenience store. As I'm pulling driving down the road about to pull left into a parking spot I spot this minivan almost perpendicular to the roadway with the wheel up against the curb. In the road, not moving.

I pull into a parking spot, get out, and have to walk past the van to get to the door. I looked over to see if someone was in the driver's seat but it was empty. There was a passenger though. It struck me that someone felt so f'ing privileged and pressed for time that they parked in the road (technically a fire lane too), tire against the curb, and left their vehicle to get some stupid item of some sort.

As I'm walking by I shake my head, laughing to myself, that in today's day and age people do this. Oh well, I enter the store to grab something. Some people walk out as I'm walking in. So in a few moments after I grabbed the single item I was looking for I'm at the counter and this woman walks in, about 40ish, and walks up to me at the counter. She asks if I was the one who laughed at her car while walking by a minute ago. I said something like "I suppose". She goes on to say that it was rude of me, and that it made her daughter who was in the car upset. I was caught a bit off guard, and said something along the lines that I wasn't laughing at her daughter, I was laughing because it looked like the car was parked by an idiot. She huffed a bit and said something along the lines of 'oh well, I've been hurting a lot lately'. Like that f'ing ten extra feet of walking would somehow rebuff her efforts at acquiring a Pop Tart. She didn't walk in with a limp, seemed plenty healthy, didn't have a handicap placard on her car. I looked at her like she was stupid, smiled and shaked my head as I turned to pay the clerk. She huffed and walked off when I turned my back to her.

OK, I can see maybe pulling up to the curb, it is a fire lane though, but to park against two lanes of traffic because you can't be bothered to walk a couple extra feet? The self centeredness is beyond the pale.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Jesus Christ, I hate people.

Right? See, that's my reaction. I know I'm not that social but I find myself just getting pissed off at self absorbed individuals. Whether it's leaving a backpack at the end of a marathon or just doing stupid parking because 'my belief in my ideas is more important than everyone around me' doesn't really matter. We, as humans, have just enough edge cases to make me ponder the idea that we'd be better off without us. (this is from a universal point of view. I in no way live in a shack in Montana. If I did, I'd raise rabbits and try to dispel my Russian accent).

 

[helel ben shachar]

I just stood there, dumbfounded for a moment. In hindsight, a pithy response would have been to inform her that it wasn’t bad customer service, as she was never a customer. But again, I was too dumbfounded.

I mean, not everyone can be Nordstrom but kind of a missed opportunity for the store manager too. Offer a $20 store credit for the mp3 player and, being an Apple store, there's nothing for sale for just $20* so she's spending some money at the store. Or she buys nothing and the store's out nothing.


*Maybe, I honestly don't know what kind of prices they sell on basic things like cables and the like (or if they even sell small items like that) but it's a thought.

Nah, I think it's better to just tell her to fuck off. Who wants a customer like that?

My addition to the Things That Piss Me Off List would be the fucking morons in express checkout lines that can't count to 10 or whatever the item limit is. If I'm ever emperor, it'll be legal to hunt those people for sport.

Yeah, those people with a shopping cart full of stuff, clearly flaunting the line requirements piss me off as well.

I have personally gone through the 10 items or fewer with 48 items though. I called it a technicality. I had four cases of different types of Cup-o-noodles. They were in the buggy. I took one representative item of each and set them to the side. When I reached the clerk, I passed the first off saying 'twelve of this type', the next 'twelve of this type' and then the other two. Only four scans were made, each scan represented twelve items though.

I feel like that technicality is legal though. With four scans I was though the transaction in a jiff.

 

[helel ben shachar]

I don't know why it is, but those people who try to creep through an intersection just irk me.

They come to a full stop at a red light, then start to creep over the line, inching out further and further into the intersection. Do they think the light will just give up and turn green? Do they think nobody notices how far into the intersection they're creeping? Does this somehow speed up time?

