f13.net

So, I came across a handful of ...art (?) from my GoDaddy Days. Rather, about 6 months in, I started drawing customers in MS Paint because the job was so easy I could be on total cruise control. Most of the dialogue is real, and jesus, ugh, I hated that place. By the way, if you were wondering, THIS IS WHAT TECH SUPPORT IS LIKE. Anyone who says otherwise is a filthy liar.

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/email_fucking_disappears.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/errant_clicker.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/jesus_saves.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/the_devil.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/imail.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/IMPORTANT_GUY.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/headshot.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/lawnmower_man.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/old_man.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/no_number.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/lonely.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/bandaged.jpg)

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/godaddy/calling_from_the_road.jpg)

When schild turns into a rampaging serial killer after Nintendo releases the "Zii" in 2014 *still* without proper HDTV-support people will look back on these images and bemoan the fact that they didn't heed the warning signs at the time :awesome_for_real:

Good stuff.

My job:

ME: Click here for the infos.
USER: Where are teh infos, on TV u said tehy would be on teh website. Liars. Im never watching ur network again.
FWD: I asked you on Friday to put the infos on the website, where are they?
ME: On the website.
FWD's BOSS: I am told by FWD that you have failed us yet again. Fix this.
ME: The infos are where it says "click here for the infos".
FWD: Can we change that to "click here to get infos"?

Great stuff, made me laugh.

Yay, finally my turn to post this:

(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y259/SundarkSoldier/FACEPALM.jpg)

There should totally be a Picard face-palm stuck in there.

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................./......................................................,:`^`..}
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............./__.(.....“~-,_..............................,:`........../
.........../(_....”~,_........“~,_....................,:`........_/
..........{.._$;_......”=,_.......“-,_.......,.-~-,},.~”;/....}
...........((.....*~_.......”=-._......“;,,./`..../”............../
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............/.`~,......`-...............................\....../\
.............\`~.*-,.....................................|,./.....\,__
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.....................................`=-,...................,%`>--==``
........................................_\..........._,-%.......`\.

(http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii220/ghoti_21/facepalm.gif)

Playing with kittens is all the job I can handle!

Glorious.

Subtract 50 IQ points from each caller and you have my experience at Nintendo summed up perfectly. I honestly was amazed some of those people could figure out how to dial the phone.

I love how schild's drawings become more harried and frenetically-drawn with each panel.

Working in a coffee shop is almost the same. Almost.

No no! They didn't become more crazy. I always tried to have them finished by the time I was off the phone. So I had to rush because my average call time was 6 minutes. That means some could take 30 minutes and some take 30 seconds. Six minutes is exceptional btw, if I were to wave my tech support e-peen.

GoDaddy is the same people behind secureserver.net right? Shittiest email blacklisters ever. They're made of fail.

Best feature - if you get blacklisted by them, you can't email their support department to discuss the issue, because they use their own blacklist even for the group that is in charge of taking people off of it.  :awesome_for_real:

But their wimmen folk are stroppy.

Uhm. Not even. They use spamhaus. They can't really do anything because they literally can't really do anything. At the same time, all it takes is a button press. Problem is, GoDaddy is vindictive.

But then, f13 has been run off of godaddy for years and you know how many problems we've had? Basically zero. None that were their fault at least. Knowing people on the inside helps though.

I had thought SecureServer was GoDaddy, but maybe not. We had a big problem with a trade org related to our company that hosts a site with them and with their email getting blacklisted, and all the support addresses you were supposed to followup with were @secureserver.net.

Secureserver.net is godaddy. Doesn't mean they directly decide who gets shut down for spam and blacklisting. And yes, you're supposed to go to unblock.secureserver.net.

Point being, if you have a support group that exists at least partially in order to deal with unblocking people, it is pretty monumentally stupid to use addresses that are covered by the very blacklist people are trying to get off of. And yes, you do have to talk to them directly after using the form - I've dealt with them a couple times over this issue and they've sent email asking questions about the info entered on the form at unblock.secureserver.net, from addresses that use the same blacklist for protection. And no, you can't use the form there to reply, as they don't allow repeat entries there.

