I feel like I'm about four inches from losing it.
Why only four inches? I don't know. it seemed like a short distance, and my temper fuse is far shorter than that, I can tell you. All day it has been the same thing:
«I»plz hlp sory engis bahd servant is down why?«/I»
I can count the number of proper English speakers I've dealt with today on one finger. The rest have all been outside the country, all struggling to understand technology that by default does not come in their native language and our hardware folks are by no means inclined to offer true multinational support. So we deal with the language barriers as best we can, mostly with me running off to translate via Babelfish or the customer telling me that his server is in the air and would I kindly tell him why?
I'm just tired of it today. Normally I don't have a problem. Perhaps it was the frantic calls of "pls pls pls fix my server", and the iterations of shortand SMS-speak for "please" and "help" serve nothing but to grate on my already raw and exposed nerves.
Then I get a slew of people who have, to put it mildly, broke things on their own. When this happens, I'll give it the ol' college try...after all, I am technical support for dedicated servers and it may be in my power to reverse the damage. Sometimes I can do it. Other times, well, when you delete vast portions of the filesystem and change ownership of /var and /home to uucp, RECURSIVELY, I am not so inclined to assist and will recommend the entire filesystem be wiped and replaced with a fresh copy. Alas, this is akin to saying "let me take your grandparents and feed them to bears and wolves" for some, because their data was so precious and important to the continued spinning of the Earth that no backups were ever made.
Why is that? I've got some stuff on this here blog that would irk me if it suddenly went away, but I've got copies of it and my annoyance would extend only to the time needed to recreate things and upload the visuals. If it's important, I have a copy. if it's really important, I make two copies. If my life depends on it, I sure as hell don't leave it sitting on a computer five thousand miles away.
One time, I got this guy calling in a complete snit, ready to litigate. He tells me his boss is a MAJOR MEDIA PRODUCER and that the past year of his life has been spent making this server ready for a MAJOR MEDIA PRODUCTION. And now, something has gone wrong, something has spiralled off into tnto hyperspace and the server does not work anymore...and what's worse, the thing that has got his ire, is that someone had the temerity to login as root on that system to troubleshoot the problem and fix it. Yes, his major objection was that superuser corrected the problem, which is called normal behavior to some, but to him was a major security breach. On top of that, in making the webserver function again, the original tech had the moxie to just leave the webserver running...which was intolerable.
Intolerable! And he let me know it! Oh, he wanted my name, the name of the tech, the name of the pet goat we no doubt tortured in the morning before coming in to work to further ruin people's lives in such a cavalier fashion. I let him rant like this for some minutes, and politely told him that if he felt the need to litigate, then I'm not going to be able to help him further, and he can go fly a kite or something. After all, I'm not the one who has staked his career on a machine a thousand miles away he's never touched or seen.
He calmed down after that. I explained to him in no uncertain terms that loggin in as root is a common occurance to troubleshoot problems. Yes, when you are the superuser, all data is available to you for viewing, but please, we do this all the time, NONE of us give a rat fuck about your data. Two thirds of our customers are in the web pornography business, and the resulting ennui for what might be in /var/www/html/membersonly/hotpr0nstars has rendered us apathetic to what stupid bytes might reside on your drive platters. None. Of. Us. Care. So, I assure you that when we examine an issue, we aren't smuggling data off your server for corporate espionage.
AND EVEN IF WE WERE...what kind of idiot stakes his company's future on some rented crap in a datacenter five states away? If you've sunk millions into a project, what's the harm in colocating, or even better, getting a dedicated line of some sort and running your own server in your own shop? I find it hard to believe that somoene would drop wads of cash in to a project and yet balk at spending a few hundred a month on services to put it online. Is the CEO going to see all this money spent and then bitch that you didn't spend $89 a month for unmanaged dedicated rack service? Please.
I got his firewall working again. I personally disable his webserver so that nobody could pull up his secret webpages, as if there was a battalion of people hitting refresh every day to see if his IP address suddenly became active. Once I had demonstrated that my personal competence exceeded his own by serveral orders of magnatude, he settled down and became almost groveling, wanting to swap horror stories, the nature of which were pathetic by my standards, the equivelent of pissing on your shoe because you were reading graffitti on the bathroom wall.
His account notes feature a somewhat unflattering description of his ancestry now, courtesy of me.
Oh, how I look forward to true corporate America again! Give me a large multinational, or a startup that could use a competent systems administrator who knows how to make things run on a shoestring budget, I don't care. I can wear the suit or the clown shoes, all I need is an office, a laptop, and the means to do my job. Release me from purgatory!
Resumes are available on request.