I have this nice older couple that I do occasional support for, almost always remote. The husband likes to tinker and more often than not, he wipes out something so they can no longer use the PC. She contacted me for help. She was able to get in the PC clicking on admin, but her account and her husband’s were not accessible. She could get to the internet so I guide her to my site for remote access. After what seemed like an eternity trying to walk her through running the remote access software, she stopped and asked me “can’t you just remote in and do this for me”. Sigh.

I don’t eat fast food very often, but I do like McDonald’s filet-o-fish, but I don’t like cheese on it. I always ask for no cheese and the label they print and apply to the box states NO CHEESE, yet guess what….. they ALWAYS put cheese on it. Well maybe not always, but literally 9 out of 10 times. This is extra annoying when I go through drive thru because I now have to park and go in to get it corrected.

Yes, I know it is a minor issue in the game of life, but it is something SO simple, No Cheese.

I am listening to NPR coverage of Cuomo’s ban on Fracking in New York and I want to beat the frack out of these idiots whining about the ban. They state all the loss of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue from fracking. One even stated how landowners in other states have become extremely wealthy from land rights for fracking. Who the frack cares if a landowner gets rich?? So one person gets rich while all the others get nothing but cancer and future birth defects. If you want fracking, I say all the families of the workers and anyone else profiting from it live on the job site and live the rest of their lives in the area that has been fracked. I’m sure they would see a different view.

Frack You!!!

I just got off a 51 minute support call with “Microsoft”. A billing issue that the rep was trying to escalate to the next tier because it wasn’t working for me. When I hung up his closing statement was “Thank you for contacting AT&T”. Whoops…. I guess AT&T and MS use t he same first tier service provider.

Home user I help occasionally contacts me asking if I can stop out and install Adobe Acrobat on their system. I’m not a fan of driving 30 minutes for a five minute install. So… I have them go to my remote support page so I can take over their system and install remotely. Twently FUCKING minutes later, I finally get the user to run the program. First they are using AOL search, then IE search, then they don’t know where the file is because their system doesn’t give a run option, only a save, etc.

Then, once on, I find out that they STILL have not replaced their defective wireless USB adapter their connection drops every 1-2 minutes. This is why I avoid home user support!

A friend recently asked me about a ransomware virus. They wondered if I had every removed any. I replied, “of course, several”. They continued to inform me that there is a PC in their office that has some ransomware and their IT can’t figure out how to remove it so they are going to pay the ransom. WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Are you F**KING KIDDING ME!!!!!!! You are in IT and you are going to pay some virus writing scumbag a fee to remove/disable their virus?!?!?!!? I was then informed that they paid a $300 ransom a few months ago for a different virus!! OMG!!! Absolutely unbelievable. Unfortunately, their IT department listens to no ones recommendations, so my comments and ability to remove it in a matter of minutes will never be heard.

The title sums it up. last night I worked on a customer requested conversion until 3am. They wanted to switch around a bunch of users and email addresses to consolidate into a job description type login as they have high turnover and want to keeps things consistent as an employee leaves a position. All went well with the exception of the time it took to do. In the morning I get an email from a department manager indicating user login issues. I emailed back summarizing the changes. About an hour later I get an ANGRY call from the director that asked me to do this. She is irate that I am working with users and billing her for all this additional time when I shouldn’t be involved as it should all go through her. The tone was that of someone berating a child, which does NOT work with me. Nobody, and I flat out mean NOBODY speaks to me that way. It is not arrogance or anything, it is unprofessional! I did all I could from just hanging up on her. I raised my tone to almost screaming how all I did was send an email of the changes and did not charge her. Additionally, I stayed up until 3am to do this for them (she was complaining how this is being done during work hours, etc.). She backed down and went into the calm OK thanks tone after she realized I’m not going to put up with that shit from her.

Seriously folks, you DO NOT talk to people like that. I don’t give a shit you you think you are. If you can’t be professional, then fuck off.

Ever have one of those days where everything seems to go wrong. Today started with a customer internet down. The issue was their router. Most likely a heat related cause. I stopped out to swap it with a spare. Onsite, I wanted to make sure I had the latest config, so I fired up my laptop, TFTP, SSH and was ready to transfer the start-up config. That is when it all went downhill. The transfer would not start. I checked a few things and then assumed my windows firewall was blocking it. I went to change the firewall settings, but received an error. I checked and the firewall was not started, yet it was being blocked. I checked a the services and when I received repeated dependency errors I turned to one of the MS Fix-It solutions. It came back with the error that it could not be fixed due to Kaspersky. I checked my Kaspersky, and even though I never enabled any fire-walling, it was doing port monitoring. I decided that is BS and uninstalled Kaspersky (note it is the antivirus only edition, yet it still has an NDIS driver that was causing issues). After the necessary reboot following the unisntall, I received a BSOD referring to one of the Kaspersky drivers. I chose a boot using last known good profile. This worked, but….. I now had no mouse by the touchpad, or by my wireless mouse. After f**king with that for 45+ minutes I said screw it and put my flash drive in a user PC to finish the router config.

I moved on to a wiring job and their programmer stopped me to say that a remote user couldn’t access the payroll system. I pulled out my laptop, hoping to fix then remote to their PC. Another hour lost. Now it is 2pm and I still haven’t fixed the remote PC. I try to use one of the servers for remote access and the KVM comes up a cable disconnected which then requires a reset.

I know at this point I am not going to get any wiring done before 4pm (time I had to leave to get the kids from day camp), so I leave to use my office PC.

From my office I fix the remote PC,  and finally resolve the mouse issue after another hour and finding a Kaspersky FULL removal tool.

I like Kaspersky, but I just want virus scanning. I don’t need a network or mouse hook.

What a waste of a day.

Not much to say, but I think this video says it all.

[youtube_sc url=http://youtu.be/cjkKziqB5CA rel=0 fs=1 autohide=1 modestbranding=1]

I am doing a wiring job for a customer. It is impractical to take everything home each night and it would seem I would not have to as contractors leave their gear at the site each day and night during a project or build. So it wouldn’t seem unreasonable for me to leave a 4ft fiberglass ladder, eight boxes of CAT5e and a pail of nylon pull cord and have it be left alone or remain undamaged. Not so. I arrived back today after not being there Monday do to scheduling of other jobs. I arrived to find my week old ladder covered in joint compound dust and droppings. OK, I can deal with that. It comes off. They used my ladder as I have used their’s. Although, I never spilled anything on their’s. But, the item that totally pissed me off was my 6500 foot pail of nylon cord. Seems they spilled paint all over the top and through the hole in the lid, coating the cord with paint. I had to discard ~400 feet to remove the painted portion. What the F*CK! Respect other peoples SH*T!

I’m glad I lug my 50lb bag of tools home every night. Who knows what would happen to them.