To Serve and Detect -or- I’ll Cut You!

I’ve been working with UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems for 15 years. It’s thrilling yet infuriating. Challenging yet arcane. Sometimes like riding a crosstown bus, you just want UNIX to hear the bell and let you off at the next stop.

*ding*

Lots has happened over 15 years. In its earlier form, UNIX could handle lots of tasks while offering the poorest interface possible. In its latter forms, UNIX has tried to steal the hearts of desktop users away from Microsoft — while not necessarily evolving in terms of acceptible interfaces, usability, or compatibility. 15 years later I find myself running applications under a Microsoft platform while interfacing with UNIX systems through Microsoft-based terminal software. After 12 years, I had done enough projectile vomiting over half-cooked UNIX “desktop productivity” applications that I could no longer muster the energy to use — much less to justify their existence.

At the tip of the iceberg, of course, is supporting UNIX which means that I have to deal with people. And by people, I mean non-technologists. I’ve realized that about 60% of my job is non-technical. I spend it answering pages, lending an ear to complaints, lifting heavy things, or sometimes just offering psychiatric help, because sometimes UNIX just makes you want to jump.

Of the 40% of my job that is technical, probably 90% of that involves being a detective. User A comes to my desk and asks me why his UNIX system is shafting him. I put a whole bunch of yellow tape around their UNIX system, take some pictures of the crime scene, there’s a manhunt, and later there’s a capture. Whether it’s a mail system or some kind of other server, it’s always the same.

Or maybe that’s not true.

Things go haywire when systems are totally broken, or when people are unnecessarily conniving or mean. This happens a lot, too. I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time to be the bad cop, and came up with a global response to people who rub me the wrong way:

I’ll cut you.

“What?! What’s wrong with you? Isn’t that mean?”, you’re asking yourself.

Not really.

“I’ll cut you” is almost a perfect thing to say. How?

User A: Hey, how come I can’t send this gigabyte-sized email message through the email server. It bounces.
Me: (knowing that we never allowed gigabyte-sized messages to be sent via email) Because that’s not what mail is there for. You should use a public folder instead.
User A: Well, it worked up until now. If you don’t fix this for me, I will escalate this all the way up to the president of the company.
Me: (shrugging) I’ll cut you.

Or apply it to pager duty…

User B: Hey, sorry I paged you, but system X seems to be down.
Me: What happened?
User B: I rebooted the server and it didn’t come back up.
Me: I’ll cut you.

Or for hilarious incidents of human error:

Me: Why is Server Y offline? We really need it.
User C: Hey, sorry. We were doing maintenance in the data center, and it looks like the system was packed up and placed in a shipping crate.
Me: What?! Why?!
User C: Do you really need this server? Is it urgent?
Me: I’ll cut you.