I hate when someone asks me how to fix something in Excel and on the outside I'm nodding along and on the inside I'm like "Are you fucking shitting me, I didn't even known Excel could DO that"
I just get angry because my role is to be an expert in real shit not the usage of user applications
I hate when someone asks me how to fix something in Excel and on the outside I'm nodding along and on the inside I'm like "Are you fucking shitting me, I didn't even known Excel could DO that"
I just get angry because my role is to be an expert in real shit not the usage of user applications
Unfortunately we've taken the step of giving everyone Linux workstations, and the productivity software is a big black eye on the matter. They know how to do X in Excel, but I'm expected to know how to replicate the behavior in Libreoffice Calc.
The answer is usually really fucking complicated and way the fuck over my head. User gets frustrated that my answer is, "I need to play with this for a while and get back to you" instead of giving them the answer right away, and I get called out on the carpet for it when this happens.
Generally speaking, I think when they're doing complicated shit like this, it should probably be a function in our in-house accounting software instead, but I don't know that for sure.
There's also a weird love of pivot tables being created in Excel that do a bunch of fancy bullshit and when they get imported into Calc they just take a complete shit and I get called out for that too.
Like, don't get me wrong, I love having Linux workstations. A user had a virus recently on their Windows machine, and it sent an email to everyone else in the company, and almost everyone in the company opened the attachment and tried to run it. Their Linux workstations didn't know how to run it. For that alone, I'll fight very hard for keeping Linux workstations, but fucking hell does something need to happen on the productivity software front.
"Hey Cog, we were embedding PDFs into Excel spreadsheets and we started getting Adobe errors"
And on the inside I'm all "You were fucking WHAT?!WITCHCRAFT! And also, fuck, if it gave an error message I have to try to fix it you asshole!"
If they just don't know how to do something I can tell them to google it.
INC001453556 SUBJECT: embedding PDFs in excel spreadsheets DESCRIPTION: you broke something with excel when we embed PDFs now we get adobe errors please fix right away STATE: Resolved RESOLUTION NOTES:
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
They wanted me to make a system in their excel that change colors based on date.
Which, I'm sure is possible, but it was something that would work much better in our EHR system instead. This way everyone can see what's up instead of just 1 person, if they happen to look at it.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
They wanted me to make a system in their excel that change colors based on date.
Which, I'm sure is possible, but it was something that would work much better in our EHR system instead. This way everyone can see what's up instead of just 1 person, if they happen to look at it.
can't Conditional Formatting do that?
I've never tried using it to manipulate dates but it seems like it could do it
e: yes, of course, it's got a ton of Date options built in
Aioua on
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Why the fuck would you externally email the company's bookkeeping stuff in re: invoices?
That's all kinds of bad ideas.
I don't know, that's not my job. I'm an MSP. I can tell them that putting the loaded gun into their mouth is not an optimal business strategy but it's not my job to actually take it out of their mouth for them.
Being an MSP is kinda cool in that regard.
You wanna figuratively blow your small business brains out? I won't load the gun for you but I also don't have to clean up the viscera.
My boss wants to start automating more shit, which is fine, but he's wanting us to come up with methods to automate the exceptions to rules. Example is for Windows updating. He wants not only just an automated thing to show that windows updates happened, when shit goes sideways he also wants to automate the reports we generate that show what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what can be done to fix/mitigate/deal with.
Can they use productivity software within WINE? Then just buy a 365 license or something?
It's something I explore every 6 months or so, and no, it doesn't work well at all.
Office Online seemed like a good fit for a while, too, but then you run into a file size issue. Plus you can't work with local files, you have to upload them to a cloud service, yuck.
I kinda get caught in the middle between two sides. There's one of the owners + the Network Admin, who want Linux workstations and think if you need to do special shit in MS Office you're probably not reaching out to our internal Dev team enough, and another owner + the CEO + the users, who show me how something it supposed to work in Excel/Word, it seems to me that what they want to do is pretty complex but a simple operation, but LibreOffice takes a shit on the whole process. Most things take 7-8 more steps to accomplish, or they flatly aren't possible. Both of these, IMHO, are reasonable positions. But they talk past each other, and I'm the only one patient enough to sit with someone and listen to them.
It's frustrating because I can understand the frustration, and I can understand why I want users to have Linux workstations, but the reasoning the others give for why they have them are.....cost related? Which I just shake my head at, because there should be some fucking dialogue here between IT and the users, and we should be finding a solution that works for everyone, and instead both sides are going, "Fuck it, have Thawmus fix it."
In my opinion, if people need to have Microsoft Office, and they should put their shit together and make a case for it, I will completely support letting people have Windows workstations so they can have a properly functioning MS Office suite. I'm good with it. There's shit I don't like about it, but in the end, I'm the money drain, they're the folks that make the money, by all means, let me help you make us some more fucking money. But it's not up to me and there is no dialogue, just kicking me around while I'm trying to also run an ISP and negotiate contracts and do sales analysis for new/old regions and and and.....