The entire unblock process is a terrible mess, and frankly, I wish they'd get their shit together on it. Now I see what you're talking about and I'm fully aware. I'll be honest, whenever I got people on the phone that were having that need unblock/have to use blocked email address - well, basically - I'd get you off the phone asap because you weren't worth money - in fact, negative money. I only speak candidly because my job, really, was sales. ^_^

Step 1 is just to realize blacklisting is a shitty way to deal with spam, step 2 is to contract your shit out to Postini or someone like that who knows what they're doing.

Actually Step 1 is get a server and run it yourself. Otherwise you're just pissing in the wind.

I want to use one of those for my avatar.

Go for it.

(http://yogan.meinungsverstaerker.de/fun/why_is_this_man_smiling.jpg)

Call Center work will make you lose all faith in humanity.  Its pretty funny training people up and watching them turn into bitter introverted people within the first 6 months.   :grin:

Well, I was bitter going in. Knowing it was a commission based job, I had one concern. Sell as much as humanly possible.

My crowning achievement? I sold over $15k in platinum registration (now called protected registration) (https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/protect/landing.asp?ci=9004) in 3 days. To one guy. Not kidding. If that's not enough to rattle your bones, I don't know what is. It's basically unheard of. Sure there are folks who buy 30-50k in new domains. But domains aren't worth jack to tech support. Sure, there's a bit of prestige in a big sale? But at the end of the day, it was about the paycheck. Always.

Memories. Dial-up tech support here at one point. Not to be insensitive but here goes anyway.

A bad day for me was trying to setup an "hearing impaired" person through a 3rd party onto the internet. I had to give up after two hours.  Would of been great if I could do it, but some things are best done in person. :ye_gods:

I got a call from my secretary today saying that a woman had called the office with what sounded like a virus, and did I want to take the service call?  Well, it happened that she was only ten minutes away from where I already was, so despite the relatively late hour of the business day, I swung by to take a look.  Upon arrival, I find two XP machines (yay, better than 98s), one running McAfee (ugh), sharing one phone cable for dial-up AOL (double ugh) and a toddler (shit).  "My webpages don't load on the desktop." is the reported problem.  So I sit down and start plucking spyware out of the computers.

While I'm doing this, the toddler blunders over to my toolbox and starts trying to open it.  This isn't a matter of concern for me; it's a beefy plastic monstrosity with really secure clasps, so he really doesn't have a prayer of getting it open.  As long as he doesn't manage to get it open and look like he's going to stab my screwdriver into his eye, I'm not gonna bring it up, 'cause it's safest to ignore pets and children when in somebody's home.

But mom notices his actions, runs over and grabs him.  "Don't touch his stuff!" she admonishes the kid.  She puts him back down, and he immediately turns back to my toolbox.  Thus began two hours of hell.

Step 1. Child comes to toolbox.
Step 2. Mother runs over, grabs child, tells him to leave toolbox alone.
Step 3. Ten seconds pass.
Step 4. Child comes back to toolbox.
Step 5. Mother runs over, grabs child, smacks child, tells him, "This is the last time."
Step 6. Child, obviously not getting it, laughs and runs back for toolbox.
Step 7. Mother re-grabs child, re-smacks child.
Step 8. Child shrieks like banshee for a solid minute.
Step 9. Goto 1.

It's like the kid's memory was resetting every thirty seconds; he was clearly not catching on, trapped in a short and stupid rendition of Groundhog Day.  Now add to this a backdrop of an absence of air conditioning on a 95-degree day, and soap operas and reality shows on the TV in the room.

Meanwhile, it turns out that mom's un-loading websites were actually the Java games on one of those vaguely-crappy free game websites.  Thanks to the unimaginable speed that only AOL dialup can provide, I wind up downloading the Java installer on my phone to load on a memory card so I can actually get the thing on her computer.  Games load, problem solved, get money, escape hellish home.

