It’s been that kind of week. I can demonstrate by detailing my most successful support ticket so far. Note that it’s halfway through Thursday by this point, and this is the highlight by far:

Tuesday: Ticket assigned. Contacted software vendor, found that the IP address they were given to configure their firewall rule for our client was off… by two entire quads. The first and third quads in the IP address were correct, the second and fourth weren’t even close. Gave the vendor the correct address, told them to contact me if problems persisted.

Wednesday: No contact from client or vendor. Good!

Thursday: Mid-morning, decided to close the ticket. Not five minutes later, the vendor emailed to say that they’re still getting the same error. Cue facepalm. Figured out the permissions needed for the user to run the program & save files successfully (note that up to this point, we were never given or shown the actual error message), used a command line utility to remedy, problem solved, client’s happy. Closed ticket for the second time this morning.

Everything else I’ve worked on this week has gone much worse. And the less said about unresponsive product vendors who can’t read what we put into the ticket updates, the better. Grr.

Is it the weekend, yet?