I've sometimes been agitated enough that I'll someimes just smoke them across the intersection when the light turns green. Sounds a bit juvenile, but at 5.4L of engine I sometimes do this just because I can.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Spoiler

Ah! You folks are describing what I have come to call the California Creep. It is the only place I've ever been where this is common practice observed by almost EVERYONE.

Pull up short of the light. Creep up to the line. Person behind them pulls up WAY short (i.e 1.5 to 3 car lengths) of the front runner, and sloooooooowly creeps forward. Like, duration of the light slowly. One or two people doing this? Okay, whatever. Five to six vehicles all doing this means that even though there is plenty of room if they had stopped properly, they are blocking access to the turn lane. Inevitably, this is the turn lane that I need to access. OR! Even more fun, the people in the TURN LANE do this! So a turn lane that is designed to hold 10-12 cars can now only hold 5!

FUCK YOU PEOPLE! FUCK! YOU! I hope you get home and your significant other stabs you to death in order to prevent any further pollution of the admittedly already shallow gene pool!

Release your anger....

I'd also like to give a giant finger to those idiots who feel the need to study their phone at an intersection. Yes, I'm looking at you Mr/Mrs 'waiting on the left turn arrow'. Where I turn into and out of work we have a rather short green left turn arrow in an otherwise busy intersection.

At least once a week someone will be sitting at the light, obviously contemplating some world shattering revelation on 'Crap-Chat' or some such site, and miss that the light has turned green. It's only after being awoken by everyone honking at said idiot do you see his/her head jerk upright at a now yellow light, and a lone car make occupied by said idiot is the only one to make it through the intersection.

Pay ATTENTION to your surroundings.

 

[helel ben shachar]

In relation to those: people who get all pissy because you're choosing not to try and turn right at a red. While there might be some places where a right at a red is a legal requirement, I have never lived in one of those places.

I really miss this about Montreal. On the island proper, a red light means "STOP." Not "maybe you can turn, sometimes, or not" just plain "STOP!" Growing up there, I had no clue everywhere else was so batshit insane to the point that red may not actually mean stop. Drivers, on average, don't seem to have the brainpower to process what conditions to check for before turning right on red lights.

Around here, most intersections you can turn on red, but not for all. As a pedestrian, the stress levels are really high when you're hoping that the drivers notice that the light is actually full red this time, because I pushed the pedestrian crossing button, not with a green arrow saying you may turn. Then again, I see drivers going the wrong way at least twice a month and people cutting through the gas station to avoid said right light at least as much. We're in the downtown core of the national capital region, where all the public servants work, you'd expect some of them to be able to grasp how street signage work...

Woah, brain trigger on the bolded. I read that and instantly thought 'Esso-Asso'! I remember that from a skit that origionated in the 80s. It was a sniglet. The term was coined for people who shortcutted through a gas station's lot in order to avoid a light.

Then I looked up the link supplied above. Expresshole: A person that brings more than 20 items to the express lane in the store. I learned a new word today and I'm going to use it.

 

[helel ben shachar]

^^ @Goofazoid: I'd have paid a few bucks for a lawn chair and a bucket of popcorn to see that.

IBM Notes, formally Lotus Notes. Seriously, were you written by clowns? I've never seen a program that fought it's client base as much as this spaghetti code.

@Notes:I know my spelling sucks. I just want to highlight the word and copy it. Why don't you give me the option to copy it. On every other program IN THE WORLD highlighting a word in a sentence and right-clicking will bring up a menu with at least one option being COPY. Nope, when you indicate a word is spelled wrong, when it's highlighted you only bring up spell check options, and your spellcheck straight up sucks to begin with. ALL I WANT TO DO IS HIGHLIGHT THE WORD, COPY IT, AND DROP IT INTO GOOGLE FOR A PROPER SPELL CHECK. Why do you fight me? I have to highlight the misspelled word and a word adjacent to it to get the copy function. Then I have to drop it into google and delete the other part of the phrase.

Damnitall.

