More work rage.
So this week has been busy as fuck. My tech support coworker has been on a week's vacation, so most/all of tech support has fallen to me.
And that just so happened to coincide with a massive move of one of our customer's database and software infrastructure across the world to another server cluster entirely, that I was informed I'd be totally responsible for the implementation of about Wednesday of the week prior, after having been involved in exactly nothing up to that point.
So this week I've been working with the IT staff of a Fortune 500 company, the staff of which is based in Brazil while the servers are in Sweden. The customers in question are in the US. Just digest the mental map of that network a minute.
And I've been deploying our software, the backend and the data to three servers simultaneously. The email chain includes 5 people besides me and is over 70 correspondences now. They schedule web meeting at one time and then call me and send me emails an hour early asking "Are you coming?!?!?" All while I'm handling regular tech support as well.
And these guys.......don't have a clue. First off, they completely ignored our sever spec sheet so the DB VM is running on 4 gigs of memory instead of 16. They opened exactly zero ports we asked for so all our shit fails to dial outside to our update servers, our own servers or the internet in general. The production server is so slow it took a WAMP installer 15 goddamn minutes to run. On the other two servers? 45 seconds. It took over 30 minutes to import their data to the production server, when it was done in a minute on the other two. This is the VM that will host an entire business and it's a giant steaming pile of shit, because they didn't read the spec sheet we sent them, claimed they never got it, even though my project manager has now sent it to all of them 7 times a piece. I'm not shitting you.
And the one person I need to talk to the most, their system administrator, is a short-tempered (heh) control freak who would only allow me to start my initial work on the servers using a screen share application and saddling me with a 45 minute deadline before he cuts me off. I had to fight for a Remote Desktop Account so I could remote into the servers and do my work without 4 people breathing down my neck in a conference.
And this guy still is not in the email chains. He's been only on the initial conference call where it became clear his way of doing things wasn't going to fucking work. Yet he's the authority for a) opening the ports we need b) increasing the memory to the server c) administrating the remotely operated Antivirus protection that is undoubtedly killing the connection that our client will use to connect to the DB and do their jobs and d) generally the person who actually knows what the fuck is going on.
Meanwhile, on the conference call today, I calmly explain this to the rest of the IT staff: the project manager, the other project manager, the guy who has boots on the ground doing installs.......and I get dead silence. After almost a minute I ask "So do you think we can make (all this bullshit) happen?" And I get more silence. No one has a fucking clue what's going on. They keep mouthing words "Oh well we tested on the dev server and it worked just fine." Of course it worked fine you fucking jack-a-ninny, you're inside your own goddamn network! Yet we, who are signed into your corporate VPN, using a fucking keyfaub to generate a secure access code, are still locked out! For the purposes of this test, you can consider our experience to be identical to the experience the clients who are about to go live in a week will have!That's the definition of a goddamn problem! FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKK.
And this is a Fortune 500 company. For god's sake, 3 years ago I was even more of a neophyte to real tech than I am now and you fucking people work for a goddamn Fortune 500 Company, and I'm making you look like you're fucking retarded! That should be a sign you're seriously fucked up. If they can succeed being this incompetent, how far could we go being even semi-competent!