And now for something different.

I recently had this conversation with my Dad about me flying home for the Christmas holidays. My Dad is a sucker for "having a plan" and "being organised" - he seems to take it personally whenever something goes wrong and is beyond his control. I was a little late in organising the air tickets due to work being a bit iffy on my holiday working dates (still working as a casual bitch), and he didn't take it well.

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Dad: "$300 for airfares!? You should of organised it sooner!!" (disclaimer: normally, it would be less than half that price, but it's the holidays!)
Me: "I didn't know the dates! Even if I did, the costs would of been the same, they don't lower the costs because you book early on a Christmas day flight, they'd lose millions"
Dad: "No that's not the point, you should be more organised with your life!"
Me: "What the hell?! I'm supposed to know magically when I'm not working?!"
Dad: "THEN FIND OUT!!"
Me: "I DID! And then I booked my airfares around it!"
Dad: "You should of hassled your boss more!! Then you could of organised it sooner!!!"
Me: "Who the fuck cares when it was organised, the prices still would of been the same! And I still got a flight on Christmas Day, so it's not like I'm missing out on Christmas!"
Dad: "You're just fucking lazy!"

After this, I called my Mum to explain what was happening.

Me: "The only flight I can really get is on Christmas Day, I'll get there around 12:50pm, can you pick me up from the airport? Will it interfere with Christmas lunch?" (It's a 40 minute drive for her, and Christmas lunch is a big thing for Mum)
Mum: "Sure, just so long as you spend the day here at home, and not with your father"

---

In hindsight, perhaps the divorce wasn't that big a surprise.

Who needs anti-virus when we have PORN?!

CallCentreCrew decided that the rules didn't apply to them.

Seriously, uninstalling anti-virus software? 

Installing fucking MSN and utorrent?! 

DOWNLOADING MP3S AND PORN?!

ARE YOU GUYS FUCKING RETARDED

Why do people think they can get away with such dumb shit? Now we have to totally scrub these computers down :(

Not physically scrub. At least, I hope not. They would be stained.

It's a verb, it's a noun, it's an adjective!

I've recently learnt something about people from the fine state of Queensland. No matter the situation, be it a conference call, tax meeting, or even a funeral, swearing is a-OK to be used, sometimes as a punctuation mark, or even as a breath marker between words.

Our Brisbane office suddenly went offline this morning - strangely, no-one had called me. After thinking about this for about 30 minutes (I didn't want to set a precedent where I call people and solve their problems before they knew about it, I'd rather kill myself), I decided to call them to see what's going on - apparently being proactive looks good, or something.

I got TheFuckingFucker on the line. Fuck is to be used at all times with this guy.

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Me: "Hi, you guys are offline!"
TheFuckingFucker: "Yea, my fucking internet is down! I can't access anything, I restarted our firewall, still fucked! What the fuck is going on?"
Me: "...you didn't think to ring me? Please tell me you weren't playing with the cables at the back of the servers"
TFF: "Fuck yea I thought I could fix it, but fuck it aye? What the fuck is going on?"
Me: "....check your network cable to your local machine."
TFF: "Shit fuck its backup! Thanks mate!"

---

The aftermath, of course, is that now TheFuckingFucker calls me all the time for tiny, annoying problems that he could fix, and catches me on Skype as well.

Today's lesson - only help when asked, don't be helpful.

The Stench of Men.

Today I reaffirmed why I don't go to gyms.

The Call Centre Crew called me up for some random job, and I had to go physically over there to solve the issue. Some little thing, I can't even remember it now - mainly because my brain has been overwritten with the overwhelming stench of the office.

Even now, hours later, I can smell the stench. It's not a small office space, but it smells like 10 hobos stuffed into a garbage bin. If you can imagine the smell of a small animal taking a dump, eating that crap, vomiting it out, then eating the vomit, THEN dying from stomach rot, you might be close to what I had savored. 

I feel for the girls downstairs, they must be tasting it in the air all the time.

This, of course, doesn't even mention the physical garbage lying around. Cans of redbull, mother, V and all types of take away food (Hungry Jacks looks like the winner!) just lying around. Great at home, not so great at work.

Like a friend said, "Total LAN party". I guess porn sharing comes after midnight.

Hell is NEW people.

So, my company is going through a bit of expansion phase, and has decided to run a new call centre upstairs. I don't really know anything about phone systems/PABX, but I thought it could be interesting!

Today, I found out that "interesting" isn't always a good thing.

The new people - 10 guys serving as a call centre - had their first real day of work. Actual computer use, on the phones, etc etc. By lunch time, there were;

- Risque wallpapers already (bikini models, very attractive, but this IS a corporate environment!)
- Dodgy web chat things on foreign websites, complete with porn .gif ads
- One request for full network administrator rights "right now"

I'm not very good at reading the future, but I have a bad feeling about this.

Kids don't lie!

Completely random - I talked to my flatemate's daughter last night.

Kid: "You look much happier! Why?"
Me: "Because I'm single now!"

She, her mother, and her grandmother, all agreed with me.

Getting my IT groove on.

So, I'm finally getting into the groove of my new job - getting my head around the infrastructure, what kind of solutions work best, stuff like that. However, user interaction, no matter the time and place, still remains the same :(

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*ringring*

RandomGirl: "Hi, my Internet isn't working"

*walk up the stairs, this is already starting to annoy me*

RandomGirl: "Oh, hi, can you have a loo....oh, it's working now! Thanks, it must
be your presence! *laughs*

*return to my desk*

Repeat ad nauseum. I wonder how many non-geeks seriously think that "IT People" have a magical aura, capable of fixing computers, and that they themselves have a deadly anti-computer aura, which destroys things.

(There is no such thing as an IT groove, it is a horrible nightmare, never to be shown)

This is a blog...

...about my new workplace, and the horrible things that happen in it.

IT Support shouldn't be this hard.