 

[helel ben shachar]

People who cannot stay in their lane when taking a turn. Specifically, those that end up in your lane at the end of the turn. More specifically, the asshole that I was really tempted to make sideswipe me this afternoon but I didn't feel too well so I decided I didn't want to deal with the cops despite the fact that he changed lanes during the turn and would totally have been at fault. So, instead, I just popped into neutral so I'd drift back a bit and revved my engine a few times right on his ass.

Third time in as many weeks that people haven't been able to keep in their lane during a turn. It's not hard people. Even if the turn is unmarked it's not exactly difficult to stay beside the other cars that are beside you.

I had some asshat encroach me in my lane this morning while riding my motorcycle into work. Why the hell you need to drift so f'ing far left before making a right hand turn is beyond me. It's not like they're driving a tractor trailer. I was in the left lane overtaking since the right lane car was doing well below the speed limit. Then with no blinker (of course not) the vehicle drifts a bit into my lane, I back off realizing this driver is about to do something stupid whilst being unaware of his/her surroundings, and zoom, veers to the right and onto a side street. Someone was completely off in their own little world.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Know what else pisses me off, Windows 10 (even 7 to some extent). I'm typing this while the machine I need is performing some stupid updates. How do I know it needs an update? Because I can't use a browser to get to the places I need to go. Every F'ing time I'm in a hurry, need a particular machine, the whole network stack goes to shit and you can't get anything done online. I'm fairly certain they do this on purpose to make users reboot. So when networking dies, I reboot, and wait for it....... another F'ing update. Now I have to wait not only for a full reboot but updates too.

I'm not normally a tin hatter, but I'm fairly certain that microsoft knows that when things go wonky people reboot their machines. So in order to get people to reboot to run updates they just make the damn machine lose its internet connection and voila, instant reboots without needing to ask.

Gaaaaa.... Damnit

 

[helel ben shachar]

EVERY F'ING NEWS SITE I VISITED TODAY IS AUTO-PLAYING VIDEOS. Special hatred (Grrrr ) to those F'ing pages which are headered by a giant auto-playing video which when you scroll past so you can read the article just resizes and follows you down page in the browser.

Hell, even the BBC (which initiated this rant) led off the header of the page with an auto-playing video, and when I scrolled down, it shrunk the video, rooted it to the top of the browser page. It then proceeded to play another embedded video in the article.

Is this what people really want? Do this on this site and people go apeshit. But we're a little different I suspect. Does the general populous love auto-playing videos? Do they get off on distractions, motion, and noise?

 

[helel ben shachar]

Oh, and CBS news, you are so guilty of video fuckery that I won't visit your site anymore. I blocked videos, frames, all sorts of crap to make your site readable without video following me around everywhere. But somehow I've managed to not block the audio stream associated with the video. It's separate from the VIDEO? I can literally visit a page and even though there is no video stream, the F'ing audio plays through my speakers. Piss right the F off.

 

[helel ben shachar]

You can disable autoplay in Firefox in about:config. Just search for autoplay and double click it to disable.

There’s something similar for Chrome but don’t recall it.

Yeah, chrome. I'm going to have to research that. First site I checked after a brief search: Lifehacker "How to Automatically Silence Annoying Autoplay Videos in Google Chrome". Didn't have a real answer though.

It did however have to auto-playing videos........ sigh

 

[helel ben shachar]

Here are the steps for disabling it in Chrome:

In the address bar, go to chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy
On the page that opens, "Autoplay" should be highlighted. In the dropdown, select ‘Document user activation is required’.
Restart Chrome for the change to take place.

For Firefox, bluloo, I think they either re-enabled it or just overwrote user changes when updating to Quantum.

Thanks for looking that up. Unfortunately it worked on about half of the auto play videos. I might look into flipping back over to firefox.

 

[helel ben shachar]

California dmv registration fees for this year (2018).

augh!



:facepalm:

Oh lord, you're fucked probably. Two decades ago it would have cost me five hundred dollars and some change to register my then new Camaro in California. I was in the military at the time. Registering it in my state was something like $25. I think it's $26 now.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Chat, yeah, not always the best option. Simple stuff is fine.

