Tales of the Stupid

shockme on 2002-08-30T22:06:21

So, before I leave the office last night, I'm on the telephone with a guy on the west coast. He provides support for one the applications running on two of our servers. The app is broken, and I'm giving him a run down of the log files. During the conversation, I make it abundantly clear that we (my work group) have made absolutely no changes to the server. None. He tells me not to worry about it, that he'll check it out and take care of it. I head home.

This morning, what do I spy in my Inbox but an email from him stating:

Well whatever upgrade or configuration change occured 8-28 - 8-29 on the [machine name] machine has it DOWN. I cannot figure out what that is. [My application] is up an (sic) working.

Basically, whatever the problem is, it's not his doing. It's mine. I don't care about email like this one, because it's the typical reaction from external "support" personnel. What really set me off was

  1. I had already told him that we had made no changes to the server. None.
  2. He CC'd the affected customers (my customers) on the email
PRICK.

My boss chewed him a new one. As mad as I was, by the time my boss got through with him, I was almost embarassed.

The problem turned out to be a corrupted configuration file. His configuration file. The one his application uses.

Heheh.

My $family{wife} and I are going to dinner tonight. Just the two of us. It's gonna be a little piece of heaven. I'm gonna drink like a fish ...