THIS..... is a good one. At one of Megacorp's Manufacturing facilities, an employee was let go a few weeks ago. He was a factory floor employee and had left his toolbox and such there. He was called after a few weeks and told to come in and get his tools or they will be sold off. So, he comes back in. He comes through a door by an outside smoking area. This door is not locked. He walks past the HR/Safety person and says "Hi, I am here to get my toolbox" The HR person says "Okay". This ex-employee (who had come in with a beer in his hand when he walked in but, discarded it before he got to the HR office), goes out onto the manufacturing floor, with no escort, and no safety equipment (glasses, steel toed shoes, whatever..). He goes and gets his toolbox. Wheels it to the shipping dock. Then he DIVES off the shipping dock onto the cement floor about 4 or 5 feet below!!!! This all happened 5 days ago and he is still in the hospital. Megacorp has deep pockets and well... I guess this guy needed some money. Now, what makes this even more interesting is, that when a reportable accident happens in a Megacorp facility, the plant manager or whatever has to call the Megacorp CEO and tell him about the accident. Reportable is just about anything. A deep cut requires you to contact your Safety person and fill out some forms. Megacorp's upper management does take safety seriously. What the hell is this plant manager going to say to the CEO about this one?
More inane stuff from Megacorp today. I was informed that cans of compressed air are against company policy because they are a combustible. You know what these are right.... the little cans with the air that shoots out the plastic tube? You use to clean the dust and graham cracker crumbs out of your keyboard and such. The can's of air they sell at OfficeMax and such for like $4? Well, according to Megacorp's rules, you are not to have any of these on the premesis because they are combstible. Combustible? What about all these fils cabinets full of paper? What about all these reams of new paper? Aren't they combustible? I tell ya, if I hold a lighter to a ream of paper and hold another lighter to the can of air, the can of air will not be the first to ignite.
More fun at Megacorp. In their efforts to contain the blaster virus, they turned off some NAT entries in our router. These NAT entries translate our private addresses into Megacorp public addresses. This allows communication between Megacorp's systems and users and our systems and users. Some crap-ass tool they used to test for this RPC bug in windows 2000 showed these NAT addresses as being PC's that were not patched. So, they removed them. DUH! This pretty much cut off our mail system from the rest of the world. Sure, we could send mail to each other but no internet mail was available and no mail to any Megacorp people. It also turned off Megacorp users from accessing our Oracle system and other users from accessing our Citrix apps. Aftre several calls and several hours, things were back to normal, well, sort of a normal similar to how the Manson family was normal.
The US Datacenter seems to think they know how to update the EDI. They have only tried like 4 times and it has been down due to this constant upgrade attempt for like 8 business days. They have finally taken our advice and let the EDI software vendor connect into the HP-UX system and perform the upgrade. This is what we told them to do 8 days ago.
Did I call it or did I call it? The user who was the subject of my last post was awiting at my office door this morning when I came in, wondering why his outlook was all hosed up. I asked if he got my message and he did but, had to connect anyway to check on some important emails. Like, I guess the sentence "do not connect because if your PC is infected, you could infect many other system" did not make the point clear enough. These are the kind of people you just wanna slap. Well, it turned out his system was clean. I applied the necessary patches, but his outlook was still hosed. It appears that Megacorp's mail system has some problems. It was up and down a few times today. Gotta love that Exchange.
Well, here it is, August 15th, one day before this Blaster virus is supposed to delivery it's payload. On August 16th, this blaster virus is supposed to contact the Microsoft Update website and overload it, thus, shutting it down. I have sat in on Numerous conference calls, ran numerous scan programs to make sure all the PC's and servers at my site are up to date and have the correct patches, and they all do. There is one guy I was not able to get ahold of since he was on vacation. I left him and email AND a voicemail asking him NOT to connect to the network or turn his PC on Monday morning until I have checked it for viruses. I went on to say that if his PC is infected, it could infect other PC's on the network. Now, I am betting this guy will not head my advice and connect his system over the weekend or on Monday morning eventhough I asked him not to. This is the kind of guy who asks you a question, and then usually ignores you when you answer it because he is busy thinking up another question. Or, part way through the answer, he interrupts you with another question.
