Yeah. You heard me right. I’m posting from Ali Baba’s, a tasty mediterranean and burger joint on my lunch break. They have free wifi too, so I’m taking the time to actually use the functionality of some of my geek toys.
Life has been busy lately. I had a phone support day from hell yesterday.
More…As some of you know, I work for the IT department of a major American university. Yesterday, ~32,000 applicants recieved a bulk email telling them that notifications had gone up on the web. That’s right. On the web.
Aparently, the powers that be decided that every applicant should have their very own computing account. Now this alone has major ramifications, that I won’t get into. But just do a thought experiment. 32k applicants create accounts every time we have an application period. Roughly 6 to 7k get accepted, which means 25k accounts need to be closed. Yeah. I’m glad we agree.
Anyway… if you just do a bit of simple math, suppose there is a 5% idiot quotient. I think that is a very conservative number. 5% of 32k = 1600. 1600 people forgetting their passwords, or aren’t smart enough to figure out how to read plain english. Basically… lets just say this. By the first 10 minutes of us being open, we had 5 people queued up in our phone queue. By the time I left, we had served 600 people and we were still open for another 6 hours. Lets just say that I’m thinking about filing for workers comp, because my hand hurts from typing in my password to authroize password changes too many times.
One of our sysadmins said it best: “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to voluntarily invite people to slam our systems during the last day of instruction, where lots of students are going to be downloading online course materials to take to their final reviews and study groups.” Sure enough, things got super hairy when a bunch of the systems went down to the onslaught of thousands upon thousands of requests. That made those stressed out high school kids and their parents really happy. “I’m sorry, I could help you reset your password, but it seems that our accounts server is down. You’ll have to call back later.”
Real story:
Person x calls in….
Me: Hi. How can I help you.
Them: I can’t get into my account.
Me: **checks their account, sees nothing wrong, authorizes a pw change**
5 minutes later
Them: Still not working.
Me: **double checks their account, finds nothing wrong** Let me walk you through the process. Go here… and then click on the login button
Them: I can’t find the login button!
Me: **procedes to explain where it is, what it looks like… for around 5 minutes, until she finally finds it**
Ok… there should be a dialog box that asks you for a username and password. Use this username, and the password you created.
Them: It’s not going to work… oh wait, it worked. What does it mean when it says “You have been accepted into (the university where I work)
Me: Umm… congratulations?
Me: **recounts the events to a coworker**
Coworker: It means that we have made a terrible mistake…
