Archive for 'Stuff IT People Like'

Sometimes the word ‘like’ is just too long to type. ‘==’ is so much more efficient and if we ever had to convert our written word to C++ we’d be two characters closer to compile time. Even when creating my list of Things IT People Like I used curly braces to delimit each thing’s rough ideas and notes. E.g.

Junk Food{
 
Cheetos {
 
Theyre orange. Theyre salty. Theyre crunchy.
They should be considered one of the 4 basic food groups
 
} // Cheetos
 
} //Junk Food

Oh, and HTML/XML syntax doesn’t count. My grandmother used </flame> in her email to me after I pwned her at bingo (Do not shout “64 FTW, G-MAW!!! WEWWWT!” at the senior center). I’m talking about some serious procedural syntax showing up in your prose. Common characters in the circle I run with are ==, && and ||. Your syntax may vary based on your language of choice. (I shutter to (think (what a LSIP programmer’s (written word()))) would look like(((!))))

I’d make this post funnier, except I have the coding acumen of pre-chewed bubble gum and thus find it hard to weave all but the most rudimentary of syntactical elements into my written communication. My last attempt at learning a programming language involved JavaScript back before the Spice Girls inhaled too much hair spray and and disbanded. Nonetheless, it’s enough of a habit with me that non techies take notice and ask questions.

Bonus points are available if you’ve used operators in hand-written communication. Immediately subtract said bonus points for hand-writing anything bigger than a post-it note since IT people do not ever partake in analog written communication that takes more than 20 seconds to create. This kind of post-it does not count.

Some might say that including logical operators in your writing might confuse those that are less fortunate in their understanding of computer science. I say they’re more like a barrier to friendships that should never be forged in the first place. If your new “friend” can’t understand this…

Ill go to the movies with you if
(
(newServerDeployment.Successful) &&
!(arriveHome.catVomitedOnCarpet)
)
||
(friendPaysFor.Everything)

…then maybe you shouldn’t be friends at all. No matter how pretty they are. Well… wait a minute. Heather, are you reading this? If !( Heather.hasBoyfriend), I’ll go to the movies with you. Can you pick me up? I spent my car fund on a new i7 CPU and 4 GTX 295s.

(Funnier syntactical elements in conversation are encouraged to be shared in the comments.)

Buy a sysadmin the most comfortable desk chair in the world with a remote control and magic fingers in it, but it still can’t compete. Purchase a replica Star Ship Enterprise captain’s chair for your head software developer and it won’t quite capture the highest place in his heart. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like ::1. We want to work from home. Besides, wherever you bought that captains chair replica, it will never compare in authenticity to the one that your chief software dev already built for himself the last time he took two weeks of vacation.

The primary motivating factor for working from home is because of one of the things IT people love to hate. Namely, you. Yes, you Mr. “QA needs that report we never told you to develop last week but will insist that we did,” as well as you Mrs. “I need you to be in on this production automation meeting to gather some specs for the new application we’ll demand that you build using disparate specifications conjured up by four committees who’s last accomplishment was designing the Ford Edsel.”

We just want to work in peace. We like to work and want to accomplish things. Working from home once in a while helps us do just that. Of course, not all working environments allow working from home. In one environment that I’m familiar with, it would have been perfectly fine for IT staffers to work from home… but the executives knew that the engineers would want to work from home too. Said engineers could not be trusted to refrain from playing Everquest all day, so to keep peace and prevent a finger pointing conflagration, the entire company had a no-work-from-home policy. Thanks engineers! One more reason why I randomly redirect your http requests to kittenwar.com.

Of course IT workers never abuse their time at home. We choose Halo over Everquest every time. No really, concentration is a precious thing and its hard to give the proper amount of concentration to such important things like tracking down replication issues on our SAN or implementing a fail-over system for the major database servers. They’re ticklish projects that, if done well, can save the company untold dollar amounts or even prevent a complete closure in the case of a disaster. Simply put: the projects won’t get done right if we’re getting stopped every 15 minutes with relatively inane requests. Give us at least one day a week to work from home (more if there’s a major project being worked on) and you’ll never regret it.

