Gobbledy-speak, special Vice Presidential Candidate edition.

“Condoleezza Rice, of course, having worked on this strategy for quite some time, I have faith in her that they’re making this wise decision and North Korea, of course, better live up to its end of the bargain there, in speaking with the other countries whom they’ve been working with, in promising the verification. That end of the bargain has got to be lived up to.”

We’re used to breaking out the user-English dictionary to translate what our users are trying to say versus what they are saying, but - like Dan Quayle - Sarah Palin is in a league of her own.

Client: Email for my sites is not working. I try to log in and it just says invalid password over and over.

Us, after checking: Your account is currently deactivated as you have multiple unpaid invoices. You can log in to the billing system at (link) with (login).

Client: How could they be inactive when all the invoices are paid?

What we didn’t say: well, genius, that would be because you just now paid all your unpaid invoices after we told you that was the reason, wouldn’t it? It isn’t like those are not timestamped like everything else around here.

Us: The account has been reactivated.

Client: My contact form isn’t working and it says to contact you.

Strike one: Your form is generating an internal server error when it is submitted, and says to contact the webmaster. Last I checked, that was not us. You know, since we don’t do that sort of thing.

Us: Your mailer script had incorrect permissions. We reset them to the correct permissions.

Client (a bit later): Now when you submit the form it says that I have to add mydomain.com to the referers. What does that mean?

Strike two: You tossed a script up, but didn’t bother to read the very clear instructions at the top that say to put your domain name in a certain line so the script knows your domain has permission to access it.

Us: It means that the referers line does not contain your domain name. We added both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com, based on the one you listed in the domain field here in the ticket.

Client (a bit later): When I submit the form now, it says that the domain myotherdomain.com has to be added to the referers. What does that mean?

Strike three! Maybe you should have listed the actual domain you’re using with this, rather than some random domain from your collection.

Us: It means the same thing as the last one: the domain has to be added to the referers line as it states in the instructions at the top of the script. Domain added.

Unsaid: We would force you to go do this yourself, but that would just mean more idiotic questions and you’d probably also screw up the permissions and/or everything else we just did. We added it. Go away now.

I used to tell my techs not to go immediately for the most exotic underlying cause when someone reported a problem. Just as a doctor should not immediately diagnose a brain tumor from a headache, a tech should not diagnose an email profile corruption issue when the error says “incorrect username or password”.

We have dedicated server clients who sometimes cannot understand that taking the time to eliminate the easy items is not only highly efficient - I am a huge fan of efficiency because it means more time slacking off at work for me - but takes a lot less time to resolve if it does wind up being one of the easy things. As an added bonus, it gets them out of my helpdesk, too. Everyone wins, but I win more, and who doesn’t want that?

Today, from our desk…

Client: I keep seeing ratelimit entries in the logs. Why would that be?

Us: Well, the most common reason would be that you actually have ratelimiting logging enabled and also have the ratelimit hosts setting enabled.

Client: Exim keeps failing over and over, too, and even while we’re sending out mail from our scripts. Why would that be?

Us: Any number of reasons, but the most common would be…that exim is failing over and over because the system detects no available connections (because all avaialble are in use) and restarts the process for that reason.

Client: But our script only uses one connection at a time.

What we wated to say: Yes. And do you suppose the many thousands of items that you’re sending out just wait patiently, one by one, or do you suppose that exim is capable of handling multiple item processing simultaneously, pushing out mail must more efficiently (there’s that word again) by utilizing multiple sockets.

Us: It isn’t just a matter of outbound mail. Inbound mail also uses those very same sockets. Every time you send something from your lists, or unfreeze the queue, and as long as you’re accepting inbound mail, you’re using more than one socket at a time.

Client, some time later: We found that the process monitor that we put in was killing off the exim process and that coincided directly with the restart notes in the logs. So, it wasn’t ratelimiting or the system check after all.

OK. Was that particular bit on a need to know basis or something? Do you think it might have been somewhat helpful for you to note that an unrelated third application that can directly affect other applications was running on the server? Because that, dear client, would have been one of those “easy things” that could have solved this quite some time ago, by either raising the process monitor threshold for exim, or eliminating it altogether.

Or is that also too easy?

…being taught all about the proper use of punctuation. Even when the topic was new (think grade school level), remembering that  a “comma is where you would take a breath if you were talking” and “a period is where you would stop” wasn’t that difficult a thing.

Some people apaprently missed those cozy little lessons way back when and continued to miss them throughout their entire lives. Otherwise, we would not receive tickets like this.

“oh my god i deleted a database that runs my forums and it had all my members in it and now most of the members are gone because my tech guy removed them from the table and can you restore from maybe the 23rd because i dont want to lose 9 years worth of work and my tech says you can put the database back and if you don’t have a backup i might cry”

Punctuation, motherfucker! Do you know any?

In everyday life, certainly at some point everyone encounters someone with the same runon abilities as our correspondent here. I’d say it’s more likely to be the verbal equivalent of that, and from my days on the phone at AOHell, I can guarantee that anyone who has ever worked tech for even a little slice of time will know this to be true. This sort of thing is obviously not restricted to the tech world, of course. In fact, even with this verbal diarrhea, you, too, could potentially be nominated to be the Vice President of the USA.

“Everything is going well and I’m out here in Arizona getting some fresh air even as we are studying up and reading a lot of voting records and realizing how extremely liberal the other ticket is so this is a good time to be here and I so look forward to tomorrow night getting to speak to Americans about the very, very clear choice they are going to have on November 4th.”

Client: “I can’t log in to the system and I’m using myemail@mydomain.net”

Tech: “That isn’t your login. Use “myemail@mydomain.com” instead, as that’s what you submitted to the system.”

Client: “I’ve been writing for help for 24 hours now and no one helps me and I tried to log in as myemail@mydomain.net and it told me invalid email address. I’m probably doing something wrong but I have three accounts here and if you don’t fix this I’m taking all of them somewhere else.”

Tech: “There are no other tickets from you under this email address in the helpdesk, and someone is responding to you: me. Your login is “myemail@mydomain.COM”. If you continue to type .net, you’re not going to be able to log in.”

So, you’re doing something wrong, and you’re going to punish us by canceling an account. Makes sense, in an alternate reality sort of way.

Selective hearing. It isn’t just for kids trying to avoid taking out the trash.

It’s been awhile.

In 1997, while toiling away at AOHell - long days that will live in infamy - once upon a time I created this site as an organizer of sorts of the kinds of questions we would get from users as they unwrapped that nice shiny computer they received for their birthday/christmas/whatever and immediately decided that since AOL was on the desktop, by George they were going to sign on. Those were heady days indeed.

Yes, things spiraled out of control from there, which is where tech support came in.

At first, back in the olden days, the site was coded using notepad and manually updated. After a couple of years, the site switched over to PostNuke. Eventually, given other duties, and a general burnout on telling tales about people who were lucky enough to be able to turn on a light without electrocuting themselves, the desire to keep the site maintained trickled off. In 2006, the site was finally shut down for good, with a farewell message.

Lately, though, I’ve been feeling that urge again. You know the one. The one where you really want to tell stories about your job, but you can’t do that on your normal site for any number of reasons. It’s been long enough without anything on this site, though, and ther is just so much a tech can take before his or her head explodes from the sheer stupidity exhibited by a select group of people on a daily basis.

So join me, won’t you, in some diversion from all the other things going on in the world.

See you soon.