For more involved discussions I'll IM someone and ask if they have a minute or so to spare. If they say yes, I reply 'Calling....' and ring them at their desk. The discussion takes much less time over the phone. Also, chat lacks inflection, which disturbs me sometimes.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Hey! I’m in Florida to hopefully watch the next Falcon launch!

First impressions:

Why the holy fuck am I being extorted by toll roads. Is this whole fucking state a fucking driving racket? Google maps must have f’ing mob ties given the cash I had to lay down. Fuck Florida. I finally found the iPhone modifier that turned that off. Still, JEBUS.

Also, this entire state drives like old people fuck.

/rant.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Why does management feel they need to get involved in details that don't concern them? F'ck. I've got an email sitting in my box that kind of reads like:

Hey, I don't know if you're in the loop or not....

Of course I'm in the loop, you're writing me because I am the loop that needs to get involved in the first place

Now I paraphrase the email: There is this thing happening and I think we should do 'x', but not the 'x' you did earlier this week that I have no idea you already did, by in my version of 'x' you should spend a lot more money, and instead to doing the job one time, I'd like you to do it a total of four more times. I'm currently not aware this makes for much more work all around, and that it costs more and in the end will not accomplish one iota more than the original plan, buy hey I'm a manager and need to stir shit up that doesn't concern me. Also, PS: I'm all about spending money when it's not coming out of my budget.

Now I have to go find this person and somehow talk him out of this damn idea that's supposed to solve some problem that has already been solved, solved for less money and far less time, but this guy wants to be the 'take charge and get things done' idiot who is literally tilting at windmills for glory.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Along the lines of other vehicles matching speeds, I find this annoying myself. Not so much that they're matching my speed, but because a lot of people position themselves on my rear corner panel which is normally on someone's blind spot*. My kid is just learning to drive and I've pointed this out before in order for him to be aware that people tend to do this and it is a potential hazard.

* I adjust my mirrors to eliminate blind spots. For years I did it like I had always been taught, adjusting them down so you could see down the side of the vehicle. It wasn't until listening to Click and Clack, the Tappit brothers (Car Talk for the uninitiated), that I realized I was doing it wrong. (Jeeze, this was the late nineties or early '00 I think)

Car Talk mirror .PDF

 

[helel ben shachar]

Not an annoyance, but more of things that make you go "WTF?"

My wife and I were driving home, and we got to a light that had a green right turn arrow. It had been green for going on 10 seconds, and still the car hadn't moved. We got up behind them, and I gave a light honk. I immediately get two middle fingers through the sunroof: one from the driver and passenger. Just to be clear: the fingers went up before the car moved, and before they looked up at the light. (I could see clearly through their rear window.)

Uh, OK. If that's your first reaction to a light honk, you're probably a terrible driver. (And yes, you can glare at me for the next five minutes. I am indifferent to your feelings on the matter.)

This kind of behavior is incredibly common these days. Not necessarily the fingers, but the lack of response to a light turning green. Stopped at a red light? Time to interact with my phone, text my friends, post to social media, etc, etc. I swear that this contributes in a major way to gridlock around my office as a much smaller number of cars can make it through an intersection per light cycle.

This. I have some very short green left turns going into and getting away from my office. Over the course of the last decade ( ) I've noticed more and more people who's attention is focused on their laps when waiting for the light to turn.

So much so that I'm actively looking at the drivers head in front of me. I hate to be that guy, but if I catch someone sitting on a green or not noticing the car ahead of them is moving because their focus is somewhere other than the driving situation at hand, I'll give a quick honk.


@sunraven: Yeah, I think I posted something Car Talk and mirrors a number of years ago, so you're probably right.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Today's good reason to cut someone: The US communications industry, which rewards loyalty with higher prices. If I pay next month's bill - I won't be, even if it means my only Internet will be from tethering to my phone - my Comcast bill will have risen 88% since I started the account two years ago.