I mean, I can't willfully violate HIPPA or PCI or anything, and if they're actually hosted in our infrastructure, we have certain requirements. But if it's their equipment on their network and we just give them support? I'll fix your error and when we hang up the phone, if you want to drive your company into a ditch, that's your thing, whatever. Just try to save enough money to pay our invoice when it shows up.
If they called and asked me for bullets to blow their brain out I'd tell them no though.
You're still thinking in a "I work here too" mentality.
If they really want to send their sensitive company information to others, it is literally not my problem.
Depending on the services you're providing, there's also sometimes an RFC that doesn't let you say "no." This can happen with providing email services a lot.
EDIT: Comes up with Internet provision too. If someone wants me to open up a gaping hole in our firewall for their connection, I have to do it. I do not get to refuse. I can try to advise them against it, but in the end, it has to happen if they want it.
If they called and asked me for bullets to blow their brain out I'd tell them no though.
You're still thinking in a "I work here too" mentality.
If they really want to send their sensitive company information to others, it is literally not my problem.
Depending on the services you're providing, there's also sometimes an RFC that doesn't let you say "no." This can happen with providing email services a lot.
EDIT: Comes up with Internet provision too. If someone wants me to open up a gaping hole in our firewall for their connection, I have to do it. I do not get to refuse. I can try to advise them against it, but in the end, it has to happen if they want it.
Yeah we get this kinda thing a lot too with hosted firewall and internet access.
If your servers sit in our infrastructure, though, we do have some rights to say no to things, and we can enforce security standards, cause every dumbfuck thing you do can expose our datacenter. Every customer more or less exists in their own DMZ but there's no guarantees.
If they called and asked me for bullets to blow their brain out I'd tell them no though.
You're still thinking in a "I work here too" mentality.
If they really want to send their sensitive company information to others, it is literally not my problem.
Depending on the services you're providing, there's also sometimes an RFC that doesn't let you say "no." This can happen with providing email services a lot.
EDIT: Comes up with Internet provision too. If someone wants me to open up a gaping hole in our firewall for their connection, I have to do it. I do not get to refuse. I can try to advise them against it, but in the end, it has to happen if they want it.
Yeah we get this kinda thing a lot too with hosted firewall and internet access.
If your servers sit in our infrastructure, though, we do have some rights to say no to things, and we can enforce security standards, cause every dumbfuck thing you do can expose our datacenter. Every customer more or less exists in their own DMZ but there's no guarantees.
Yeah, to clarify:
I have a firewall sitting between my ISP customers and the Internet. It's a pretty normal thing at a WISP, because you can take a call from a 16 year old hooking up his Xbox, asking for a port to be opened, but you don't have the staff to handle customer routers turning into DNS phishers. I block everything inbound (except established or related traffic).
If someone asks to have a port opened, or to just be exposed, I offer the absolute minimal amount of resistance to the latter, and none at all to the former. Being a small ISP, I'm allowed to firewall off my customers like this (I wouldn't if I had 100,000+ customers), but I have to allow traffic that the customer wants.
Fucking sales guys shouldn't sell shit without running it past engineers.
Sales Guy: "Hey Cog, install this Sophos software on all the servers and workstations at <client>"
Cog: "Hey Sales Guy, that software doesn't work on Servers and they have thin clients, not workstations, and it's not compatible with the AV that's on the like.. 3 desktop PCs they do have."
Sales Guy: "WHAT?!? But I sold them like fourty licenses for this! What are we going to do?!?!?"
Posts
The language is Visual Basic, isn't it? With a lot of extra Excel API hook-ups, mind you, but it is VB in the background, isn't it?
yes
I just get angry because my role is to be an expert in real shit not the usage of user applications
I just bring it to our resident Excel expert aka the Controller.
"Hey Cog, we were embedding PDFs into Excel spreadsheets and we started getting Adobe errors"
And on the inside I'm all "You were fucking WHAT?! WITCHCRAFT! And also, fuck, if it gave an error message I have to try to fix it you asshole!"
If they just don't know how to do something I can tell them to google it.
The Controller is the person who put the ticket in. I'm screw't.
I say this about alarm system batteries constantly.
Unfortunately we've taken the step of giving everyone Linux workstations, and the productivity software is a big black eye on the matter. They know how to do X in Excel, but I'm expected to know how to replicate the behavior in Libreoffice Calc.
The answer is usually really fucking complicated and way the fuck over my head. User gets frustrated that my answer is, "I need to play with this for a while and get back to you" instead of giving them the answer right away, and I get called out on the carpet for it when this happens.
Generally speaking, I think when they're doing complicated shit like this, it should probably be a function in our in-house accounting software instead, but I don't know that for sure.
There's also a weird love of pivot tables being created in Excel that do a bunch of fancy bullshit and when they get imported into Calc they just take a complete shit and I get called out for that too.
Like, don't get me wrong, I love having Linux workstations. A user had a virus recently on their Windows machine, and it sent an email to everyone else in the company, and almost everyone in the company opened the attachment and tried to run it. Their Linux workstations didn't know how to run it. For that alone, I'll fight very hard for keeping Linux workstations, but fucking hell does something need to happen on the productivity software front.