Although, it has to be said, we’re not too good to gloat about our flexible work conditions to those that slave in less generous work environments. “Hello Marcel, Pardon me if I giggle… it always tickles a little while my wife massages my feet on the deck sitting next to my pool sipping on lemonade. What are YOU doing right now in the cold, cold server room in front of a KVM console with an OCD boss watching you through the security cameras? Tee hee!”

In parting, let me speak to the fearless leaders of our places of employment. Dear execu-manage-leader-member-tators: Let us work from home. It benefits everyone involved, most of all our Halo team member… I mean, most of all you. Let the engineers gripe and fume. That hurts no one. No rly. If you allow us to work in the comfort of our own home offices, maybe… just maybe… the engineers will never again have to choose between the cuteness of FudgeBits versus Commodore cuddle Pants. Dare to dream!

In the IT universe, “they” are the antimatter to the effeciency freaks’ matter (you can read about people who like KISSing in my last SITPL episode). “They” are the people who inject needless complexity into everything they touch. Only it’s not needless – at least in their minds. “They” need complexity to fulfill their lives. “They” are not happy unless they’re complaining about how hard it is to use magnetized needles to code their own memory management schemes for the DB2 servers. “They” rationalize the three layers of firewalls that each utilize port knocking rules which when graphed out looks like a player piano’s music sheet for Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto.

Who are “they”? “They” are that special breed of IT people that other IT people love to hate. Something like a cross between a ferrett, Barney Fife and a chansaw with a few heeping portions of OCD and passive agression thrown in for kicks. Typically, in my experience, the demographic that falls in this category is the older set. “Older” of course means anyone that can’t tell the difference between the red pill and the blue pill. Anyone old enough to have memorized 8085 opcodes (and if you even knew that 8085 wasn’t a typo for 8086, you might be close). Anyone old enough to have been around when ASM was a high level language.

Of course, age is not the only determining factor, but in my experience it seems to be a significant part of the equation. Other factors include but are not limited to obsessive compulsive disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, extreme insecurity and a desire to learn spoken languages that only exist in science fiction.

At the core of the issue, there are two types of anti-KISSers. Those who rationalize it and those who don’t. Those who rationalize it might give varying degrees of assent to the notion that they’re “solutions” are a bit mirey. However they tend to justify their actions using euphamisms like “creative”, “resourceful” and “job security”. Job security is admittedly a compelling argument. It’s hard to fire someone when only 4 living humans know enough about ADA to maintin the custom SMTP server that the SysAdmin built… who incidentally is working hard on killing those last three people.

And who can honestly deny a man or woman the particularly intense gratification of creating a beowulf cluster from a few hundred abacuses? “Wait, no one can do that! It’s against the basic laws of science!” Oh yeah? Let me introduce you to Mel, our DBA, who majored in comptuer science right after he came back from three tours in Vietnam with a black belt in “Get-outa-my-face!”

Those who don’t rationalize their complexity are the ones who are completely unaware that there is anything out of line with coordinating 500 client backups with tar* and self modifying python scripts implementing a tower of hanoi scheme on fourteen-hundred 8-track tapes written to with a Decca solid state 8-track recorder. They also don’t see any problem with documenting the process in Klingon and deeply resent any notions to the contrary. Sujatlh ‘e’ yImev and naDevvo’ yIghoS! Dor-sho-gha!

To be perfectly honest, I can’t deny the fact that it’s fun (in a demented way) to pretend you’re MacGuyver and use pinecones and fruit striped gum to get Microsoft Dynamics to consume FoxPro files and make it all be visible through a frankenstein Quatro Pro 6 spreadsheet running on the CFO’s Windows 95 machine.

And this is certainly not a knock against those admins who really do only have pinecones and fruit striped gum to work with. This is a frustrated satire against those who, knowingly or not, manage to make things harder than they have to be. Just KISS IT you fools!

The end result of not KISSing is always the same: Death. The death of work weeks involving less than 50 hours of work. The death of untold weekends. The death of unclaimed vacation time. Possibly the death of a career. Even the death of a life. Yes, my life. Why? Because I’m going to have a heart attack if Mel… yes, you Mel… doesn’t stop manually issuing SCSI commands to the disk controllers to synchronize the rotational speeds of our SAN disks to coincide with the aphelion and perihelion of the earth just to theoretically save 28 kilojoules of heat expenditure per year. Mel, are you listening to me?!