Ahh, a banner day here at Megacorp. First, I had HP come in to replace a defecive DLT autoloader in one of our HP 9000 HP-UX systems. No big deal. It has multiple heads and can write multiple tapes at a time and only 1 drive was faulty so, I was getting a decent, if not complete backup. However, the HP tech showed up at the exact same time there was a conference call between all IT folks within Megacorp and the top Megacorp IT security dude. Well, from what I hear, he was pretty pissed. I guess he spent 30 minutes yelling about this is not a managed network and if it was, it would not be up to local IT people to manually apply these patches and stuff to each workstation to prevent against the w32.blaster virus. Well, maybe if the brain trust that manages the Megacorp systems would have not cut back on IT staff at both the remote facilities and their datacenter, they could have either had enough workers to get these automated patches done right or, had enough people to manually patch each system before the virus spread too much. I guess Megacorp is really having issues with this virus and has been locked out of certain customers networks because PC’s on the Megacorp network can not be trusted. Megacorp has somewhere around 70,000 PC’s worldwide. That’s only the office user type desktop PC. Even they do not know how many are here and there for process control or SPC or QA or whatever. Too bad I missed the call. I would have put the mute button on and had a good laugh. My site has only a couple of people get the virus. One was a visitor from another Megacorp site. When I approached her and asked to check her PC for the virus, she was like “you know, now that you are here, I have been getting this message for a couple of days. Is it important?” DOH!!! Gotta love them users.
Had an idea contest today. People were put into groups to go to stores like Jewel and Sams and Costco and such. The idea was to locate a product and improve it’s packaging by making it more useful or adding a feature or replacing the packaging completely. I work for a packaging company and who better to go out and think up new products than people like me who work in the IT department. After we all came up with an idea or two (or 5 in some cases), we had lunch brought in and presented our ideas to all the other people. Probably 50 people in total. Everyone voted on who’s ideas they liked the best. The other people on my team were 2 other people who are “transitional employees” (meaning, being laid off eventually once the transition is complete”, and one temp. So, our team had 3 people who have been given a date as to when they would no longer be needed and a 4th person who is temp anyway and could be let go at any time. Well, sometimes life is stranger than fiction because we, the temporary team, won this contest. The prize? $25 per person. That’s much better than keeping my job.
EDI is still down. The folks ate the US Datacenter have been trying to install this upgrade for over a week now and even with instructions and the EDI software vendor on the phone, they just can’t get it right. Hope there are no important orders out there. They are restoring the original files again and will try the upgrade again. At least their backup is working
July of 2003 was the worst month in History for what was Smallcorp's core businesses.... EVER!!! Not just in Megacorp history (the last year), but the whole history since the original company was founded. So much for sales goals!! Some bigshot is coming in from NewYork to meet with the management here. Between the corporate controller and the VP of marketing, (each easily making $100,000 per year), the best cost saving idea they could come up with is cutting 2 $30,000 per year jobds. Yeah, that's gonna help make the goal of 550 million in sales for this year.
Urgent message from the upper ranks of Megacorp's datacenter operations and security people. Some PC on their network is hammering all the domain controllers looking for password. Domain controllers are sporadically down and the only thing known about this rogue PC is it’s name, CISCO. No idea what network it is on, what location it is in. With 60,000 Pc’s, this could take awhile to figure out. EDI is still down too.
The datacenter has attemped to upgrade the EDI software on our main system. Back last year this was moved the datacenter because they could manage it better and control it more (well, that's what we were told... a part of datacenter consolidation). The EDI upgrade failed. Our EDI person can not understand a single word either of the two Indian UNIX support people at the datacenter. They don't seem to understand her.
Megacorp's email system goes down due to mimail.mm virus. Yep, gotta love that Excjange/Outlook combination. SmallCorp's UNIX based mail system (The one some other plants that have yet to be converted to Megacorp's mail system are using) was not effected.