Ouch. And to think I was on the fence about railing how the parking garage at work has raised my monthly parking fee by about 88% percent over the last ten years. But 88% in two years? I'd be pretty pissed as well.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Counterpoint: Being enlisted in the Navy at one time, even aircraft carriers that I've served on were called boats.

For reference: 'Chief of the Boat' is a pristine title conferred upon the most senior sailor.

Not to be confused with Chief Brody saying 'Were going to need a bigger boat". The Orca was clearly a boat.

 

[helel ben shachar]

I'm beta testing our corporate version of Windows 10. It's seriously pissing me off. Between some lockdowns I'm working around that slow me up, the sheer fact that I can't find what the hell I'm looking for half the time, and some of my essential peripherals acting up now I'm about to have an aneurysm. My print driver failed and I noticed when I go to 'devices and printers' it takes a number of minutes just to come up. So I'm curious as to if this is a common thing so I started to look it up..... and got quite a chuckle.

Spoiler

So it's a known issue. This sucks.

 

[helel ben shachar]

I'm beta testing our corporate version of Windows 10. It's seriously pissing me off. Between some lockdowns I'm working around that slow me up, the sheer fact that I can't find what the hell I'm looking for half the time, and some of my essential peripherals acting up now I'm about to have an aneurysm. My print driver failed and I noticed when I go to 'devices and printers' it takes a number of minutes just to come up. So I'm curious as to if this is a common thing so I started to look it up..... and got quite a chuckle.

Spoiler

So it's a known issue. This sucks.

Get a new IT department? Windows 10 is fine

EDIT: If your user name implies a government job, then my sympathies....

Actually I've been reading up on this. It appears that it's bluetooth related, and I keep my radio on because I have devices hanging off it. I'll confirm if this is the case on my machine next week when I commit back to that project.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Parking monopolies piss me right off. As mentioned in response to SuperDave's ISP bill exceeding an 80%+ rise in fees, the same happened with my parking garage. In the last number of years my bill has jumped 83% while inflation during that period has probably been around 6%. The parking company that owns the garage has bought up every lot and garage in the city. They just upped my bill again and I wrote them demanding an explanation. They never responded.

I walked into the main office and turned in my pass. Over a decade of parking in that garage and this is how it ends. Well, that's less revenue for them then. Unfortunately I couldn't (or more properly wouldn't) let the office know how I felt about it. The clerks working the front desk didn't have anything to do with this. They don't deserve to get railed at.

So anyway, I'm parking on the street and walking the final ten minutes after taking the kids to school. Those days I don't have to do that, and the weather is favorable, I'm taking the motorcycle in, driving around the gates, and parking in the garage for free. Fk'em.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Bicyclists. Specifically those stupid fuckers that charge about like they're in the peloton of the bloody Tour du France with no regards whatsoever for traffic laws & patterns.

Actually I was ruminating about this yesterday morning while having long walk. We have a mixed use walkway along the river that stretches for miles in my city. I used to cycle regularly but I have to admit that after a series of unfortunate events in my life that I've gotten a bit lazy and just prefer to walk now. Nearly all cyclists are courteous but you do get the occasional asshole(s) that think the walkway is their personal raceway.

I was thinking back a couple years ago when my daughter was fairly new to riding a bike. She tended to wander to the left and right a bit, as someone learning to be confident in their riding abilities are wont to do. Anyway, these two assholes come barreling down the way and this fuck starts yelling at my daughter "GET TO THE RIGHT! GEEETTT TOOO THE RRIIIGGGGHHHHHTTTT!" as he rapidly approached. My daughter damn near vapor locked in fear because everything was happening too fast. Anyway she barely gets over, these two assholes flash by, and I can't take off after them because now my kid is confused and crying. I yelled at the guys to stop, I seriously wanted to beat someone's ass into the ground, but they kept on going.

It's been years but I'm still pissed about that.

