yaleman.org

One of the guys at work referred to the large hadron collider as “the big kaleidoscope” today and thus the large hardon kaleidoscope meme was born.

One of my earliest fault reports from this morning…

Description: user’s outlook wasn’t synchronising because user refused to follow instructions in error message and sync errors repeated every 20 seconds

Impact: no new mail and deleted items getting loaded up with sync errors

Cause: user didn’t read error messages and follow instructions

Sigh.

Update: Not five minutes after I posted the first one…

user’s mailbox is way over its limit – advised to clear it up and will stop getting messages saying it’s full. user claims to have received email saying his account would be closed – but had deleted it and cleared it (and only it) from the deleted items. over 50MB of other stuff in deleted items however. advised if gets message like this to NOT delete it before calling us.

Why?

Well, I should have known better than to have trusted all those in the chain that my contract paperwork had to go through in order to go from a temporary employee to the comfort of a permanent role. Of course once I had made the assumption that all would go well, it did not. Instead of attaching my paperwork along with some others, it lay forgotten in the digital wasteland that is an Executive Assistant’s computer and did not reach the appropriate people to get me paid.

Of course, the people that it was destined to reach are a government-run outsourced nightmare of bureaucracy and stupidity so I thought it would be them at first. Alas, they had not received the paperwork so it was most likely to be a fault on our end.

The complete lack of information on who to call and talk to in this place is just mind boggling. I had to ask two different people before I could find the wrong person that just happened to know who the paperwork had gone.

They had to call me back because there was much walking and discussing to happen. I’m sure there’s Tolkien-esque paragraphs I could write about the rage that boiled inside me.  I won’t, I hate Tolkien.

I will say that I was physically twitching and feeling decidedly unwell with rage. And lo, it was solved! I got a call from RR, the wonderfully sweet young lady that is the Executive Assistant to someone incredibly important far up the chain. As the fires of anger raged within my gut, my heart and mind were instantly calmed. I can’t explain it, I couldn’t yell at such a Nice Young Lady. Her sweet voice was the music to the beast within.

As it stands, I got paid enough to pay rent and have splash cash, and I should have the rest by the end of the week. Sigh.