Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Down the rabbit hole.

Not to be confused with the 80s band.
So some army dude out at the Patriot missile site called up Network Management and was like "Yo, man.  there's some beepin' comin' from the thang thang out there by the tower with all the wires from a black box.  Two air force guys came out earlier and replaced something in the thang thang and it's still beepin'."

The NETMAN guy, SrA Johnson (named changed to protect the person's identity), bewildered, was like "what's a thang thang?"  Eventually he figured out that it was the UPS that was beeping.  An UPS is basically a battery backup for electronic equipment and when the batteries run low it usually emits high pitched beeping that drives everyone in the building crazy.

Johnson tells the army guy to call our CFP (the equivalent to a helpdesk), and the CFP was like "why did you tell him to call us?  This is a CE issue."  So CFP just creates the ticket and sends it to NETMAN to deal with it.  Johnson gets the work ticket and transfers it to my shop with no annotation.  So when I get it i'm like "what the hell?"  so I annotated it by typing in under "work info", "this is not a CST issue.  this isn't even a comm issue.  have the user call CE." and I transferred it back to NETMAN.

Johnson got the ticket, thought about it, and then transferred it straight back to me with no annotations.  So I transferred it back to him with a note that said "see last update."  A few minutes later, the ticket shows up AGAIN from Johnson with no annotation. Irate, I called up NETMAN.

"Johnson."
"Sir?"
"What the fuck."
"uh..."
"UPS batteries running low is NOT a comm issue.  It's a CE issue.  Have the user call CE and put in a ticket."
"Got it."
"Never send this ticket back to me again."
"Yes sir."

and then I hung up.  It was pretty close to awesome.  Or at the very least, amusing.  To me, anyway.

3 comments:

  1. so me and robyn had this brief discussion about your comment. I think she's less confused than I am because she knows actor-network-acting-actress theory and I don't.

    The farthest I got using google was a $70 book on amazon (that looked very interesting).

    ReplyDelete
  2. it's an awesome book and i think you'd like it! i downloaded the kindle version for the free mac app. but i'll look out for a cheap copy if you're interested. i thought your blog post was really compelling in light of thinking about a network of people/things that have political motivations and the stories those elements tell :)

    ReplyDelete