 

[helel ben shachar]

The Seattle surrender has made it to south west Ohio.

Twice this past weekend, I was behind someone who just slowed to a stop on the thoroughfare, blocked traffic, to check their phone. I'm assuming it was for directions, as they started up again after blocking traffic for a few minutes. In other words, just long enough for folks to figure out what was going on, and start letting the blocker know what they thought through a variety of means.

Once they had Washington plates. The other time, recent Ohio registration. So, I'm hoping a recent transplant.

Ran across this happening in Atlanta, Ga last month. The driver is very, very lucky that they're not a statistic at the moment.

(I hate driving through Atlanta)

 

[helel ben shachar]

You know, I was finally okay with not getting an invite to the Royal WeddingTM, but had sworn off news of it. Then this morning, I turn on the news, and there’s this interview about how the bride’s father might not attend. Except they’re interviewing her half-brother’s ex-wife, who doesn’t actually know anything, but she’s speculating on it being health related.

...

Just wait until they interview her father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate. That's when the real magic happens.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Look guys, I think I've already said too much. Plus, that black helicopter has been in a holding pattern far longer than usual.

I think one issue is that if some controlled data gets on a SSD accidentally, then the deletion process is more complicated than just deleting the file. And shredding is apparently not the best course in this situation. Yeah, you have bigger problems when there is accidental exposure of controlled data, but it's one consideration for the SSD restriction apparently.

And yet I question why the industry hasn’t responded with a high-security version that would support better purge method.

You mean the OPAL or similar embedded encryption drives?

I would imagine the root Yagisama's issue is bureaucracy. I once carried a secret clearance in the service when I was younger. We had some pretty wacky regulations and loopholes we had to jump through.

Now I do some work related to the business of making big atoms into smaller ones (commercially) and I've had to deal tangentially with the NRC at times. Now there's a monolithic bureaucracy of epic proportions. Falling afoul of or even seeming to run afoul of any documentation, no matter how mind boggling questionable, has serious real world consequences. I actively limit myself to the bare minimum of contact.

I can totally understand where he's coming from, even if at face value it doesn't make much sense.

 

[helel ben shachar]

People calling pizza 'za instead of pizza. It's not that fucking hard.

I've never heard anyone call pizza 'za before. That's a new one on me.

Now that I think of it, I'm hearing 'brah' a lot here lately, mostly from my kids and it irrationally irritates me. I know where it's from, its origins has its roots firmly planted in Hawaii. Actually, I do know why it irritates me now that I think about it. It probably migrated to the mainland because of that god awful Dog the Bounty Hunter show. Every episode it was 'what's up brah' and 'yo brah' and even possibly 'you're going down brah!'.

OK. Now I'm even more pissed off because six degrees of Bacon links me to Dog the Bounty Hunter because my idiot cousin, who is from Indiana and has an IQ of about room temperature, knocked up Dogs daughter which now makes me tangentially part of the family.

Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?

 

[helel ben shachar]

Attention inattentive drivers: Look the F*k around yourself while stopped at an intersection.

I was walking to work this morning and was in the process of crossing an intersection where the 'walk' light was lit, so I was in the clear. This car zooms up from my left and stops because he's on a red light but the guy was only looking to his left (me starting walking across the crosswalk on his right). He's clearly trying to gauge a gap in cross traffic so that he can make a right turn and proceed wherever the hell he was in such a hurry to get to.

I'm now in the crosswalk and I watched this guy make two stalled attempts at gunning into the right hand turn. This guy still hasn't looked right and I'm clearly about two feet from his bumper. This dumbass has no clue that pedestrians are crossing the road. So I stop a number off feet off the curb, you know, not wanting to meet my demise by some dumbass.

Oh, and it's been raining off and on the whole week so I have a largish folded up umbrella in my hand. Almost a golf sized umbrella.