INC001453556
SUBJECT: embedding PDFs in excel spreadsheets
DESCRIPTION: you broke something with excel when we embed PDFs now we get adobe errors please fix right away
STATE: Resolved
RESOLUTION NOTES:
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I've had a person want it so that they can embed a copy of an invoice into their excel.
Yes, it doesn't make sense to me either but people can have some...interesting...ideas.
Put it on a network drive and create a hyperlink to it.
Click it and boom, opens up the PDF.
Which, I'm sure is possible, but it was something that would work much better in our EHR system instead. This way everyone can see what's up instead of just 1 person, if they happen to look at it.
can't Conditional Formatting do that?
I've never tried using it to manipulate dates but it seems like it could do it
e: yes, of course, it's got a ton of Date options built in
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
If they needed your help with that part of it, you are straight doomed.
You can't email it externally though! :rotate:
EDIT: Also, you can actually visually embed the PDF into a cell, which is apparently desirable for some fucking stupid reason.
That's all kinds of bad ideas.
I don't know, that's not my job. I'm an MSP. I can tell them that putting the loaded gun into their mouth is not an optimal business strategy but it's not my job to actually take it out of their mouth for them.
Being an MSP is kinda cool in that regard.
You wanna figuratively blow your small business brains out? I won't load the gun for you but I also don't have to clean up the viscera.
this doesn't actually seem like a request you would refuse, bowen
This is not going to be fun.
It's something I explore every 6 months or so, and no, it doesn't work well at all.
Office Online seemed like a good fit for a while, too, but then you run into a file size issue. Plus you can't work with local files, you have to upload them to a cloud service, yuck.
I kinda get caught in the middle between two sides. There's one of the owners + the Network Admin, who want Linux workstations and think if you need to do special shit in MS Office you're probably not reaching out to our internal Dev team enough, and another owner + the CEO + the users, who show me how something it supposed to work in Excel/Word, it seems to me that what they want to do is pretty complex but a simple operation, but LibreOffice takes a shit on the whole process. Most things take 7-8 more steps to accomplish, or they flatly aren't possible. Both of these, IMHO, are reasonable positions. But they talk past each other, and I'm the only one patient enough to sit with someone and listen to them.
It's frustrating because I can understand the frustration, and I can understand why I want users to have Linux workstations, but the reasoning the others give for why they have them are.....cost related? Which I just shake my head at, because there should be some fucking dialogue here between IT and the users, and we should be finding a solution that works for everyone, and instead both sides are going, "Fuck it, have Thawmus fix it."
In my opinion, if people need to have Microsoft Office, and they should put their shit together and make a case for it, I will completely support letting people have Windows workstations so they can have a properly functioning MS Office suite. I'm good with it. There's shit I don't like about it, but in the end, I'm the money drain, they're the folks that make the money, by all means, let me help you make us some more fucking money. But it's not up to me and there is no dialogue, just kicking me around while I'm trying to also run an ISP and negotiate contracts and do sales analysis for new/old regions and and and.....
You're still thinking in a "I work here too" mentality.
If they really want to send their sensitive company information to others, it is literally not my problem.
Depending on the services you're providing, there's also sometimes an RFC that doesn't let you say "no." This can happen with providing email services a lot.
EDIT: Comes up with Internet provision too. If someone wants me to open up a gaping hole in our firewall for their connection, I have to do it. I do not get to refuse. I can try to advise them against it, but in the end, it has to happen if they want it.
Yeah we get this kinda thing a lot too with hosted firewall and internet access.
If your servers sit in our infrastructure, though, we do have some rights to say no to things, and we can enforce security standards, cause every dumbfuck thing you do can expose our datacenter. Every customer more or less exists in their own DMZ but there's no guarantees.
Yeah, to clarify:
I have a firewall sitting between my ISP customers and the Internet. It's a pretty normal thing at a WISP, because you can take a call from a 16 year old hooking up his Xbox, asking for a port to be opened, but you don't have the staff to handle customer routers turning into DNS phishers. I block everything inbound (except established or related traffic).
If someone asks to have a port opened, or to just be exposed, I offer the absolute minimal amount of resistance to the latter, and none at all to the former. Being a small ISP, I'm allowed to firewall off my customers like this (I wouldn't if I had 100,000+ customers), but I have to allow traffic that the customer wants.
Sales Guy: "Hey Cog, install this Sophos software on all the servers and workstations at <client>"
Cog: "Hey Sales Guy, that software doesn't work on Servers and they have thin clients, not workstations, and it's not compatible with the AV that's on the like.. 3 desktop PCs they do have."
Sales Guy: "WHAT?!? But I sold them like fourty licenses for this! What are we going to do?!?!?"
Cog: "The fuck do you mean 'we'?"
Those guys know their stuff.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Oh we have SEs. Fucking sales weasel just didn’t bother to involve them.
A lot of words and one really bad visual representation coming up!
Edit: Visual representation too bad. Cutting it.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
You're fucking it up for everyone.
It's not their fault they don't understand.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm