The scenario: Working with one of our biggest vendors on the product that all of our techs (and several of our big clients) use every day on an annoying bug related to virus alert generation, I had to nudge our rep this morning because it’d been a week since any activity took place on the ticket other than a note that “this has been escalated to a feature specialist, you should receive an update shortly.”

By the by, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve received that bit of tech support boilerplate then I could afford to take both of my girlfriends out to a very nice dinner, each. I’m in the habit lately of updating tickets solely to ask, “Is it SHORTLY yet?”

Anyway. Our rep emailed back to say that he’d escalated us to the head of support, and that if I didn’t get some kind of response by the end of the day, I should notify him. Okay, great. I hate feeling like I have to play the squeaky wheel game, but at this point I just want the situation resolved. (For the curious: The antivirus system is detecting a false-positive “virus” file and generating two alerts into the system every two minutes for that lone file. We have to clear out thousands of alerts every day from the file… which, of course, I’ve left in place so the tech support guys can look at it!)

Ten minutes ago I took a phone call from their support staff. No, he wasn’t on the phone to help me with the problem. He called to tell me that someone’s looking into the problem and that I’ll receive an update via email when things are resolved.

Well then.

So, I was contacted “by the end of the day,” considering that they’re on East Coast time and it’s coming up on 5pm there. Mission Accomplished. On the other hand… I just received the verbal equivalent of the email boilerplate!

Do you ever get the feeling that you were being placated… badly?

Most of my workdays are rather frustrating. I’m usually juggling three or four “urgent” problems from as many clients while flinging email messages hither and yon and trying to manage the ticket board and make note of system alerts from the managed services platform and, you know, try not to tear my hair out on account of any or all of the aforementioned tasks. The fact that I don’t like having to switch mental gears frequently, something I’m usually required to do all day, does not help one bit.

Thanks, most likely, to the impending holiday weekend, the pace has been nicely quiet and I’ve been engaged in an unusual activity: getting things done. I deployed new monitoring configurations to our clients’ servers. I performed cleanup on our main virtual machine system in anticipation of a demo install on Tuesday. I configured backups on a client’s server which hasn’t enjoyed reliable backups in… well, let’s call it “far too long” and leave it at that, shall we? During all of this I also reconfigured the offsite backup replication for this server, and checked a few of the anti-spam configurations.

All that, and my new laptop is almost ready for use. Today is indeed one of the better workdays I’ve enjoyed in a long time. That doesn’t stop me from looking forward to a few days off, of course…

This evening, I boarded the Sternwheeler Rose and spent a couple of hours out on the Willamette. I wasn’t alone, mind you. Tonight was the company summer party so the boss and his family were there, as were most of my fellow employees, some of their friends and family, and then there was Kyla and I. We ate, drank, and lounged around while we meandered up and down the river.

I even managed to behave myself: When I waved at the Entercom Portland building, I used all of my fingers.

Perhaps I’m something of a dorky guy, but one of my favorite parts of the evening was going under some of the bridges and spotting details you can’t really discern from above, or at least wouldn’t ordinarily pay attention to. Hey, we get our enjoyment from wherever we can, right?

At any rate, the food and company and accommodations and weather were all excellent. Bravo.

I love our managed services platform-of-choice, Kaseya. It allows me to run complex scripts, remote control machines in a number of ways, and generally stay on top of all the fiddly bits involved in keeping disparate groups of machines in peak condition. Because computers take everything literally, however, sometimes you get “critical” alerts like: “The amount of installed RAM on Machine X has changed from 3327MBytes to 3326MBytes.”

Someone stole one megabyte of RAM! Quick, to the Batmobile! (Or, maybe not.)

Then again, sometimes the best platform in the world can’t save you from the vagaries of the server vendor. Take HP (please! ha ha) and their instructions for monitoring drive failure. “Watch for Event ID 1214,” they say, and then when the drive fails the actual logged error shows up with Event ID 1202. It’s not even that their instructions are wholly incorrect, as the last time a drive failed it did use the “correct” ID. Unfortunately, last night’s drive failure at one of our biggest clients used the “wrong” ID.

Guess who looks bad when we “drop the ball” in such a fashion, eh? Oh, I’ve fixed that one. Now I just have to wonder how many other little traps are waiting to spring…

The “DST 2007″ fallout isn’t quite as bad as I originally feared, but I’m not completely out of the woods. For instance, there are all of those Outlook recurring appointments to help people straighten out. The stunner, though, is that for some reason certain copies of Windows XP selected the wrong Pacific time zone when they received the DST update patch. What used to be “GMT-08:00 Pacific Time (US & Canada); Tijuana” is now “GMT-08:00 Pacific Time (US & Canada)” and “GMT-08:00 Tijuana, Baja California”.

Spiffy. Guess who gets to figure out how to find and squash this particular dilemma? Sure, it’s not a difficult problem to fix on an individual machine, but try scripting the fix across hundreds of client machines in a variety of environments without breaking something else in the process. My efforts aren’t helped by a (possible) bug in our managed services platform which is preventing me from checking the value of a Windows registry string.

Of course, thanks to the DST change itself, I’m handling all of this after getting up at what felt like four-thirty in the morning. I’ve had worse Mondays, I suppose…

I didn’t know that working across the street from a car wash could constitute a health hazard, but this morning I’m being proved wrong. It’s all thanks to this:

Apparently the car wash is having a pre-Spring cleaning of some sort, and that truck is involved. If you haven’t had the “pleasure,” imagine someone humming one note in the low-tenor range right behind your head at very high volume for about two solid hours. There’s plenty enough subsonic activity to set the skull to throbbing, which means I’m in the process of growing a right fine headache. And here I am with no pain meds and no way to escape.

Lovely.

Happy gaudy heart-shaped decorations day.

EDIT: It’s amusing when one of the most famous companies operating today screws up their “trademark” custom logo for the day…

For some reason that makes me feel better. This probably indicates that I’m a bad person.