It almost ranks up there with the woman who called for help after hours one day.  I told her that there was an additional fee involved for same-day service that late in the evening, what the service call would likely cost, and that if she didn't want the extra fee, I could come out the next morning to take care of it.  She said it needed to be done that night, so I agreed, got in the car and headed towards her house.  Halfway there, I get a call.

"Hi, you just got a call from my mom about a virus, and she said that there were all these extra fees, and we just don't think it's reasonable." (This is a grown guy's voice, not like a little kid despite the 'mom'.  'Mom' didn't sound elderly or anything, so guessing in his 20s.)
"Uh... huh.  Well, I explained the costs to your mother, and she agreed to them."
"Well, you can still come tonight, but we're not paying extra for it."  (Oh, how generous, allowing me to come fix their computer.)
"I'm sorry to hear that."  (Already pulling the car over and turning around.)
"So are you coming tonight?"
"No."
"Oh.  Well, what time can you come tomorrow?"
"I'm afraid we can't help you.  I suggest you try the Geek Squad; you'll love their prices."

Not that corporate customers are any better.  There is nothing worse than finding that the person in charge of a company's IT projects (ie, my liaison) is an imbecile.  When they're your point of contact with a company, telling them that they're incompetent doesn't usually get good results.

"I was installing service pack 3 on Mary's computer, and it looked like it was frozen, so I rebooted it and now it won't start."
"Well, you destroyed her operating system.  Good work."
"What, are you serious?"
"Yeah.  That thing on her screen about not turning off the computer during the install wasn't there for looks."
"Well, what can you do about it?"
"Reinstall the whole thing."
"But she needs her computer working!"

This from their 'IT Manager'.  Always a pleasure.  This is a guy who bit the 'Mac vs. PC' ads hook, line, and sinker, and keeps buying Macs to replace PC workstations.  Which would be dandy, except for Leopard's giant swath of flaws at connecting to Active Directory domains, which left all of those employees disconnected for the months it took Apple to patch the problems away.  And the fact that the company's financial software was written for MS-DOS and refuses to run under emulation, requiring that they keep PC workstations running for everyone anyways.

God I love my field.  Seriously, I think that if I stopped eating food, I could continue to exist solely on the schadenfreude.

Why do you go to people's houses if you have a secretary?  Why don't you just send the secretary?

Ha!  If she was the least bit competent at computer work, I would.  She's just being paid to keep the shop staffed while I'm out on calls so people can pick up/drop off computers.

She must be very pretty.

If managers were competent at technical work, they would not be managers.

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ (http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/)

The best part of that video is how everyone is an imbecile.  Worst part: chipmunk voices.

I thought the chipmunk voices added a bit of funny to it. Funny is subjective.

I love these threads.

We had a call from a customer with an account with four users on it yesterday. Each user in the software gets their own login, so that they all can use it at once. Each user has seperate tasks, email, etc , in the system.

The lady wants us to change all four usernames and passwords to the same thing, so that they will be easier to remember.

She wants all four logins to be identical...

It took almost five minutes to make her understand the problem with this idea.

I took over 40,000 calls at GoDaddy. if I had drawn every single one, it would take an encyclopedic volume to contain them. I should have. Also, they all could have been drawn. GD caters to the stupid. But then, with the nascar and white trash models, I suppose you knew that.

I don't watch NASCAR now that Dario has been sacked.  I hate Chip Ganassi.  There is still Indy, though, and the angry manliness of Danica.

I have no clue what you're talking about. Racing is a bullshit sport.

I'm not extremely technical or a network whiz, but I know just enough to be dangerous. The problem I've found in every version of business that I've worked in is that the IT department usually knows what they are doing, but they are the shittiest communicators on the face of the earth. They just assume that changes made to the system or the email don't need to be communicated to the staff, and then when something goes wrong because of it, everyone gets pissy.

Also, people never delete emails. It's ridiculously uncanny. Our email server was constantly overloaded because people had email from 2 years ago. Seriously, it's not tax information, it's email.

No.  God no.  But she'll work for the relatively small amount I can pay her, and she's not lazy and incompetent compared to everyone else who applied.  And if you've ever tried to hire basic office staff, you'll know just what horrifying dregs of humanity arrive for the position.

lol I managed the network for an office of 25 people with 60gig of mail on our exchange server.... err well I suppose if it had 60 gig of mail you couldn't really say I "managed" it but anyhoo I was the guy they called when shit broke. 

