News: 1596178925

Maybe it's a hold over from Usenet days, but I hate (email) sigs.

My "favorite" were those idiots whom had half a megabyte of sig attached to an (email) message that amounted to "Ok, thanks, bye."

Oh, and if your sig tries to intimidate the recipient into deleting the missive under pain of legal punishment, you can take your sig & stuff it _RIGHT_ up your arse. The recipient is under no legal requirement to do any such thing. In fact, if they decide to forward it as a BCC to the entire Gmail, Apple, AOL, Microsoft, & EU email owners as global spam, there's not a damned thing the sender can do to stop it.

Email sigs: Just Say No!

I understand and partially subscribe to your point of view.

As a freelancer, I have to have a signature that includes my registration identification, but it is just three lines of text with my name, the name I am registered under and my registration number.

There is no 1.5MB image, nor is there any legal warning notice.

"The recipient is under no legal requirement to do any such thing. In fact, if they decide to forward it as a BCC to the entire Gmail, Apple, AOL, Microsoft, & EU email owners as global spam, there's not a damned thing the sender can do to stop it."

Unless your name is M. Markle. Then you can go to court to sue a newspaper for printing the contents of said communication.

There's a world of difference between going to court to sue a newspaper (sic) and going to court and successfully suing a newspaper. Just sayin'...

Well, that was clearly breach of copyright. And yes, in some circumstances you could probably be sued for unauthorised forwarding of someone else's email on the same basis.

I'm fine with sig blocks .... so long as they keep it to the McQuary limit.

Somehow I read that as the Mary Quant limit, which probably has something to do with mini skirts.

icon: the vinyl one, please.

OK..

Learn something new every day!

Quite in agreement, which is why client enforced giganto-sigs annoy me. You know the ones with several colours because otherwise you miss the name.

I work as a contractor but permanently based at one client facility. The client **REQUIRES** a certain email signature format, on all messages, including replies and internal email:

Name, title, a note that I'm a contractor for $myEmployer not an employee of the client, client company name, address, email (like you couldn't get it from the "from" line!), phone number, client company website, links to client company social media pages, and finally the client company logo.

I wish I was allowed to turn it off, at least for INTERNAL emails, or use the much-abbreviated one I had before the requirement came through. The email content is frequently shorter than the signature.

And then there's the auto-applied-by-the-server legal disclaimer for outgoing external email...

I think it was a finger .sig (.plan?) rather than email, but in my early days at university one of my brighter classmates discovered animated ASCII art (this was a while ago!) and added some to his .sig (and/or .plan), much to the joy of the long-suffering sysadmin :-)

I especially hate the long signatures that include a block about thinking before you print the email.

Especially ironic when you do have to print the email and the signature block is the only text on the second page

My pet sig hate is users that insist on 'signing' their name in a lurid script font, usually in a biro shade of blue.

Might as well format the whole email in Comic Sans while they're at it.

I send all my emails in Wingdings - and save Comic Sans for the signature, where professionalism really counts.

Personnally, I only use my 20+ lines long, with hotlinked pictures and fluffs, Corporate Approved ( well Corporate provided ) signature for mails that needs to be treated with care by the recipient...

It's a way for me to say : read carefully the fscking mail and ponder on it before doing anything stupid/ridiculous.

The rest of the time it's first name & name.

Some took the cue about the sig, but there's still people that don't get it and go the stupid way.

And yes it comes down to habits taken from the old times.

The real gems are the corporate sigs that say if you're not the intended recipient you shouldn't read this email. Appended at the end where you only see it after reading the email. Because email clients have a facility for adding sigs but not headers and the thought that would have to go into issuing a corporate template and instructions to prepend it would be too hard.

> My "favorite" were those idiots whom had half a megabyte of sig attached to an (email) message that amounted to "Ok, thanks, bye."

Good old BIFF@BIFF.NET (and sometimes PSUVM.EDU):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF#An_example_Biffism

Telecoms again.

Called by one of our more technologically challenged users.

Phone turret not working. One of the almost indistructable 3820's.

Get down to client [1] Ask usual questions.

Client had of course done nothing that may cause the issues. However, turret is total Dodo.

Pick it up... And.... Get a cup of cold coffee down my shirt.

Fairly simple diagnosis from that point.a few choice words were exchanged. Well actually the conversation was one sided.

She did offer to get my nice CT shirt dry cleaned.

Roll on pint time....

Have a good weekend all...

Dave

[1] Same client who took recabling every desk to the board as it was obviously cr*p because pushing her bag right under her desk was pulling extension leads apart regularly.

Gaffa tape fix.

