Re: Well, that's unexpected (Speedball reboot)

On 11/3/2024 7:39 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Sat, 2 Nov 2024 18:05:57 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
 

>

 

Oooo.   Okay.  From my days programming and tech support for 911
Dispatch Systems.  Not a tech support call I had to handle but one
passed on to new programmers.  Client calls, reports their system is
down.  All the screens are blank, no response to anything they try to
input.  The person calling is the head of that city/county's IT
department.  On call tech tells them to go to the main server's terminal
and tell him what it says.  Caller says he's already there but can't see
anything.  Asked why.  Caller says the room has no lights, they are in
the middle of a power outage.  Wants to know how to bring the system
back up until the power comes back.  :D

  Why do I suddenly imagine the client hunched over a stationary
bicycle, pedaling furiously to generate electricity while DT chants
over the phone, "Faster! Faster!"?
 

Well like I said it wasn't a call I fielded.  But one would really expect that the head of a county or major city IT department would know that computers won't work in a power outage.
One I did have to field was when a client (one of the half dozen largest cities on the US Pacific coast) called to report their system wasn't responding.  Normally we dealt with the dispatch shift supervisor or a senior dispatcher but when I contacted the client the person who answered identified themselves as the chief of police.  Who wanted to know why it was that as soon as one of HIS officers had been shot MY system had ground to a halt.  I finished connecting to their system and quickly found that the volume of network traffic the incident was generating because everyone in the department who was awake or had been woken up for this (it was 2am on a Sunday morning) was following the incident "live" was more traffic than their network could handle.  Since I couldn't install a WAN with higher capacity over the phone I gave him some suggestions to work around the problem and told him I would have our hardware people contact his department ASAP Monday morning.
Found out on Monday during our weekly debriefs of afterhours tech support calls that this client had NOT upgraded their WAN to the specs we had informed them when we installed their system would be needed in the event of an incident like that.

I never had such fun experiences. It was always the usual nonsense;
program crashes with error (but never bother to read what the error
message said), or problems caused by malware, or dead hardware.
Usually the worst was when the user fucked himself (who needs
c:\windows\system32 anyway?) but it was all pretty ordinary in its
stupidity.
 Although I did get blamed for somehow not making it so the software
would still run on computers could resist having hot coffee spilled
all over them.
 

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky dirty old man.