Unreasonable dickheads

[Blir]

I work in IT support and naturally in the city you encounter some fucking dickheads from time to time, but this complete cunt is really pissing me off right now.

 

Here's the basic story - Last Friday I was doing some work at a clients office waiting for somebody who was in a meeting there so he could open his office down the road and I could get on with some server work. In the middle of looking at an issue on someones PC he comes out of the meeting and says he's going to open his office and asks if I could come over pretty quickly. I say yes and finish up what I was in the middle of doing, he leaves and literally two minutes later as I'm about to walk out of the building he calls the receptionist and asks her where I am. By the way, this is one of these arrogant financial company director cunts with a serious chip on his shoulder.

 

I walk one minute round the corner and I'm at his office - As I walk in he says "What part of urgent don't you understand!? I have to catch a flight and now I'm probably going to miss it!" then he stands there asking a bunch of pointless questions while I'm thinking "Don't you have a flight to catch?" Eventually he fucks off and I get on with my work.

 

This morning I get an email from my boss sent to the whole support team asking what this business is about with the guy "missing his flight at great expense" - So now the prick is blaming me and stirring up shit for missing his flight because I came over TWO minutes after! Who leaves it that late to catch a flight anyway? I'll tell you who: An idiot.

[Guest Blanket Fort Collapse]

lols, what a fucking donkey indeed, you should give him one quick kick to the cunt

[goDel]

*ignore rant*

 

and you can ignore my pov that i could relate to the "unreasonable dickheads" side. point is, you interpreted "pretty quickly" where he meant "now"/"ASAP". i'm assuming he's a customer who pays for the services of the company you work for. could you agree that a customer, under certain conditions - say, he has to catch a plane - can make you decide to quit doing what you were doing in order to "serve" his needs (as awful as it may sound - but the IT- business is a service business)?

if not, you're doing the wrong kind of work (for you).

[Guest Blanket Fort Collapse]

... no, unless he says right now, pretty quickly in the IT world from I have seen usually means 10-30 minutes or in the next hour. In my experience's no one has ever expected less than 10 minutes super rush. Especially when he was asking pointless shit after he let you in the office, anyone who misses there flight because of being delayed for 2 minutes is a fucking ricky retardo anyway

[goDel]

yeah well i wasn't there. in business nobody asks for things to happen "pretty quickly" especially not when they're supposed to catch a plane and in a hurry. i read the pretty quickly bit as an euphemism to makes his (Obel's) case stronger. not as what the lunatic actually said.

[Blir]

The fact remains that I was doing work on one client PC before he appeared, I couldn't just leave that to run down the road as I wasn't returning to that office after.

 

I understand the value of a paying client, believe me I know the kind of job I'm in. But I'm not talking about having to do work for somebody or even my motivation, but someone whose organisation is so poor that they leave a meeting seconds before they have to apparently catch a flight and need someone to blame missing it on. How about blaming the traffic that is all over London?

 

I'm not in trouble or anything, my boss is a decent bloke who doesn't jump to conclusions. But I don't appreciate the attitude of the client - which pissed me off. Hence: Rant thread.

[goDel]

The fact remains that I was doing work on one client PC before he appeared, I couldn't just leave that to run down the road as I wasn't returning to that office after.

it depends. my point was that under certain conditions this would actually be something you could have done. you made the decision then and there this was not the case, which could have been the "right" thing to do. reading from your first post i suspected it may well have been a miscalculation. (i was under the impression that you were in the same building where your customer was having his meeting, or that he asked you face-to-face to come right away) so i was just testing you on that.

 

there's no arguments on the jerkiness of the customer.

[kakapo]

I imagine you were stitched up deliberately and he was going to miss his flight anyway, and was looking for an excuse. You'd be morally justified in finding out where the cunt lives and torturing him and his family to a painful death, but unfortunately we live in a world of consequence. Speak to your manager or hr. It may be the case that they wouldn't want to do anything that might lose a client, but at least put it on record.

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

In my capacity as an important person I often find I have to be late for things and treat people disrespectfully for valid reasons such as time constraints, to maintain baseless ego beliefs and to assert my importance, which I think I may have already mentioned. Sometimes I encounter lay people such as computer lackeys, scaffolders, people I employ to paint my skirting boards and so forth,et cetera , and some are distastefully sanctimonious such as yourself and honestly it's only fitting for me to do my utmost to have these people's salaries reduced to the percentage of mine which reflects the percentage to which they are as important as I am, which is really rather important indeed.

[Blir]

I imagine you were stitched up deliberately and he was going to miss his flight anyway, and was looking for an excuse. You'd be morally justified in finding out where the cunt lives and torturing him and his family to a painful death, but unfortunately we live in a world of consequence. Speak to your manager or hr. It may be the case that they wouldn't want to do anything that might lose a client, but at least put it on record.

 

I've abducted his kids, but I just realised I don't have any place to store them.

 

Does somebody have a basement or any spare warehouse space I could rent?

[Guest Dirty Protest]

This is why im not very good at life. I'ld have told him where to go or punched him. One because im noones kick bag and two because its a totally unproductive way to behave.

[oscillik]

i agree that this cunt is being a cunt.

 

if he missed his flight because of a few minutes, then that is not your fault. the blame lies entirely on his own personal time management.