On top of the 60 on our server I archived the owners stuff to pst once a year, he had an aditional 10gig of his own stuff stored that way.

I have well over 2 GBs worth of .pst files from the six years I have worked for this company.  At least I dump them off of the exchange server and in to pst's.

My favorite conversation from my time at godaddy:


Me: What web browser are you using?
Woman: Oh, I have The Googles!

(she was, like many people, typing her urls into the google search bar and wondering why her site didn't show up)

The Googles. Sounds like a disease where all your web browsing turns into GIS Goatsex pics.

And you never know when it's going to bite you in the ass that you deleted something.  I worked with a guy who had 8 banker boxes full of old printed-out memos and telephone logs.  His e-mail was just as full and it was common knowledge he did this - hell it was a bit of an office joke.  People STILL tried to pawn shit off as his fault or his decision or would ask "what stupid asshole decided we should move that door in the first place?"   He'd go back to his files, pull out the info and point out to the Division President or the Builder or whatever other random asshole causing problem that they or someone higher than them said to do it.   :uhrr:  (This was common for all divisions, but he was the only guy who kept track of his shit.)

I have emails going back a decade. Just sayin.

Various cases come up where I've been asked to put something on a website, for which my parent publication or TV network ends up getting sued or pursued by media watchdogs and I am named in the case. Apart from minimising my risk by not using certain stories, I can't know what it's going to be, so I delete only big file attachments, spam, press releases and emails from the audience. In a workplace that enforces a 300Mb maximum on mailbox sizes and refuses to give me any more space. I'm reduced to picking low-risk people and deleting all email from them.

Ha, our limit is 85mb.  Some people have 5 different PSTs FTW.

Oh, I got Lemon Partied once too.  Some web designer had a falling out with the owner of the website so he locked the server and the site was a redirect to lemon party.

Another guy tried to get GoDaddy to sponsor his bass fishing boat...

Yes, well there's a difference there. If it's important you print it out and file it away. Big decisions, big memos, major orders, yadda yadda. Accountants do that all the time with almost all of their information. The joke is that you can't take a dump as a public accountant unless you document it. Still, I deleted all email that was a year old. That's your time frame.

The technophile's question to you is: Why print it out when you can keep it indexed, sorted and at the end of a quick 'search' command while taking up 0 'real' space if its still saved digitally?

Because concrete documents can't be wiped out by server failures, errors, viruses, and other common technical hoo-hah. They can be burned or lost, and that's about it.

Everything is savable, everything is possible to be lost.  Much easier to keep multiple physical storage devices for files than it is to have to file everything in boxes and move around.  Our company's policy is "everything older than 6 months must be deleted legally!" but I have email back to the day I started (years ago).  It's only 5GB of data, but I store it on my computer and on the local multi-TB file server.  I delete useless shit like jokes and duplicates, but I have every bone-headed decision I and anyone else I communicated with stored away for future reference.  And yes, I have gone back to 2004 and 2005 and referenced schematics and drawings from a much older revision and hunted down schedules and dates that were promised and reneged on with a comment of "we never said that!"

Text takes up so little space that it's easier to keep it forever than it is to decide what to delete.  All my email for the past 10 years or so is only a few gigs, and most of that is old attachments that I would throw out if the storage they took up cost more than what is literally pocket change.  I keep one copy on my current desktop PC (it gets moved from machine to machine when I upgrade) and another copy on a cheap external drive.  In another 10 years I have no doubt that I'll be able to fit it all on a $5 thumbdrive or its futuristic equivalent.

Disk space is cheap.

I worked for Palm Inc. about 8 years ago. Once I had a dude call in and ask what the Azimuth of our satellite was... I replied "Um... I don't think we have a satellite..."

