FFFFFU

This morning I walked into a world of shit. As previously mentioned, I work for an ISP, and it looks like last night our radius servers committed suicide. This means NONE of our DSL connections work. That's over 11,000 very irritated users trying to call a helpdesk manned by only two people, all at once. I'm typing this while some inbred retard from the Isle of White yells down the phone at me about how his business is suffering because his internet connection has been down for an hour or so. There are a number of reasons why I hate people like this, the most prominent of these being:

1) Getting shitty with me personally or anyone at this company will not help their situation, and only serves to make them look petty and unprofessional. If you want to throw your toys out the pram, do it on your own time. Mine is valuable.

2) They're universally ignorant. Even when a company has hired an "IT Professional" to give them support on their network and talk to us on their behalf, the complete lack of knowledge is staggering. Stay away from anyone who has "IT Professional", or anything equally ambiguous, on their business card - This is a synonym for "Poisonous retard". Generally speaking, if they don't have a CCNA, they don't know shit.

3) Because of their lack of knowledge, they don't understand what "Service level agreement" means. In the UK, the only two providers offering independent services are BT and Tiscali. All other ISPs just buy connections from either of these two and resell them to end users and other resellers. So, all connections conform to the same two service level agreement contracts, as both BT and Tiscali offer the same ones: Standard Care, and Enhanced Care. Enhanced care is a 20 hour fix. Standard care has no time constraint at all and generally takes about 2 weeks to get fixed. Most people just get standard care because it’s a little bit cheaper, then go apeshit when their connection goes down and i tell them it's going to take forever to fix.

4) As another knock on effect of their stupidity, they don't understand what "demarcation point" means. There are a number of people who continually call in with dumbass problems with software and hardware not supported by us. When we provide an internet connection, if the router can connect, that is all we care about. If you can't get your laptop connected wirelessly, that's your problem. If you're server isn't working properly, that's your problem. If you can't configure MS Outlook, talk to Microsoft. If you can't configure wifi on your iPhone, talk to Apple.

5) They often get annoyed when they're expected to do something. Even things as trivial as rebooting the router can cause an uproar of complaints and stupid questions. "Why can't you do this remotely?", "Why can't you send an engineer to do it for me?", "Why should i have to find this out?” They don't seem to understand that it's their responsibility to provide us with any info we need, or that if they don't, we can do shit all to fix their faults.

At least the weekend was entertaining. Didn't go to the fair when I was planning to, as it was raining, so we went to IKEA instead. Fun. Went yesterday instead when it was sunny, was fun. House party was... crazy. I don't remember most of it, but I’m told there was excessive drunkenness, nudity and making out with minors. Curse my lack of sexual inhibitions while drunk.