Ugh, that is dumb. Someone needs a smacking with a big ole halibut for that. To be honest, an exact copy of the error code is usually enough.
It’ll come next week in an email, or a letter from her lawyer or something:
“See, the actual way to fire someone is to TAKE THEM OUT TO LUNCH, and while you have them out of the office, you have their desk cleaned out for them, and have IT come take over ownership of their computer files. So, I’m suing you for the cost of lunch at the most expensive restaurant in the city, plus $100,000 for the emotional distress I had to feel while I drove home ON AN EMPTY STOMACH!”
There is no good reason why the error message shouldn’t be selected for C&P. I have to admit that sometimes I can’t read my own writing, and if I don’t KNOW what I’ve written down, then I might misread it. Yes, I am a user who wants to know what the error message is, because if I ask for tech support, the support person will appreciate the information.
You mean they make it so you can’t do alt/prt sc and paste it into your email? I’ve never seen that. I have to save these things for my test engineers all the time when they give us new automated tests, and not being able to get a screenshot would drive us all nuts.
Yeah I’m kind of waiting to see if another shoe will drop.
So. I promised a dramatic story, and here it is. A couple of years we hired a very pleasant but non-too-bright older woman. When I say “older” I mean “older than me” so don’t get up in arms - she was 50.
Our job - fundraising, community events, etc. - is not exactly hard but it is very fast-paced and you have to keep on top of everything. Plus everything has to be documented, data has to be kept, everything has to be logged.
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She couldn’t handle the fundraising aspect. Someone said on a conference call she needed to have X amount of sponsorship dollars in by Y date. Thing is, they were in a big Metro city and their X amount of sponsorship was probably 3 times our requirement. We told her this time and time again but it stressed her out incredibly, and she would never listen to us. She’d work all week and then work on the weekends, too, trying to raise this enormous amount of money - money that was almost our whole budget.
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She couldn’t handle the data. She was terrible at Excel. Now most people who have come into this office don’t have the proficiency at Excel that is needed. That’s all right, I do, and I pride myself on being a pretty good teacher, and I’ve taught lots of people. This woman, no way. She couldn’t handle doing a simple expense report. I would tell her over and over again. She would write it down. I would write it down. Without fail, she’d lose the instructions, or she’d forget, or whatever.
In short, she was eminently unsuited for the job and it was clear the job was stressing her out enormously.
So. Time comes when my boss decides to fire her. She takes her in the office, does the deed. Out comes the woman and goes flying into her office, sobbing.
She then, instead of just getting her stuff and crying in the car, proceeds to call everyone she knows - her sister, her friend, whatever, sobbing loudly the whole time, telling them they were fired. My boss comes out, sees she is still here, and tells her she needs to leave. She’s still crying. I mean, like full on racking sobs, snot, tears…
oops got a meeting. I’ll finish this later.
Screenshots are OK, but sometimes it’s helpful to send just the text of the error message, so its nice to be able to highlight the text, Ctrl-C to Copy and Ctrl-V to paste the text in the body of the email. Some error messages make it impossible to copy the text this way.
I’m currently being treated to a loud conversion between two of my co-workers regarding the virtues of “whoopin’ a dog’s ass” to teach it proper discipline. :rolleyes:
Many messages that appear not to support this will still copy if you click on the dialog, do Ctrl-C and then Ctrl-V into your document.
Your friendly neighbourhood support rep.
Guys, you’re giving me flashbacks to the asshole who kept insisting that the screen didn’t say anything. 8-10 minutes later, only after threatening to disconnect the call and being very irate with him (all of which would have gone bad for me if my management had been listening), did he actually READ THE FUCKING SCREEN TO ME.
As God is my witness, I wanted to kill that fucker.
I need a TRIGGER WARNING on this sort of stuff. <whimper>
Our computer systems have been down all morning. Nobody knows why. Several people from IT have come over to try various things on people’s machines, but nothing has worked, and most workarounds have caused more problems than we had in the first place.
We’re a tech company.
I am about to deliver a good old-fashioned mountain beatdown on the new guy. He has managed to rile up both my Irish and my German and that is a Very Bad Thing.
This guy, we’ll call him “Daisy,” (short for lackadaisical) was hired about two-three months ago. He has managed to piss everyone off in that short amount of time. At first I could pass it off as, “He’s new; it takes a while to get used to the way things run around here and it’s a busy time of year.” Nope. He’s just a clueless idiot.
I thought The Ferret (not our Ferret) was bad about running around, but this guy’s worse. The Ferret mainly moves back and forth behind the desk. Sure, she gets into my personal space bubble more often than I’m comfortable with, but she does move when I say something. Daisy straight up disappears and then I see him in the lobby scrubbing something that the P.A. (public area) guy already cleaned that morning. He goes into the little shop next to the desk and starts restocking. That is also not his job; it is the manager on duty’s job. When he does stay behind the desk, he sneaks off around the corner and starts texting. He claims he’s bored. I claim he’d be less bored if he actually did his damn job.