Well, as I surmised, this guy who is still looking left guns his vehicle into a gap in traffic while I'm standing off his right front quarter panel. I proceeded to take my umbrella and like a one armed lumberjack firmly slammed my umbrella across his hood as he crossed right in front of me in his turn. His head jerked up as he finally looked right and I was quite amused/pissed off to see the realization of his fuckup cross his face. The obligatory one hand, palm up 'my bad' was all that I got in return.

My umbrella is fine but I hope I left a mark on his hood. Not once did this asshat look to see if the intersection was clear.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Whelp, I blocked so many elements of CBS News's webpage trying to get rid of self-playing videos, including the infuriating ones that follow you down the page, that their news site will not render anywhere near correctly. It's so bad that I really can't use the site at all now, but hey at least I don't have video autoplaying all the time. Also, since I can't use the site now I'll cross it off my current list of news sites, so no page views from me.

HEY CBS NEWS! AUTOPLAYING VIDEO THAT FOLLOWS USERS AROUND IS NOT A FEATURE.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Effective though. We do the same thing when we're retiring systems, turn it off and see who screams.

Ungh, just be kind and inform IT upstream before doing this. This caused me a real headache a couple months ago. A major nuclear client decided to retire a server(s) hosting Citrix environments that we used. I came into work one morning and had a hundred or so engineers marching around my area with pitchforks and torches demanding action because they couldn't access the resources they needed for their work.

I had to keep explaining over and over that they were working in a virtualized environment on their client's farm and that there was nothing wrong on my side, everything was working as it was supposed to on my side and that the client was at fault and needed to fix their side by spooling things back up again and rethinking their action plan. But, you know, it was the local IT's fault because this was all done on a computer and why can't I get just fix it already.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Effective though. We do the same thing when we're retiring systems, turn it off and see who screams.

Ungh, just be kind and inform IT upstream before doing this. This caused me a real headache a couple months ago. A major nuclear client decided to retire a server(s) hosting Citrix environments that we used. I came into work one morning and had a hundred or so engineers marching around my area with pitchforks and torches demanding action because they couldn't access the resources they needed for their work.

I had to keep explaining over and over that they were working in a virtualized environment on their client's farm and that there was nothing wrong on my side, everything was working as it was supposed to on my side and that the client was at fault and needed to fix their side by spooling things back up again and rethinking their action plan. But, you know, it was the local IT's fault because this was all done on a computer and why can't I get just fix it already.

There is that of course. Turn it off and wait for the screams is the last step before physically decommissioning in my workflow at least.

I think it is everywhere. But if a system has a hundred users screaming the day after you turn it off, someone screwed up a step before "turn it off and see who screams".

Yeah, sounds like someone threw away the "This old system is going bye-bye, you need to be migrated to $new_system by $date" email from the downstream provider. Or they fucked up and didn't provide notice.

From the best I could sort out the client never informed our firm that it was migrating system level resources. It wouldn't really occur to upper management because IT is magic and 'Just Works™'. So word of the dependency switch never made it across the client/firm barrier. So someone in the clients IT department either didn't look to see if the resource was being utilized regularly or assumed that the resources were being used internally by individuals who hadn't migrated to the new farm already. So they pulled the plug and left our engineers in the dark and nobody knew why they couldn't work.

So let us see. Maybe 100 engineers charging (I don't do rates) I'll guess maybe $80/hr. But the fault isn't on our end but we're still bleeding $7500/hr in billable time. And that's not a big outage. Yeah, that's why the number of nines in your uptime percentage rate is a real metric.

That was a costly lesson in communication.

 

[helel ben shachar]

That directors' whims trump business needs, defer essential work, disrupt lives, and cancel vacations for no reason other than said directors' want warm fuzzy feelings about things they don't begin to understand.

Secondarily, looking for another job. I hate the job hunt, and don't have an abundance of time to polish my resume. It has become clear to me that the director that runs my organization will never be promoted or fired. So, it's time for me to take action.

Oh well, off to the boardroom.

Classic definition of Seagull Management. Sounds like you're taking the correct course of action in an otherwise unenviable situation.

