Work Rants

Two days ago I decided, at the spur of the moment, to take the rest of the week off. Where I work, we get the week between Christmas and New Years off. So taking the rest of the week off gives me a whopping two weeks off in a row! I have not had that kind if time off since I started working in the real world. I am currently in day two of the vacation. How is my week of solitude to rest and recoup going? Not well. Today, an issue came up that normally I would delegate to one of my underlings, but they are all on vacation in other countries. So, I needed to come to the rescue - as is my specialty. My accursed speciality. So, at 8:30 a.m. this morning, the issue comes in and I get to work on it. Except that I cannot, because I locked out my account . Fun. After a shower where I bitched and complained the whole time about having to work on my two weeks off, my account was unlocked and I started up again, more carefully this time. I work the rest of the morning to reinforce my opi...

Ack! The sky is falling! Donkeys are on fire! Children cannot find their mommy! So, I sent this message with high importance!  !  Blark! Almost every single message I get flagged with high importance is not important to me. It might be important to the person who sent it, but importance is subjective. In my opinion, if a message is not time sensitive in a relatively short time period, and it is not critical to either me or my bosses, it is not important - period. And, of course, important things are rarely urgent and urgent things are rarely important. Do not send me a meeting request with barely a title, much less an agenda, and is scheduled a month from now, marked as urgent. It just isn't. The option I do like to use, which I seem to be alone in using, is the low importance option. Some of us already consider all email to be low importance. But, I find this option to be a courteous indicator to the recipient that I am not trying to push my interpretation of importanc...

Here at work, we have to change our enterprise passwords every 90 days. I am sure this is similar to many institutions. We get three warnings: one at ten days, one at six days, and a final warning at three days. That gives us two days to forget about the impending doom. Sounds like a recipe for success. Changing our password means all saved passwords have to change; otherwise our account gets locked and we cannot log into anything. For me, locked accounts means no workie. Sounds promising, except I like to do my work and hate being frustrated with inane minutia that stretches out for hours. Here is the list of what I have to change. I have 5.5 devices to work with: work iMac - with virtual Windows 7 machine, Macbook Pro, iPhone, iPad, home iMac. Work iMac Initial logon Email Lync Safari web signon password Firefox web signon password Windows 7 Virtual Initial signon - thankfully this is used for other programs Email Internet Explorer web signon password  Mac...

I just revised a sentence in an email by replacing the word "complaining" with "reporting." As in, ".... so, when user are complaining reporting that things are not working ...." Tee Hee Hee

Last summer I made the switch from PC to Mac. Moving to a Mac at work is not a decision to be taken lightly. Not all software applications have Mac versions. As a fall back position, I installed a Windows 7 virtual machine. Everything worked - except one program: CA's SCM Workbench. Everything worked fine until I logged on and an error message and even Google had never seen. I sent the error off to the folks who maintain the application. They found nothing. After monkeying around on my machine I discovered if I set the VM up with its own IP address, it worked fine. So, problem solved .... .... until we moved. In our new location it is a one-port, one-IP world. This time a someone else lead the charge. The server guys did trace routes and watched network traffic. Butkis. Finally, another workaround was put in place - set up a spare Windows machine for RDP. Very clunky. Next on the road of false hope was the upgrade. Somewhere we heard there was a Mac version in the new r...

Security is necessary, I get that. Security is a pain in the butt, I get that. Security enforcers are very black and white, I don't get that. We have a group of security enforcers who scans the local network with scanning software. The scanning software hacks up a report. The security enforcers then send the report to those responsible for a particular site and tell those people to cram it immediately into their schedule. I didn't tell them, but I really wanted to cram it somewhere else ... in the schedule ... uh, yeah. I had this opinion because the whole process is very disruptive and security enforcers are not reasonable in terms of schedule. Also, I believe the process is flawed and way to black and white. Any item identified as "high" needs IMMEDIATE attention. Regardless of the fact that it might have been in production for 5 years on a low-traffic site which uses a protected account to expose data that by its very nature is public information. It ...