Did you use Gaffa tape on the cables or the user?

Oh I wish. I wish...

Additional.

The Nortel 3820 was the fixed line equivalent of the Nokia 3310.

I once dropped an unboxed one down the center of the stairwell. 3 floors...

Only damage was a few scratches.

You have to really try to kill one.

"Only damage was a few scratches."

To the stairs?

And James, like all good BOFHs, "went back to charging the recently-used cattleprod".

There, fixed it for ya.

I was thinking more along the lines of to the pub. The good BOFH never sleeps. It wastes time better devoted to malevolence and sneaking into the building to loosen window catches and recable the boss's office to install listening devices..

"User has checked cables"

Yeah, right

Wife, who is not a total L-user when it comes to tech, gets very offended when I start at the very basic end of problem diagnosis - "I've already checked that!" "Yes I know, but that's how my problem solving works - if I haven't checked it, then it hasn't been checked". Too many experiences of people claiming they did nothing or had already checked a thing, for the simple thing to turn out to be the issue anyway.

"User has checked cables"

Yeah, right

Yep...

They've checked them so much that if you ask them to unplug them, then blow on the end and plug them back in it always solves the problem.

Obviously blowing on the end of the cables does nothing and you could just say "check the cables are pushed in properly", but the users don't do that whereas they will unplug it to pointlessly blow on them, and plugging it back in then solves the problem.

You just reminded me that I forgot to bring a 15m ethernet cable to my favorite user ( aka Mom ) so that she can connect to Internet when her laptop wifi goes AWOL ( loosing the connectivity with the box and going for another generic wifi network. )

Damn, I'll have to tuck that in my bag for halloween, if they managed to get planes back between ORY and CFE. ( no way I'm going to endure the 4H [ potentially going on 8 ] of train going there )

Er... can't you just send the missing ethernet cable via snail-mail?

Better yet, just one end of it, so you can connect the other end to your network as a backup.

Obligatory XKCD: (see comment)

https://xkcd.com/454/

Back in my green days (which I like to count in decades now as it keeps the numbers smaller and thereby some how seems not as long ago) I had a user with a totally dead, completely shuffled off the mortal coil 22" CRT monitor (such a beast they were classed as a two man lift for company insurance purposes, not that anyone actually followed through with getting a second engineer to help).

Asked the obvious, did you check it was plugged in, affirmative from the user, so in my nativity I toddle off back to our basement office to grab a replacement, trolley it back up, swap over, pop the power button and..nothing.

Oh dear.

So I check the power cable I re-used and, yep, it's plugged in alright.

They do tend to work better than when the extension block is turned on though...

I didn't want to lose face to the nice lady so simply told her the new monitor's now up and running and popped her old one back into storage for when one actually failed...

The first rule I always taught new helpdesk staff: "Users lie".

Greg House? Is that you?

"It is always such fun when users take it upon themselves to diagnose issues, and usually ascribe them to a mystery virus or some other example of miscreancy"

The best I've had: I think it got a virus, so I ran a defrag on it but it made no difference.

The real problem (other than the user) was that the son had spilled coke over the keyboard.

The real problem (other than the user) was that the son had spilled coke over the keyboard.

Not too hard to hoover that up.

Both sugary and acid enough to cause serious damage. Spilt some my self on a laptop and it was hell getting it all clean and working

Happened to me once. The laptop kept working for the day - just what I needed to back up everything important.

The next day, it was dead.

That's when I learned to be extra careful with liquids around a keyboard.

And tomatoes. Watch out for tomatoes

Reminded me of a call - had a user ring up (legitamally) complaining of lack of disk space. Helldesk response - run a defrag.

School IT revamp.

I literally upgraded (and therefore wiped) every client and server.

Obviously, before this, I took copies of absolutely everything. And did things piecemeal over the summer. And even went to the extent of copying/imaging/removing old client drives before doing so or as I went. People stored stuff in silly folders and something they didn't hit their network profiles and one of the things I was upgrading for was a better version of Windows that handled users profiles on a network in a better fashion, so we were killing that legacy but needed to be sure we'd got everything.

One teacher, upon their return, was subject to a subject audit - the big bods go through their teaching and make sure they're compliant with the curriculum and so on. Strangely, at that point, she claimed she'd lost "everything" (even by her admission, that's a handful of files, but anyway). So I "must have wiped it all when I upgraded". The saga went on for a few days, while I explained that we'd wiped nothing that we didn't have copies of, and provided what I had.

No, apparently those things were still missing. I was obviously stupid and had deleted it all. All her stuff was there. I was causing her stress. She couldn't go through with the audit without those files, etc. etc. etc.