He apparently thought we beamed emails into his palm via our orbital space platform and his $60 handheld would pick them up for him. He was very upset when he found out he actually needed a computer to sync the emails over. I told him to go buy a blackberry... he said "But those are like $500" Satellites are expensive... I didn't bother explaining the whole cell tower thing. Jackass.

I bothered a tech support guy tonight.

My personal website (and email redirection) got suspended because my credit card details have changed, I'd forgotten my password for the hosting provider's system, and my email address had changed so I couldn't get a password reminder. Phoning them is not practical because I'm in Australia and they're in the US.

So I decided to open an email-only account with my old ISP, re-creating the old email address. Sales (outsourced) didn't understand, so passed me to tech support (in-house). They still had my details and to finish the job, he wanted to email me @ my domain. But that was suspended ... so I told him my tale of woe and why I was setting up the account.

I could hear him drawing.

I was working on a staff computer, some email issue. I had her log into her email and there were no messages or subfolders. "That's odd," I said, "Have you been able to see your email today?" "Oh yes," she replied, "I printed one out." "Well, they seem to be gone now." "I only needed the one I printed out." Turns out she prints out important emails and keeps them in her file cabinets and deletes everything, she has zero email on the server. I did explain to her how the email server is backed up, how little space text takes up, and how email is indexed for searching. Eh, some people, they funny.

I'm in the camp of stripping attachments and keeping everything else. I do delete most stuff like ads or meaningless conversations.

I don't understand this.  I keep the meaningless conversations.  Every now and then I'll go looking for something and come across some long dialogue I had with a forgotten friend or girl-friend.

I have email going back about 12 years now, most of my life is touched on in there.  Moves, people, jobs, happenings, events, pcitures and etc...  It costs me nothing to save it, actually it is easier to save it than it is to remove it.

Yup I've saved all my email as well. I've got email messages stored away that are "older" than many of you :awesome_for_real:

I don't have long and meaningless dialogues :)

Me either, not in email anyway. Sure talking on the phone, maybe. Still, saying email from the times of YORE will always seem packrattish to me.

can also be shredded! archiving every last bit of your email can also work against you in court.

Keeping your email around is great if it is actually useful, my boss had 15 gig of email and yet I quite often got the old "Can you forward me back that email I sent you a month ago, I can't seem to locate it in my sent items".  So if yer too lazy to index it or too stupid to do an advanced search for it, then it is pretty much useless.

There is also a huge difference between managing your own PST's and expecting your exchange administrator to manage your mail.  I was always leary of turning on autoarchive because I knew the end users would hit the 2gb limit pretty fast and dork their file.  By the time M$ upped the limit (20 gig now?) we were already doing things another way.

When I worked in corporate settings, I printed critical emails and took them home for storage in manila file folder(s).

If there is a conflict and a higher ranking employee puts the screws to you, those electronic emails go poof from the system. And your only recourse will be those printouts (with message headers) showing culpability with the company, not you.

It might even net you a settlement package.

Only if you have totally corrupt email admins. And you can end up in jail for that sort of thing, as our email admin if I got a request like that from anyone I'd be going straight to the head of HR. (I haven't decided for sure what I would do if the request came *from* the head of HR but our CEO is a pretty stand up guy so he'd probably be next.)

Even if emails are not deleted, you could be walked out the door and your account erased and you would not have access to those emails even if they are still on the server.

And perhaps SOX and other recent legislation has altered this behavior, but I recall when working for a major charge card company, where employees were instructed to delete all emails regarding a given topic (in one case it was Y2K but there were other instances also regarding third party vendors and potential liability).

SOX et. al. does have a lot to do with it, I think, yeah, but so does the march of technology. Every year it gets a little harder to totally hide your tracks in a corporate system.

If you ever *are* in a situation like that, make sure your lawyer works on getting the email backups subpoenaed (or discovered, or whatever the term is) along with everything else. In most environments it might be easy to disappear everything off of the server, but going back and disappearing it off of every single backup tape that it might appear on is another matter entirely.

Even Mario Kart?

still work there

gotten worse

want to kill

everyone

abandon internet

sign off

If the company you worked for pulled that shit after SOX compliance was mandated, you can make a lot of money as a whistle blower.