 

check-in usually requires you to be at the airport at least 30 mins before take off, and 3 hours before take off if its an international flight. being in London, this cunt should've planned his schedule with ample time to check in and allow for traffic.

[Blir]

This is why im not very good at life. I'ld have told him where to go or punched him. One because im noones kick bag and two because its a totally unproductive way to behave.

 

Oh, believe me I was fucking raging - but I like my job and have good future prospects so I just kept it under my hat until he left the office.

 

About three years ago I would have told him to go fuck himself straight away. I won't be doing desktop support forever though so I'll put up with the bullshit, there's a far greater number of clients who are an absolute pleasure to work with.

[Guest 277: 930-933]

I get to work with a lot of people who are stressed out of their minds (no business like show-business!) and use this knowledge to put their assholery in perspective.

But there's a very distinct line I have and if someone goes over that they'll be calmly explained that their behaviour could result in not getting what they want at all instead of as soon as possible.

It's all give and take...

But then again some people are just assholes, shrug it off and know that they'll get theirs at some point, nice guys finish last but get to eat all the stuff that's left over from the buffet plus they're home later so usually you get to sleep in.

[Guest theSun]

unrelated IT story - (i work at a college, client is a professor)

 

so yesterday i get this laptop that came in with spyware, viruses, you name it. this professor apparently brings in her laptop once a month or so to get viruses cleaned off. i don't know if she has a weird internet fetish oft overindulged, but that's beside the point.

 

anyways, i pick up her machine and start running our AV scripts, which halfway through fails for some reason (i wasn't there and the pc just restarted). anyways the laptop no longer recognizes any sort of hard drive in BIOS and i'm thinking "shit." since we are not really a big college, we don't have elite data recovery tools. i plug the hard drive into our Mac and the thing will not mount.

 

then apparently it had it's second wind as it started spinning up. i was starting to feel relief that i might actually be able to salvage some data but it kept spinning louder and louder and then the loudest *snap* i've ever heard from a HD and it sounds now like there are many pieces inside rolling about. data gone.

 

now i have to inform the user. she is a woman who speaks broken english, so our phone conversation was basically useless. trying to explain to someone who speaks heavily accented english (i think she's from turkey?), over the phone, that they just lost all their files is impossible. she just kept repeating "you have my data?" so i went to her office to deliver the news face to face.

 

of course the people who never back up their shit have HD failures like this. i thought she was about to cry. i don't even know what was on computer, but she said years of work (she is in the fashion dept) of designs, class outlines, projects, homework, student work all lost. by the time i left her office she was going to buy an external hard drive and attend the next help desk seminar on backing up data.

 

moral of the story - BACK UP YOUR SHIT

[Blir]

unrelated IT story - (i work at a college, client is a professor)

 

so yesterday i get this laptop that came in with spyware, viruses, you name it. this professor apparently brings in her laptop once a month or so to get viruses cleaned off. i don't know if she has a weird internet fetish oft overindulged, but that's beside the point.

 

anyways, i pick up her machine and start running our AV scripts, which halfway through fails for some reason (i wasn't there and the pc just restarted). anyways the laptop no longer recognizes any sort of hard drive in BIOS and i'm thinking "shit." since we are not really a big college, we don't have elite data recovery tools. i plug the hard drive into our Mac and the thing will not mount.

 

then apparently it had it's second wind as it started spinning up. i was starting to feel relief that i might actually be able to salvage some data but it kept spinning louder and louder and then the loudest *snap* i've ever heard from a HD and it sounds now like there are many pieces inside rolling about. data gone.

 

now i have to inform the user. she is a woman who speaks broken english, so our phone conversation was basically useless. trying to explain to someone who speaks heavily accented english (i think she's from turkey?), over the phone, that they just lost all their files is impossible. she just kept repeating "you have my data?" so i went to her office to deliver the news face to face.

 

of course the people who never back up their shit have HD failures like this. i thought she was about to cry. i don't even know what was on computer, but she said years of work (she is in the fashion dept) of designs, class outlines, projects, homework, student work all lost. by the time i left her office she was going to buy an external hard drive and attend the next help desk seminar on backing up data.

 

moral of the story - BACK UP YOUR SHIT

 

Haha, we've had a few people who don't back up get upset at HD failures recently. Get it sent to an expert data recovery company if it's that important, obviously she'll have to foot the bill though.

 

We have a client who for some inexplicable reason refuse to pay money for a backup solution. They're web usability experts with about 40 employees who deal with BSkyB, Google, BBC and other big companies. All their users work on laptops with roaming profiles, all their data is stored on the server and they absolutely don't want to pay the relatively small amount of money for a backup solution.

 

It's funny really, recently they've been saying "oh there's no need because we're moving Exchange to the cloud"... Yeah... BUT WHAT ABOUT YOUR DATA!?

[Guest theSun]

yeah we're supposed to give users a brochure for a local data recovery center if they're that concerned. it's usually $750, but with damage that extensive i'm betting it would cost her around $2,000.

 

even though she was devastated she was still nice enough to offer me tea.

 

i just don't understand why people wouldn't want to guarantee safe data? especially if it's an integral part of your career.

[chassis]

There will be dickheads.

 

Also

 

BACK UP YOUR SHIT!