So I reached into my filing cabinet and - stacked among several hundred others - was every hard drive from every computer and every server. Pulled, labelled, stored just for such instances. Yes, the "upgrade" didn't wipe anything at all. Not one byte. I'd put new drives in everything, and pulled the old ones, carefully labelling them with their former location, PC number, and who used that PC. And I know that, because I did the entire upgrade single-handed, so not one computer got upgraded without that happening by myself personally.

Strangely, that drive didn't have her claimed files either... shocking! It was at this point that, having a boss who understood IT, there was some hefty backtracking and she "found" what she was missing, and the saga blew over.

Until a few days later, when she claimed that I was blocking websites and they were critical to her department review. It was odd, because I didn't block anything manually unless asked, it was all auto-categorised. And teachers pretty much got an exemption (their web history is recorded and flagged, but it doesn't block pages for them like it does the kids). I asked her to send me the address. She sent me her department curriculum planning document, which is something that every department keeps and contains all their ideas for teaching, what resources, etc. Obviously, that often now includes a web link or two.

I clicked it. The site was dead. I told her "that's not us, the site is down". She made such a fuss, she went straight to the head and complained that I was blocking things she needed to "do her job", etc. etc. etc.. So I investigated. No DNS resolution for it. I poked around, looked up WHOIS records. The domain had expired TWELVE YEARS prior. No other website had ever sat on its domain. Archive.org provided a lovely timeline of updates, ending promptly at the point of domain expiry all those years prior.

I presented this to the head and there was a ruckus. Because that website was in her curriculum plans for the last 15 years, and it hadn't existed for at least 12 of them. And she insisted that she'd been using it all that time, which was technically impossible. She couldn't provide any evidence that she'd used it, we had years of web logs, the kid's accounts had no traces of anything from it or work like that.

She'd basically dropped herself in it twice, in quick succession, and shown everyone that she hadn't been doing her planning for all the time she'd worked there. There was a huge fuss. I don't know/care what happened because they accepted my evidence, and I left shortly after, but last I heard she was being made the "Head of VLE". The day I left, she asked me what a VLE was (virtual learning environment - a website where teachers post resources, homework, kids log in and grab them and submit them back, teachers comment on them, etc. etc. etc.). "That's like Google, right?!" she asked. Yeah. Just like Google. Bye.

I have upvoted, but only with reluctance as this story of somebody attempting to cover their own mistakes by vociferously lying to put the blame on others, being proved wrong and still rewarded for it saddens me. The one bright note is being able (twice) to pull out unambiguous proof to the contrary and have it believed.

I used to have a job working on the help desk of online PC manufacturer in the early 2000s. We had a customer who claims their PC had made a loud bang and smoke had come out of the back of the PC, 1 week before their warranty was due to expire.

When it was received back it was found that the scorch marks were actually caused by the customer using a lit candle to make it look like something had blown and they had inadvertently dripped molten wax all over the inside of the PC in their attempt to make it look like it had developed a fault. Yet when confronted with this they swore blind not only that they had not done it, but that they don't even own any candles.

As it was despite their efforts the PC booted up without any problems and so was shipped back to them, minus the candle wax.

So many half-truths and I don't knows over the years, one stands out. User complained that their Macbook Air was running really slow, type a word and wait 10 seconds for it to appear on screen. I head over the service counter, and have a look. They type and indeed 10 seconds later, the text appears. I have a look at the keyboard, CODE RED! Nurse! Gloves! Stat! Grimiest keyboard I've seen in a long time. And then I get a whiff of coffee. I tell the user to wait as I move the MBA over to the work bench. I whip off the bottom plate, and I see pools of coffee! I told the user what I found, and they replied, I don't drink coffee, so it wasn't me! I said, But this is assigned to you, you are responsible for the upkeep and care of the computer. Priceless dumb looks...

"Hi there, you tried to access a dubious website this morning".

"No I didn't".

"Yes you did. sexydirtypron.ru at 09:53:01 from [machineid], you were logged in as [username]". If you say that someone else was logged in using your machine and your id this converation may go to places you might regret".

" ... ... ... ... "

At a previous job, way back in the large 90's, I was informally running the sites web proxy. Chatting casually to one unit manager one day, I told him that porn is being looked up all the time.

I had to log requests, but I didn't view or act on them - that's up to corporate, and if they flagged an access from my proxy, I'd have to pass them whatever relevant logs I had.

Fortunately, in the years I was doing this, this NEVER happened. But invariably I'd be debugging/tracing, and I'd see the contents of the log.

He was curious to what was logged, so I offered to show him.

