beib’s blog

Seriously, even the boss is about to kill him.

We have a customer who owns a lot of sites and use a head office package we have to control all sites.

On the 16th they rang and said some of the info from the 15th was missing, half of it, the rest was there, and the info for the 16th was there.

That was OCTOBER 16th, almost a month, and unibrow has been “working” on this call since that day, and it’s still not sorted.

One of the problems they had was no communication between the sites, 3 weeks ago they reported this. Unibrow doesn’t know that much about the indepth workings of head office but does know the basics, like if there’s no communication, what to check.

He told me the head office program was *off* due to the issue of the 15th/16th info missing, and has been off since.

This morning the customer rang and spoke with our boss, I say spoke but it was far from polite, and he was dead right to. I mean, a month and this is still going on? I’d have flipped out.

So anyway, we’re discussing this with our boss and trying to figure out a way to sort it when unibrow said the head office program has actually been ON the whole time. So wtf?
First he says it’s off all the time, now he says he’s been dialled in and noticed the program on. He’s even turned it off and back on again himself while checking information.

*bangs head on desk*

3 weeks, his call, he’s able to fix the problem, and he gives us the wrong information. I’m trying to figure out why he did that. I know it delays the call and I think that’s what he was doing, trying to wait until I got so pissed off with it that I took it over. I really think that’s what he was doing, and have for a while, but he’s well capable of handling this and as far as I knew he was fixing things, so I didn’t take it over.

The boss just about flipped, and unibrow was coming up with excuses such as “beib said it was off!” - even the boss knows that unibrow was the one that gave us that information. “I didn’t notice it” - it’s the 2nd problem, for 3 weeks, and you didn’t notice it? Not even when they ring every day? ok….

We got that sorted in about 30 seconds flat, simple port blocked error, simple. That’s something out of the way at least and will calm the customer down, but jesus that was some battle, and always with the excuses.

Anyway he now has to fix the original problem of the info on the 15th missing, but with this done it buys him some time he didn’t have originally, to work on it longer. God only knows how long longer is.

You know, you’d think there’s no one else working here the way I only talk about the rabbit and unibrow, but there is.

They’re just not all that interesting, compared to unibrow and the rabbit’s battles anyway

Funny/stupid/odd/frustrating things unibrow has done recently….

- Cannot spell for shiz, seriously. One of our customers had a problem with STOCK, he logged it as problem with SOCK, hehe ok that’s kinda funny, but EVERY call he misspells and you’re looking and trying to figure out wtf is going on!

- Still smells bad.

- Before I had blogged how he was spelling out a word over the phone for someone and said “Q for….Q” hehe, he did the same again the other day “E, for E” lol

- I’ve asked numerous times that if they want me for something to call me by saying my name first so I’ll snap to attention, so to speak. He doesn’t, he talks and then when I don’t answer him because I’m too busy doing whatever I’m doing, he starts sighing REALLY loudly and staring at me. Kinda freaky.
This morning he did the same but I heard him. Today I’m testing a new piece of software so my concentration is… uhhh…. ok well it’s meant to be on the software and not my blog, but it’s noon I needed a break from bugs :p Anyhooooo, so he says something to me, I heard him but wanted to keep doing what I was doing and since he didn’t call me I just fobbed it off.

He came over and stood right beside me staring at me, that shiz seriously creeps me out. So I go, “what unibrow?” - and he says he asked me a question. I said I didn’t hear him as he didn’t call me and I was engrossed in my testing. He says he did call me. LIAR! So did not, so I said this, well not the liar part but the not calling me part and he spent 10 mins arguing that he did call me, when he didn’t.

Like what’s the point? I dunno.

- Farts all the time. A lot.

- Hasn’t slipped on our spilled tea trap. Damn.

- Call avoidance, still doing it. For example, took a call last week, the rabbit updated it on Thursday, unibrow updated it on Friday but insists it’s the rabbit’s call. Hate that crap.

- Listens in on my phone conversations. Like he’ll be walking past and here me on the phone, so he’ll stop and listen. On occasion he stares in.

- Asking stupid question. As I mentioned earlier, today I’m testing a new piece of software. So Unibrow gets a call from a customer about someone having dialled into their PC this morning, and he asks me if it was me. I say no because I was working on software only and he says well you might have dialled in for a while or something. Again I say no, software today only, no calls as he already knew. OK I just need to check because you could have been. Me: “….”

- In the rabbit’s own words:
[15:01] rabbit: When I came in this morning and went into bosses office, he stood out in the reception playing with the scale, listening in. He had no reason to be out there at all.

- We have a boss rule here regarding calls, any call where the customer is under warranty or on contract, must be kept updated every 24 hours if the call isn’t easy solve. Unibrow’s calls of this type can go a week without an update and if you ask him about it he pulls about9 different excuses from his excuse list, like, “I forgot” ” I didn’t see them there, ” “it wasn’t there this morning, ” etc…but my personal favourite is: “I didn’t have time.” A whole week and doesn’t have 5 minutes to update the call or even call the customer back?
And then  comes out with “Oh hey soandso is on tv tonight/soandso has a special offer on their website” or we get a sudden blast of a Southpark episode he didn’t to watch and didn’t get his earphones plugged in before the music started :p

And I got tied up with work most of the day so cutting it short and most of that is repeats anyway but that was all just *today* lol

And it’s only Monday…

Anyone’s who’s been paying attention for the last few weeks knows I’m off to Spain end of the month for my cousin’s wedding, and also that I booked and organised most of the flights/hotels/car hire/etc for everyone going.

