Had an awful day today, yet another meeting set up to address unnecessary meetings >

What really grinds your gears in networking? Could do with a laugh!

Feces rolls downhill.

If there is an application problem don't troubleshoot the application itself - blame it on the database to which it connects.

If there is a DB issue don't troubleshoot the DB - blame it on the OS/Hardware on which the DB is loaded.

If there is an OS issue don't troubleshoot the OS/hardware - blame it on the network.

Actually I'm a SysAdmin so I do actually review OS/hardware setups and logs any time a ticket comes my way but on occasion I do have to send a query to the Network engineers asking what they are seeing and often enough they'll say nothing. They are funny in that even when they do acknowledge there is an issue they'll say "but that is the way it is supposed to work" before changing settings to prevent the issue.

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Thinking of funny things reminded me of this common story:

A man drifting in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. Reducing altitude, he spotted a guy on the ground and descended to shouting range. "Excuse me, sir," he shouted. "Can you help me? I promised a friend would meet him a half hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below responded: "Yes. You're in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field, between 40 and 42 degrees North Latitude, and 58 and 60 degrees West Longitude."

"You must be an engineer," responded the balloonist.

"I am," said the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the balloonist, "everything you've told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost."

Whereupon the man on the ground responded, "You must be a manager."

"That I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you're going. You've made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is, you're in the exact same position you were before we met, but now it's somehow my fault!"

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Now That's funny...I'm a lowly manager for an engineering firm (nothing to do with computers) and my favorite days are when I have 3 or 4 engineers scratching there heads, saying, "Well, that's a problem....how would you do it???"

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That is very funny!! Sums up working with middle management! What is the stupidest query you've ever had to fix? I once had someone ask me to fix her network connection, only to realise the lead had been plugged out the whole time!

The example in #3 is sometimes known as the 'Microsoft helicopter' joke. You have to make the following substitutions (with or without the use of sed):

• the balloon becomes a helicopter
• the engineer is in a Microsoft complex, presumed a Microsoft engineering employee
• the pilot of the helicopter is in fog and is trying to find an airport
• 'you are directly above the centre of the earth, flying at 40 feet, and in fog'
• 'everything that you have told me is correct, but could not possibly be of use to me, so this must be a Microsoft building'
• the last couple of lines are optional
• the helicopter, having confirmed its co-ords flies off and presumably lands successfully

Some of my favorites:
Once a Human Resources Director called me because here PC "wasn't working". When I went to check it out she told me she had turned it off and on several times (*cringe*) to no avail. I asked her to show me what she had done - she reached up and turned the monitor off then turned it back on. I reached to the side of the PC and turned on the power switch there and it booted up immediately.

At a support center where we worked with hotel software/hardware we once got a call: "The TV on the kitchen table isn't working." We explained that we were a computer support desk and didn't support home electronics. After further discussion it turned out that the "TV" was actually the console for the main computer - the live in manager kept it on her kitchen table in her apartment.

At that same place we had a chain of sites that ran SCO Xenix on AT&T 286 systems with 5 1/4" floppy drives used for daily backups. We once had to have a site restore a recent backup so got them started and told them that as each floppy completed they would be prompted to put the next one in and should continue to do so until done. About 5 minutes later we got a call back: "I kept putting the floppies in like you said but it doesn't seem like it will hold more than 3 even if I force it."

The people that thought the mouse was a foot pedal like old sewing machines used to have.

A cow-orker who once wrote up a document on how to install Sybase along with patches and fixes to get a new system to the same level as an existing system. She neglected to actually put the base Sybase package itself in the instructions and was surprised later when I told her it wasn't there then blamed me for not following the "clear" instructions. (This same woman later infamously asked another coworker if we ran Production on the systems that were our main Production servers.)