May 2007
Monthly Archive
Humor24 May 2007 01:47 pm
Kidnapping and subterfuge
The night before last, I noticed the little penguin knickknacks I have on my desk were missing. The next morning I sent this e-mail:
*****
|
Mr. Ambassador,
My fellow penguins are no longer at their post on the ledge of Tux Castle.
This is unacceptable.
They are being held against their will, and our “employers” are now without the assurance that anyone that comes near Tux Castle will know that they are now in the Linux Nation.
The people of Linux Nation are now in a state of unrest, because those ever vigilant vanguards of Vision are captives of the Empire of Microsoft.
We will rise up! If my brethren are not returned forthwith, we will be forced to invade and take them by any means at our disposal! Do not tarry, for we will not warn you further! Only then will we talk of truces or peace.
Sincerely,
King Penguin |
*****I didn’t hear anything back all day. I was planning on actually getting pissed about it today, but I ended up getting really busy with a new server. Today an e-mail showed up.
*****
| To His Royal Highness, the King Penguin:
Your brethren have been returned. They can be found in the Break Room.
Their memory has been wiped – questioning them for our identity will prove to be a fruitless effort.
You should know that at no point did they betray you; they remained loyal during interrogation.
For images of the adventure, please visit.
http://thegreatpenguinadventure.directhomes.com
Viva la Revolucion! |
*****I get notified by a random person that there’s a brown paper bag in the kitchen with my name on it. Inside this brown paper bag is a large Tupperware bowl. I pull off the lid, and there are my penguins, wrapped in Ziploc bags, floating in a mess of green Jello you see in the last pic on the page.In response, I sent out this email:
*****
| Our ever vigilant vanguards of Vision are back home! They are currently being debriefed in an undisclosed location before they are returned to their post. Our medical examiners have determined that they are in perfect health and ready for service.
Our spies have, however, uncovered the identity of the kidnapper and he is the leader of a known revolutionary organization.
We have sent out our own ambassador to invite the leaders of the revolution to a neutral location to discuss the terms of our peace agreement.
In celebration of the homecoming of our brethren and the possibility of a successful negotiation, I am declaring today, May 24th, as a new national holiday.
Aptenodyte Day!
With much love for his subjects,
King Penguin |
*****So that’s pretty much the coolest thing ever. This person just pwned his sysadmin. I’m taking him out for dinner and drinks tonight, because I laughed just that damn hard.You WISH you worked with people this cool.
Personal Pimping
So, just in case you guys haven’t bothered to drop a www in front of the domain name, here’s a hint. It’s my VMOTD blog. It’s the Vague Message of the Day. A lot of it (okay, ALL of it) is stuff we actually run into with users over the course of any given day.
It’s fairly well dedicated to those users who call you up with a problem and give you nothing more than, “My computer is broke. How long will it take to fix it?”
It’s going through a little bit of a redesign since I switched from b2evolution (decent blogging program but not very mature) to WordPress. WordPress has a lot better spam prevention system and the php for the themes is fairly simple to manipulate. The publishing part of it is really intuitive as well. If you’ve got a spare box sitting around doing nothing, I’d highly suggest dropping CentOS 5 onto it and installing WordPress. It’s fun and you get to learn how to do shit in the process.
Please send me a clue
Okay, obviously Admin’s have nothing to do. At all. Ever.
What we REALLY want from users is the most ambiguous shit you could ever come up with JUST so we can spend the next 30 minutes either trying to figure out if there’s a problem with a server in the first place, or grilling you for the actual problem.
Say you can’t ssh to *one* of the several ip addresses that are on a single server. What you should do (and we love this I tell you) is IM your sysadmin, because he hates the usefullness of the trouble ticket system, and say “such and such server is down.”
Immediately start getting pissy because we start asking questions because you were vague. I cannot stress this part enough. We will not work faster or drop everything else (which is nothing, remember?) that we were doing unless you start to get personally offended that we are asking you a question.
When you answer the question, try your hardest to sound like you know what you’re talking about by using any buzzwords that might impress your sysadmin. When your sysadmin tells you that the thing you just asked *was* working, assume that your sysadmin is the one that’s clueless and threaten to escalate the “issue.”
Then, argue about it for a while longer until you actually feel like leaking out what is really wrong. Finally, get ambivilent about the fact that there wasn’t an issue in the first place, just that something changed because your sysadmin sacrificed your convenience in the name of something trivial like security.
Your sysadmin will honor and respect you and will never scan your computer for “unauthorized and prohibited” material on your hard drive.