I fussed about this to Detailed AGM who told him to quit cleaning the lobby. He did, for the most part, but he will still sneak around when no one’s looking and start fussing with things. All of this is being noted by all three managers: Big Boss, Detailed AGM and Squirrel AGM.
Now yesterday is when he got me all the way riled up. Daisy breezes in about ten minutes before his shift and goes in the back to clock in. He’s back there for a while and comes up to the desk. He goes over to the computer I’m not on and starts scribbling. I’m checking in a guest, so I don’t really see what he’s doing. I get done, point out a few things that will be passed on to the next shift, take off my jacket, and get ready to go. “Oh wait,” he says, “I haven’t clocked in yet.” He shows me his blank time card, neatly colored at the top.*
I give a great sigh of frustration as he skitters around to the break room to clock in, put my jacket back on, and express my frustration in a very mild yet irritated manner. Squirrel AGM and Big Boss are both sitting right there and saw the whole thing. They both remained silent, but I could see the incident being filed away in their minds. When Daisy skitters back up front, I finally get to clock out and leave.
I know there’s a Come to Jesus meeting with the managers in Daisy’s future. The sooner the better because there might be a Come to Jesus meeting with him and me and a couple of my other co-workers that he’s pissing off before that. I have to work with him tomorrow and I’m going to make it very clear to him that he needs to stay his ass by his computer and not abandon me because we are going to be *slammed *tomorrow afternoon.
*A lot of us, me included, color the tops of our time cards so we can find them in the pile easily. The rest of us manage to color them without inconveniencing others.
Not as annoying a problem, but you just reminded me that it was several years before someone from IT told me that they can’t see the subject field on the emails that we send them. Apparently they don’t get them as emails; the emails are automatically inserted into a scheduling program and they access our requests through that.
So I stopped summarizing my request in the subject field and then giving only added details in the body of the email. I was a good thing to finally know.
Oh, you did that on purpose!
And it’s working.
Indeed - it’s like a serial drama!
I don’t mean to! It’s just been one of those days. I haven’t gotten much done because my grandboss was in the office and wanted to have a huge meeting, then a favorite volunteer came in and we talked to him for a while, and then I had to go pick up my car from the shop…
etc.
Anyway. Where was I? So she’s crying and crying and crying. Now in those days our office was what we called a “fishbowl” - that is, you could see into every office because the whole front wall was glass. You couldn’t see people’s monitors, because they faced away from the glass, but you could see everything else.
So we could see this woman crying and sobbing, like I said, full-on snotfest. My boss is kind of at a loss now. Boss says she will have to call security (note: We don’t have any security. I guess “security” would be the 80 YO building superintendent. We’d have to call the cops.) Woman cries some more. Now she’s older than my boss, too - so boss is made even more awkard and uncomfortable!
Finally the whole office is so awkward that my boss squares her shoulders, marches in there with a box, and starts packing her shit for her. As she’s packing the woman is hitching with sobs, trying to get some words out, and my boss just has this grim look on her face as she continues packing her stuff. The boss is like “Is this yours? Is this yours? Is this yours?”
Finally she gets all of her stuff packed and walks it to the door and places it on the floor outside the door. She then goes in and says, gently, “You really have to leave now. If you don’t leave, I will have to call building security to escort you out.” (Well, she doesn’t know we don’t have any security.)
Taking the tissue box in her office (which is OURS, btw!) she slowly shambles to the door, utterly broken and spent. I don’t even know how to tell her goodbye now - everything is so awkward. She kind of randomly waves at me, and floats out the door in a sea of her own tears. Taking her box o’ stuff with her.
An exhausting day for all of us. Boss took the rest of us out to lunch.
This job…this job is a not-for-profit job. It doesn’t pay that much. I can only imagine she had never been fired from a job before, ever.
I’ve never heard the expression “grandboss” before. Boss of a boss? A previous boss?
Boss’s boss. I got it from this site, it made so much sense to me I started using it.
“I’m getting zero records returned from a query. Is the system down?”
No, you stupid bint. If the system was down you’d get an error message. You’re getting zero records returned because there is no actual data in that table.
So we get a email yesterday telling us, the students, that the school, you know, the nice people that we pay THOUSANDS to every three months, has decided to cap our printing at 214 pages a quarter, and charge us past that.
And how do they propose to do this? They have added a keypad device to each printer, that somehow interfaces with it to ding our account. Mind you, the MENSA students in MIS have yet to get Blackboard reliably working with IE. Yet they have time to waste with this.
The kindest comments on this I have heard on this is “horrified” and “disgusted”–and those came from some of the professors–the student comments were unprintable.
Thank the gods that I will be off campus for the next six months, then out of here. What next, charging for toilet paper?
SELECT * FROM tblUsers WHERE Clue > 0
0 Rows Returned
When you exceed 12 sheets.
Best part was where I pointed out that it was a test environment and may not contain all of the production data, and the user got angry with me because he knew that. (looks at list of filters, looks at user… :dubious:)
Owner of that particular data mart told me they had emptied that table in order to test a new load procedure. Yeah, that sort of things happens IN TEST ENVIRONMENTS.
Moral of the story being that only complete morons try to pull data from test systems to do their non-testing related jobs.