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[TheBiggerFish]

Relevant wtf: I am in Germany right now, and apparently, they have a "children's beer", a type of beer designed for the younger market with green and red fruit flavouring and colouring to get kids to drink it, which none of the adults like, presumably as it has way too much sugar in it.

'Children' is the wrong word here, methinks. 'Teenagers' is more like it: Those who are too young for liquor, too young for a properly refined taste; those who just want to get shitfaced and do not yet have the tolerance to make such an endeavor unfeasible with just beer.

Yeah, those drinks are shit, but causing a moral panic over them is completely unnecessary. The kids will grow out of that phase eventually.

BUT ALCOHOL IS TEH EVULS!!!11!!

My school bought a restaurant style electronic billboard to advertise themselves.

They canceled the senior trip for lack of funds.

...Jeez.
I guess, maybe they've been making a loss for some time and the billboard was a last-ditch effort to try and pull themselves out of the slump, but still... are you a senior?

Yup.

This is on top of the whole "secure" password shenanigans I posted about earlier.

You mean the "unsecure" password shenanigans.
But seriously.  I want to facepalm your school's administration.
Apply my palm.
To their faces.
;P

[Calidovi]

Relevant wtf: I am in Germany right now, and apparently, they have a "children's beer", a type of beer designed for the younger market with green and red fruit flavouring and colouring to get kids to drink it, which none of the adults like, presumably as it has way too much sugar in it.

'Children' is the wrong word here, methinks. 'Teenagers' is more like it: Those who are too young for liquor, too young for a properly refined taste; those who just want to get shitfaced and do not yet have the tolerance to make such an endeavor unfeasible with just beer.

Yeah, those drinks are shit, but causing a moral panic over them is completely unnecessary. The kids will grow out of that phase eventually.

BUT ALCOHOL IS TEH EVULS!!!11!!

My school bought a restaurant style electronic billboard to advertise themselves.

They canceled the senior trip for lack of funds.

...Jeez.
I guess, maybe they've been making a loss for some time and the billboard was a last-ditch effort to try and pull themselves out of the slump, but still... are you a senior?

Yup.

This is on top of the whole "secure" password shenanigans I posted about earlier.

You mean the "unsecure" password shenanigans.
But seriously.  I want to facepalm your school's administration.
Apply my palm.
To their faces.
;P

I want to facepalm them too.

With a brick.

[Rolan7]

I want to face palm them.

With a palm.  Tree.

[TheBiggerFish]

Seriously, that school.  Terrible.
Deserves to be told off officially.

[i2amroy]

To be fair the majority of school funds can only be used in one way or another and aren't "transferrable" to a different thing. They might have millions of dollars for new construction money to spend, but they aren't legally allowed to use that for say, field trips or teacher salary if they don't want to do any new construction.

[TheBiggerFish]

My university web class made no effort to tell anyone that there were assignments or that it had started until about sixteen hours before the first four assignments/readings/discussions were due.

"Oh, hi, welcome, by the way, don't forget to do these. And this. And that too. Also this. By the time I'm telling you this, it's too late to go to the bookstore to get the book you need for the discussion on the first chapter. You did listen to these songs, right?"

You'd think an online course would be a little bit better about emailing about this stuff or something. I'm mostly at fault for not paying closer attention to it, I'm sure, but.

Yeah seriously.
Bit much.

[Mechatronic]

To be fair the majority of school funds can only be used in one way or another and aren't "transferrable" to a different thing. They might have millions of dollars for new construction money to spend, but they aren't legally allowed to use that for say, field trips or teacher salary if they don't want to do any new construction.

They could have gone with any of the other construction options that don't make the place look like it is selling pizzas or lap dances, though.

[i2amroy]

To be fair the majority of school funds can only be used in one way or another and aren't "transferrable" to a different thing. They might have millions of dollars for new construction money to spend, but they aren't legally allowed to use that for say, field trips or teacher salary if they don't want to do any new construction.

They could have gone with any of the other construction options that don't make the place look like it is selling pizzas or lap dances, though.

That on the other hand has no excuse other than that the majority of administrators are often "people-focused" people and thus have no right to be designing (or approving designs for) a building.

[LordSlowpoke]

Though admittedly there was that one time where there were about 4 LWs and LSP is strikingly similar 3me

hey horsecock grande, i don't attend irc and if someone claims to be me tell them to fuck off

[Frumple]

They could have gone with any of the other construction options that don't make the place look like it is selling pizzas or lap dances, though.

... maybe they have an exotic dancing degree path? I think some colleges offer something like that. And there's good odds that they have a culinary program, so, uh. They may actually be more or less selling pizzas and lap pole dances.