 

[helel ben shachar]

People that steal packages from your front porch.

Did this happen to you? If so, did you get the thief on one of your cameras?

Yes and yes. Knowing the cops around here, they likely won't do anything.

I shop a lot from Amazon and I'm glad I haven't had that problem. Unfortunatly it should probably be framed as 'I haven't had that problem yet'. That would piss me off to no end. Is there any remediation for that or is one SOL? I assume the latter.

Anyway, have I got the solution for you: https://www.theblankbox.com/

I might just reposition a camera and buy one of those myself just to pre-bait my front steps. Why wait until after the fact?

 

[helel ben shachar]

How do you feel about "we only check the first six characters of your password, no matter how many you type in?"

I had that issue with some Axis cameras some years go. I had set their interface up with a 12 digit or so password. When I went back in to do some configuration changes the password wouldn't take. Turns out (and they might have fixed this, dunno) that no matter what password you used, and verified, only the first eight digits vere captured. So even though it accepted a 12+ character password in setup, in order to hit the interface you had to use the first eight digits. Using the full password would come up invalid. Took me a while to figure that one out. WTF security is that? :facepalm:

 

[helel ben shachar]

How do you feel about "we only check the first six characters of your password, no matter how many you type in?"

Stabbity-stab.

A bit off topic and this is directed to Truculent (I'm sure he'll see this here)
[offtopic]@Truculent: There is something off with your profile. You are the only person who's name I can click on and the contact person box is empty. There is no option to email or PM. I'm bringing this up because you PM'd me a couple days ago and I'm unable to reply to you. When I hit reply your name doesn't appear on the PM. Your profile is the only one that does this. It might be related to your recent name change, I don't know. Anyway, I didn't ignore you (that would be rude since I solicited PMs in the first place) and wanted to pass that information along.[/offtopic]

 

[helel ben shachar]

What's pissing me off this morning? ATM charges. Needed some cash but my bank is not within reasonable walking distance from work. So used another branch's ATM.

Tee Fiddy. To use their ATM, they wanted $3.50 as a service charge. Again: Tee Fiddy! Madness. Granted my bank will reimburse me ATM fees at the end over every month but that's not the point. Something Something Too Damn High!

 

[helel ben shachar]

It's only second to the aggressive bicycle-trail riders who refuse to slow down or much go around pedestrians walking or hiking along the same path.

I love those guys. I weigh more than them and their bike combined. Occasionally I feel the burning desire to give them an impromptu physics lesson about who *really* has the right-of-way in any interaction.

Pro tip, it ain't the dipshit traveling at 15-20mph over rocky dirt in protective spandex.

The one law that can't be ignored. Physics. :devious:

But I still think we can fool physics, now and then. It's just figuring out how to do it reliably and for things other than just a couple of atoms :devious:

Speaking of physics and things bigger than atoms, proceeded straight through an intersection today when the light turned green while coming home from work. The person at the wheel in the opposing lane must have said something along the lines of 'this looks like the perfect time to make an unannounced left turn through this intersection. Look at all the pretty around...". I was on my motorcycle and damn near locked the brakes in an evasive maneuver (actually, I'm fairly certain the back wheel locked momentarily). Dodged right and cleared while gesturing my best WTF body language. I think I heard the boyfriend in the passenger side yell 'Sorry dude'.

Don't be sorry. Pay the F attention to what you're doing on the road. I swear, I can almost hear people humming The Girl from Ipanema as they drive around while completely unaware of their surrounding.

 

[helel ben shachar]

So using the twiffer thing to deal with the issue I have been having has produced mixed results. On the plus side the supervisor was apparently caught in a bald-faced lie and the 30 ton vehicle actually has a warning alarm when backing up now. Plus they seem to not be taking risks by not backing up when they don't have to. On the flip side I never did get my call back from supervisor nor a response from my tweeter buddy. Disappointing as a simple "We're addressing it please give us time" would have been something.

What's the backstory about the lie? I don't seem to recall anything about a warning alarm.