Back in my office, I had only run a tail on the log file for a minute when some dodgy porn site popped up.

"See?", I said. There's porn all the time..

"Who's PC is that?"

"Hang on..." (looks up address) "Errm, it's yours!"

This was one case where someone could not be accused of lying when he protested his innocence!

It turned out that as he was away on his lunch break, one of his staff used his faster PC for his staff break!

Fortunately, he was a chilled sort of guy, and nothing was ever made official, but the staff member concerned got an embarrassing talking to!

That reminds me of a time when we also noticed some porn sites appearing in our proxy logs. It was only a small company with 15 developers, so identifying the machine used was not difficult, so we thought..

However, the timestamp was from early in the morning, before any right-thinking developer would have dragged themselves out of bed and into the office, so we were curious how it had happened.

It began to happen on a regular basis, a couple of mornings a week, but not always from the same machine, and so we decided to look more closely. The days and times coincided with the hours that the office cleaners worked (06:30 - 08:30, Tuesdays and Thursdays), so we approached the cleaning company and asked them to talk to their staff.

It still kept happening, so we set up a webcam overlooking the desks, but disguised inside a cardboard floppy container. The next morning, we reviewed the footage, and found that one of the cleaners used to bring her teenage son into work with her, and he would wander round the desktops until he found one that had been left unlocked, and would then amuse himself with a bit of porn.

We showed the footage to the cleaning company, and the cleaner was disciplined. We also had a rant at the developers about leaving their machines unlocked overnight.

[Humour failure] "James was working in the IT team for UK local government. In keeping with the thrusting, staying up-to-date ethos of such organisations, there was a "no iPads/personal devices" rule strictly enforced. After all, who knows what horrors the newfangled things might be carrying in or, more importantly, out?"

Really we quite liked iPads but they feckin things were/are massively expensive to buy in those days and needed 1:1 setup and maintenance (they are still a massive ballache in large numbers but not as bad as those days). Cllrs and senior people demading new toys just for them were/are a massive drain on the limited stock of IT people. Also they were crap for day to day use.

We had that same issue. Clls demaded iPads. Turned out "iPad" meant tablet computer just like "Hoover" = vacuum cleaner. So they got very expensive Dell tablets (at least we could manage them centrally and not have to push apps through a VDI on an iPad).

Then they said they needed keyboards because typing on a tablet was hard.

Then they wanted mice for them because using your finger was hard.

When asked if in fact since they had a screen with a keyboard and a mouse if they did in fact want a laptop since that was about half the price of their current setup? Nope they definitely "needed" a tablet.

These days we have to supply them with Surface tablets, but then we also have to give them desktops to do any work on since the Surface is just to carry around and put on a desk in meetings like a decorative figurine.

"The Surface is just to carry around and put on a desk in meetings like a decorative figurine."

I guess this is what most Surfaces are used for. Having prodded one in the local shop, they don't seem particularly sturdy to me. The creaking noises when I touched the screen were particularly alarming.

My Daughter is a lawyer and was delighted in the surface pro with attached keyboard she was given in her last role. It did everything she needed and was portable enough to be shoved in her handbag for meetings on client sites rather than carry a laptop bag. She's not gentle with kit but the surface survived everything she could throw at it.

Its an expensive bit of kit and too small for my old eyes but it works for her and she doesn't have to commute through London with a laptop bag any more as she works stupidly long hours and still takes work home late at night this is a hue relief to me.

I'm a Contract PM but seem to specialise in Government projects. I've had the dubious honour with working as the interface between the IT Department and the team who provide day to day support for Councillors. A very common practice was for members to redirect their emails to personal gmail or hotmail accounts. The root cause turned out to be the fact that they had to use strong passwords to access the Council email system. Whilst staff were unable to autoforward emails to external domains the council leader insisted that this restriction we removed for members. They were briefed on the GDPR/ Privacy and data security risks but we were overridden. We had even provided Outlook Web Access so they could read emails on private devices but the requirement to put in a sensible password was just too hard.

Another council was forced to buy very expensive convertible laptops (even dearer that ipads). The justification was based on a business case that council meetings would be paper free. We did suggest a pilot but were overruled and 70 devices were purchased. Needless to say it was impossible for them to flip between 2 or 3 reports / supporting letters / planning documents on a 13 inch screen so all the paper was printed for every meeting anyway. It turned out he 70 devices purchased were never really used as they were significantly heavier than the laptops they already had. The following year the campaign for ipads for members was started. I'm not sure how that ended up. Frustratingly these initiatives never get funded, they just come from the tightly stretched operational IT budget.