[Greiger]

Spoiler: Another IT tech support rant (click to show/hide)

I do phone tier two internet tech support for a major ISP.

Today I spoke to a customer that was mad that they keep getting somebody hacking into their wifi and that our wifi is insecure garbage and that she's going to sue.   I do the overly long winded and over-complicated verification I'm mandated to do.  And by the time she's security cleared I see the problem.  The wifi security on the router is set to open.  There's no security at all.

Assuming that she was hacked through the laughable WEP or WPA1 security the equipment has on by default, and that it was just set to open by the intruder, I offer to switch it to use WPA2 security which while not perfect, is the best we offer.  She's happy and tells me to do so.

Then I ask her what password she wants.  And she says she does not want a password.  This is more common a response than some would think, so I happily explain that the password only needs to be entered one time on each device(and that I'll happily help her with that) and that it's the backbone of wifi security, without a password, the wifi is as secure as an unlocked front door.

She then proceeds to flip her wig, saying that she was told by her tech savvy neighbor that wifi passwords will slow down their internet and that it's a scam by [my company] to minimize the amount of speed we have to give her and that she should never put a password on her internet.  She even went so far as to tell me the second time she was hacked, the security department put a password on her wifi without telling her, and it slowed the whole neighborhood down so badly that the neighbor noticed and came by to check with her and removed the password for her.

I attempted to convince her to put a password on the wifi anyway and see if her speed improves after (her internet speed was 1/3rd the expected amounts and her data usage was over 50gb a day) and she of course refused. When I even suggested the possibility that the neighbor might be tricking her she called me enough wonderful things that I actually sent out a sup escalation to get permission to hang up on her.  Apparently I was not the first to suggest the possibility.  Supervisor eventually responded to my request by telling me to transfer her to them instead.

After my next break I got the 1on1 coaching I'm supposed to get every time I need to supervisor escalate that's supposed to point out how we could have handled the call better. I was told I did most everything right, except I'm not supposed to suggest the possibility of a neighbor stealing their wifi, even if that's exactly what's happening.  I was told that she had called in 10 times in the last 2 weeks and that she was costing [my company] more than she was paying, and that her service is being refunded and cancelled.

How can people be so STUPID?  This isn't even just lack of tech savvyness, her neighbor is so obviously playing her for a fool that I would think a child would see it.  And while I don't know her age she didn't sound like a little old lady either.  She sounded like she was in maybe her 30s?  How do people fall for that?

[Frumple]

... y'know, she could have not been falling for it. Her and neighbor in cahoots, seeing if they can set the grounds for a lawsuit or somethin'. Maybe there wasn't a concerned neighbor to begin with. Hell, if that refund included parts of the month or whatev' she had already used, she just made some bank.

Alternately, there's still plenty of people, some of them young, that don't really have more than a skin-deep (if that) understanding of the whole computer thing. Between that and the fact that some folks are just natural victims for your average confidence artist, and you've got scenarios like you dealt with. It happens more than you'd want to think it would

E: Also color me mildly curious what neighbor was doing with 50 gigs/day throughput. Don't suppose that kind of suspicious activity is enough reason for your company to do some checking, is it?

[Greiger]

Hm, I didn't actually consiter that first point, that could actually be it.  In that case we're the ones being played for fools.   

Though I recall from the previous notes it did seem like she spent a very long time on the phone with us.  I don't remember how long it went back but it was more than 1 page of call notes which is pretty unusual even for recurring problems.  If she was scamming us I would think she would be spending less time on the phone with us and more time enjoying free 105mb/s internet.

@E: They probably do.  But it's neither me nor my sup's department.  The only indication I ever get of suspicious activity is a flag that pops up on my screen telling me to transfer the caller to security after the call.  So that kind of investigation clearly happens, but I know nothing of it.

[majikero]

Can't you just claim its mandatory and give her a random password and email it to her or just set it to a default password and let the change it sometime or whatever?

[Greiger]

I have direct access to the equipment.  I can access the admin console for the router just as if I was sitting next to it with an ethernet plugged in.  Maybe even a little better because my login unlocks some advanced functions not actually available clientside, and I don't actually need to know the admin password(I just need to know mine).   If I wanted to I could put in a password, change her wifi ssid, set up port forwarding, put her computer on the DMZ, even factory reset it or disable it entirely. It is a fully functioning backdoor.

I would just get fired if I did any of that without permission to.  Everything I do is logged and linked to the phone call.  If she refuses a password all I can do is say how ill advised that is and ask again.