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Journal heliocentric's Journal: A life update, been too busy really, thus this will be short 16

Journal by heliocentric

Ok, so to sum up in one of those executive summary things:

I gots me a new jorb working for Sun Microsystems.

If you want to reach me at work, my email address is the pride and joy of the job:

I'm simply god at sun dot com.

That's right, I'm god.

You got a problem with that?

Didn't think so.

I spent last week up at the Sun campus in Burlington, MA. If it wasn't for the high cost of living in that area, and the rumor that 250 people got laid off in buidling 3 last week, I'd want to move up there in a heart-beat.

I'll post a few pix of me doing nerdly things (mostly along the lines of "Look what I caught" photos, only replace the marlin with a Sun [insert large number] server). Probably tomorrow during work if I get bored, which is rare.

Yeah, I guess one could say that this is heaven given my name here and all, and sadly this is the kind of job where I could easily become a work-a-holic (I already go in at 6:30AM now and stay until 5PM, pretty much being pushed out by my manger by that point, only to ponder at 8PM if I went back to work what more could I get done).

I was hoping to come into this job to learn a lot of Sun things, to be the low man on the rank of UNIX weenies. I'm sad to report I'm the technical person everyone now goes to in the group with questions. I had a week of training, and I honestly think I was more qualified than the instructor for that course. That's been the most depressing thing: to get to work for the company I held so high to find out the people there (at least the ones I deal with) aren't who I thought they were. I'm sure the good ones are around somewhere, I just haven't found what rock to look under yet. I really want to get some training in some other things, hopefully I can get approval to get that stuff (the training I got was forced stuff, decided before I was even hired that I would do, couldn't get out of it, teacher did a fine job for the subject, it just wasn't a good subject for me at this time).

Well, one customer of Sun did put me in my place when he sent me a scathing email proclaiming his genius to my idiocy. At one point he did appologize when I pointed out to him the gigantic flaw in his entire design of "logic." * But that was quickly followed up with more calling me an idiot and complaining how poorly educated Sun people are. Ahhhh, put in my place again. I should post that email, it's true genius in action.

Ever notice how the people who are so quick to talk up their expereince, to tell you they used to work for [your company] and blah blah blah really are idiots? Yeah, I just love to let them continue to tell me they are high and mighty and at carefully planned times subtly point out that the empreror has no clothes. Idiocy I can handle, in fact sometimes I aprecate it when presented with honesty as compared to the other way true idiocy presents itself: arrogance. Idiocy coupled with arrogance is a joyous marriage. I'll be the first person to tell you what I don't know, but I'll never tell you what you don't know. Deal?

Well, I'm going to get some rest to get to work bright and early tomorrow. Look for my handy work on future sunsolve docs.

* - This genius apparently calls into the Sun Helpdesk all the time (I researched him after he went off on me), I got him because he called in about a known bug report involving adding drives to a particular type of storage array. I suggested he run some commands to work around the problem (these commands were listed in the sun solve bug report), and his responce was that they wouldn't work. Not that they didn't, just that they wouldn't. He never did run the commands as this supposed machine wasn't put together yet. I then asked for some more specifics about his setup to anticipate anything unique he perhaps hadn't told me to this point that could infere with the info I gave him, when I quickly learned that the hardware he had was infact something other than what was listed for this bug. Sort of the automotive equivalent of "Hey, I heard there's this problem with distributors in V8 cars..." "Sir, you have to find top dead center..." "No, that won't work..." "Okay, open your hood and tell me what you see" "I see something that says 'Dodge Neon'" "Umm, sir, you have a neon, that's not a V8, this problem doesn't apply to you." He still insisted I tell him the commands that would solve the problem. Sort of like "Well, okay, fine, so I have a neon, how do I change the distributor for the V8." At this point I suggested perhaps a course from Sun Education Services might do him a little good. My job isn't teaching customers how to make their happy little arrays. I know that in reading that line there it sounds like I was being arrogant, but really it was said as a suggestion for furthering the use of Sun tools and other nice ways of putting it. Trust me, I can have tact when I want to. This guy was a real piece of work, getting far enough with help desk people pretending he knew what he was talking about and not even attempting the suggestions I made. I noticed after I pointed out he didn't even have a system capable of doing what he initially wanted he called the Sun helpdesk again and opened another case for the same issue. (He wanted to create a RAID array using drives of different sizes in a 1+0 format, using a device that only has no controller, well, he thought he had another storage device that had an extra controller and had a bug, but he didn't).

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A life update, been too busy really, thus this will be short More

A life update, been too busy really, thus this will be short

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  • Where are you located now? Didn't know Sun had offices in central PA.
    • I still live in South Central PA (werd, to my homies!). I work close to home (less than 5 minute drive) in a non-descript building. I think it used to be a sears warehouse of some sort perhaps as some of the parking spaces are labeled "Sears."

      (Combining South Central and Sun lingo:

      "You down with OBP?"

      "Yeah, you know me!" )
  • How'd you manage to get 'god' as your email dude?

    Re: Arrogant, know-nothing customers - I have dealt with a few of those in the past. There is no telling some people, but with much patience (not to mention scads of tact) you can at least deal with them to some degree. The problem is, these days I have less and less patience for people like that.
    • How'd you manage to get 'god' as your email dude?

      Honestly, no one has even issued me my login ID and password yet. I've just been using finger to find information about myself, then figuring out the passwords. Once in, there is an online page where we can setup aliases for our email. I grabbed quite a few good ones, including rm-rf, heliocentric, zimwiz, etc... I even got thefirstname.thelastname of a certain famous kernel developer, I'm thinking of using that to start an interesting rumor.
  • . . . I guess that makes Sun heliocentric-centric.

    OTOH, if Sun revolves around you, then you're not really heliocentric anymore, are you?
  • god at sun dot com Does this mean that you don't believe in yourself?

    *rimshot*

    Cheers,

    Ethelred

  • Keep me in on the inside track wit Java, d00d!
  • My Sun contact is a useless FUCK who thinks an MBean is a Message driven bean! ACK!
  • how many of the idiots geeks have to deal with are really just geeks working outside their own area of expertise.
    • I honestly think my true area of expertise is trains, specifically Reading T-1s, but I hardly see any ads in the paper like "Wanted: Train nut to recite information about trains on an as-needed basis. Benefits include trips to ride trains."
      • i wasn't thinking about you or the guy that pissed you off. i was just thinking about how often people complain about tech support and how often tech support complains about users.

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