your willingness to help astounds me .. no really ..

Irate customers shit me. Not learning about problems until late on a Friday afternoon also shits me.

Take today for example. 2:47pm I get told there's a problem with customer X using remote desktop to their server via their vpn. Rightio. I don't know enough about the firewall to be able to do any real in depth troubleshooting and the customer's already pissed cos of numerous traceroutes he's sent that're a) useless and b) not clever from our ops' perspective for asking for them.

So, pissed customer ends up on my doorstep. At this stage, he's obsessed with his traceroutes. Bear in mind all icmp (traceroute kinda relies a bit on icmp) is blocked at the egress network (border routers), so of course it isn't going to work. *sigh* So aside from that, nothing useful comes from anyone much for a long time. No one's thought to try to replicate the problem either.

So, we start on the shitty spare laptop. After 2 hours of messing around on that, we've come to the conclusion that we can't get the vpn software to work. Customer is more pissed now. No one thought to pass on the information I gave, which was "your traceroutes are useless .. get over it" and "we're trying our fucken hardest to replicate it .. STOP TYPING IN CAPS IN THE JOB, SMACKTARD!!!".

Someone ought to send him to a netiquette link.
http://linux.sgms-centre.com/misc/netiquette.php
http://www.raycon.com.au/articles.php?n=sk3mfcop
http://www.infomarex.ie/infomarex/faqs/faqs-netiquette.htm#057
http://livinginternet.com/i/ia_nq_basics.htm#emotion
And the list goes on :P

Here we are, 6-7 hours on and we're no closer to a machine running the software because I'm talking the ops through installing an xp workstation. We haven't even gotten to installing the software for the vpn yet.

This is going down as time in lieu, you can guarantee that. Especially if I have to get in my car and go *back* to work tonight to make it work.

*grumble*