Hello Manifestites! Once again we find ourselves weeks and weeks in between blog entries. Eh, not much to say. To be honest, I haven’t seen that many stupid things lately. I’ve seen stupid driving things here and there, but nothing to really blog about. I did see someone driving down a freeway on-ramp the wrong way today, but she turned around right away, and the person getting off the freeway actually stopped and let her go without honking their horn. I don’t get it.
I could blog about RGPer AtticusCole, who spent a few days stalking me and making a very poor attempt at humor related to the blog, but since I can’t seem to find an email address of his to post publically, I’ll just mention it.
I’ve told several people that the only stupid things I see at work, and that usually I can’t really blog them because they either involve way too much set up, or they involve more inner workings of the business that I’m working for. But tonight I ran into something that I can’t let go.
As you may or may not know (or care, for that matter), I am a Windows based server engineer specializing in Citrix products. I have a good job that I like working for a major company here in the area. The drive is nice, I get to work from home once a week, and the work is challenging enough to keep me on my toes and clear of boredom. But of course, like anywhere, I run into all sorts of strange political things, and sometimes straight up donkishness.
Today a group requested an emergency install of a major patch to 10 of their servers. Since I support their group, I was volunteered to do it. Tonight at 9pm seemed to be the best time, so we set up all necessary paperwork. The manager of the project group emailed his entire team letting them know to expect the servers to be down from 7pm-5am (just in case anything went wrong), and gave me the go-ahead to install the patches and reboot the servers.
Shortly after 9pm I log onto each server one at a time and start the patch installations. The plan was for me to install the patch, reboot the servers, then email the group letting them know the servers were successfully patched so they can test their applications. At 9:50pm I decided to log into work email to get that set up and ready. I see a strange email:
From: Donkey
To: Me
Hi Adam – I see you’re running something on 34…when will you be finished?
34 is the short name for one of the servers I’m patching. Now, 34 isn’t necessarily a unique number. Our naming scheme contains letters for the company name, location, application, then a 2 digit number. As far as I know, there are at least 3 servers that end in 34. Luckily I happened to be checking my email at 9:50pm on a Tuesday, and I also happened to know what this person was talking about.
So I reply:
From: Me
To: Donkey
I'm putting service pack 1 for Windows 2003 on it right now. After that it will reboot…shouldn't be more than 20 more minutes I would guess.
Immediately, I get this back:
From: Donkey
To: Me
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply
I'll be out of the office Oct 10 returning Monday Oct 16. I will not have access to email or voicemail.
Umm…huh? The person that emailed me won’t have access to email? WTF is up with that? A few minutes later I get this:
From: Donkey
To: Me
Damn…Ok – I’ll stop my job. Please let me know if it’ll be more than your estimated 20 minutes…I’ll plan to restart my job in about ½ an hour.
So I’m a little annoyed, and fire this back:
From: Me
To: Donkey
You did get the email from Bob earlier today saying I would be starting at 7pm and to expect the servers to be down until 5am, right?
Then this, and I have no words for this:
From: Donkey
To: Me
No, I’m on vacation and am not checking my emails until next week.
Uhhhhhh, Beavis? WTF? I give up. People not checking emails are emailing me with answers to my emails. I’m either in the twilight zone, I imagined this entire conversation (which is possible, I just recently found out that I’m apparently NOT allergic to alcohol), or this person is a complete donkey. I’m going with option C.
So that’s that. Until next time, where I hope to have something interesting to report. I have more home owner stories based on the home projects we’ve tried to do this summer, but I want to wait until things are finished to post it, because there’s a good chance more idiots will try something as stupid as trying to blow themselves up, like last time.
Yours Donkily,
Morphy
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