Okay. I’ll get out of your face. Just put the Qutluch down. *sigh*

*Note to the ungeeky: this tar, not that tar.

Let’s be honest. Everyone is jealous of us IT folks if for no other reason than we have access to the server room. It’s important, mysterious and powerful; everything that we wish was true of us (instead of just being ignored, marginalized and pasty). If there are any windows looking into your server room, you will see a fresh set of greasy face and fingerprints on it each day because people can’t help themselves when they see pretty patch cables and blinken lichten. If you notice any other greasy body parts have been pressed against it, call security immediately.

IT people like the server room for the impenetrable sense of solace which comes from a room that needs a key card or a Ford F350 traveling at highway speeds to get into. When the pressures of userland get to be too much for us, we can always sit in the cool isle, sip a Red Bull and plug straight into the OC-24 line to play Halo 3 on our favorite team server.

Oh sure, if the Halon/FM-250 dumps then we’ve got roughly 24 seconds to save our game and bequeath our level 80 WoW character to our nearest kin, but that’s what shell scripts are for, right? I’ve had nightmares about being locked inside the server room just like that Brady Bunch episode where the kids get locked in Sam’s meat locker and only Bobby was small enough to wiggle through a broken window on the door. It’s for that very reason that I bribe a child from the corporate daycare center to sit behind the Catalyst 9000 with a hammer and wait for my signal. I just hope no one asks where all the graham cracker crumbs are coming from.

Speaking of food in the server room, there’s no better place to have an IT picnic than in a sealed room where the accounting department can’t infiltrate. Because, if they did manage to get inside we’d have to explain how twenty-two large triple-meat pizzas for only 9 people is a business expense. And we’d have to turn in our receipts before we could attempt to tamper with the line items… namely that item involving two rolls of quarters from the cashier to play Q*Bert with.

All this server room love gets an epic ice bath when we discover that members of the executive team have access. Does the CEO really need to get into this room? The same man who swore that it was our wireless network interfering with the remote controls for his 40 inch flat screen TV mounted above his desk does not need to be in the same room with the database servers (hint: remotes need batteries to work). He shouldn’t be in the same room with a Furby.

Even worse is when members of the building maintenance crew have access. CEOs are trouble enough, but they don’t usually carry screwdrivers or reciprocating saws. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before we reverse engineer security’s keycard system and lock everyone but us out. Then we’ll retreat to our icy depths and begin our long awaited takeover.

I hope security will let Pizza Hut deliver.

Since “good artists copy and great artists steal” then I’m destined for a couple of pyramids built in my honor. Why? Because I’m going to totally rip off the likes of such blogs as “Stuff White People Like” and “Stuff Christians Like” with my own twisted take on things. Behold, “Stuff IT People Like”.

Over the next several Fridays I’ll be releasing a few of the bizarre rantings that I’ve scribbled down concerning us IT folks and our idiosyncrasies. They are full of gross generalizations, oversimplifications, regionalisms and total insanity. In other words it’s just like reading an SAP marketing brochure only hopefully involving fewer migraines and no homicidal urges.

I’m sure you will agree with me, disagree with me, laugh a little, cry a little and flame me a lot in the comments because of how wrong I am… because we all know how IT people like to be right (yes, that’s probably going to be an upcoming post).

These “Stuff IT People Like” (SITPL) posts tend to focus on the administrator / help desk / operations manager role. I am not delving too deeply into developer humor because, well, my experience with development involves a summer using Metrowerks CodeWarrior on  Mac OS 7.6. If anyone wants to contribute developer posts let me know. I certainly include developers under the larger heading of “IT People” and I know developers like stuff just as much as SysAdmins and help deskers. Of course, it would be even more awesome if someone decided to rip me off and start a “Stuff Developers Like” blog.

Stuff IT People Like. The SysAdmin blogosphere might never be the same… even though it probably will be.