His parents were to fly out the 25th of this month, all booked and paid for. Today the airline announced it is in discussion with the unions over whatever and if they can’t come to an agreement, they’ll go on strike, on the 24th.

I mean talk about bad luck, and it’s the last thing you want after organising a wedding, not being able to even get there!

I looked around and gave my aunt different options if she wants to cancel or book a backup flight with anothe airline just in case, but they haven’t decided what they’ll do yet.

Need to think about it fast, or they won’t get any money back!

I bought him 5 scratch cards last night.

He won:

2 free tickets

4 euro

and 2 euro

Out of 5 tickets, not bad!

ok so the rabbit was making tea just now and while bringing it back into this room he spilled some on the floor.

So he asks me if he should clean it up or wait and see what happens. I.e if unibrow slips or what.

I said wait -_-

I mean, come on, it’s Monday! Need some entertainment :p

You know the one with the heart condition, turned 88 recently, that one, he does the Lottery every Wednesday and Saturday nights.

A few weeks ago, my uncle looked up the numbers on teletext for him. He’s blind as a bat, so my uncle wrote them down on a piece of paper for him to read up close.

So my uncle is sitting there beside him after handing my grandfather the piece of paper with the numbers written on it, the numbers also still on screen on the tv, when my grandfather starts calling out the numbers written down. One by one, it’s just him checking the numbers out loud.

My uncle is slowly hearing my grandfather call out the numbers, and with the numbers still on screen begins to realise that he’s calling out the right lottery numbers. In his own words, his heart started racing, his palms sweating up, his eyes darting back and forth as my grandfather called out the remaining numbers to himself.

“Show me that there, da, ” he says to my grandfather. My uncle goes up beside the tv and starts looking back and forth between the piece of paper and the tv.

After a few minutes of him panicing inside and trying to find a way to not give my grandfather a heart attack with news that he had won the lottery passes, it slowly dawns on my uncle that the numbers he was checking, were from the piece of paper he himself had written the numbers down on

Way to go uncle This leads to a story tonight.

One of my aunts is visiting for the weekend before we all jetset off to Spain for her son’s wedding in 2.5 weeks (weeee!!). As I said above, my grandfather does the lottery every Wed and Sat. And since he’s always looking for paper and pen to write the numbers down to check them himself, when I was in a store earlier this evening (after the draw) I asked the cashier if she could print out the winning numbers for me.

So I brought this piece of paper down to my grandfather tonight, so he didn’t need to go off spending an hour looking for something to write them down on/with.

I’m sitting in the kitchen, having my 20th cup of tea for the hour (I don’t think the kettle every stops boiling in that house :)) when 2 of my aunts come in ROARING laughing and yelling my name.

The print out of the winning numbers is printed on the same paper, font, colour etc etc as a regular ticket. My grandfather checked the numbers AGAINST the one I gave him. Sat back on the chair and coolly says to my grandmother “Eily, I think I won.”

It took my aunts nearly 20 minutes to explain to him what happened, and for him to come down from winning millions, to nothing!

He thought I had bought him a lottery ticket. And this is the man with the heart issues!

Think I’ll just buy him a notepad

My mother is trying to find ways to avoid Halloween, in a cruel way, it’s the kids that suffer! She wants to leave the house, rent a dog, or the best one yet: leave a big box of treats outside the door with a “help yourself” sign.

First kid to the door is the lucky kid in that scenario :p

And rent a dog? She’s nuts. Anyway, they live on the coast, it’s not like they’ll have kids knocking every 10 minutes. The only times you really see kids back there are when it’s over 20degrees and their more interested in going swimming than knocking on doors!

Me myself, couple of my male friends are coming over and we’re dressing up to get in the spirit. Then we’re gunna hand out treats away happily for the night. I love it. Though I guess my mother went through it for years with 3 kids so I can kind of understand her wanting to get away from it!

Kinda depressing one here. Everyone says it comes in 3’s, and it seems to.

My aunt in law’s father passed away yesterday. Was at work on Saturday, left us by Tuesday, crazy. They’re doing a post mortem today since it was so fast and sudden, he was only 61.

The rabbit’s dog died. He’s in Germany on hols so doesn’t know yet (I hope to God you’re not reading my blog over there, if you are, SORRY!!!!).

And one of my aunts found her own dog this morning, also gone to doggie heaven. Frisky the frisky doggie. She’s devastated. We had to put one of our dogs down years ago and I was devastated. If anything happened to my dog now I’d be gone.

I got contacts back today. Haven’t worn them in a couple of years. I had to put them in in the opticians but the right eye one wouldn’t go in. My left eye took it no probs, but my right eye seems to hate having anything stuck in there.

I keep moving them around. Seriously, I’m sitting here poking my eyes out all day!

It’s official, my family/friends are weirdos. Not that most of you who’ve known me a long time don’t already know!

Sunday night I was visiting my grandparents, as I do most nights. For years they only ever had 3 channels, the basic free ones, so my mother got them a bunch of channels, but there was no sport and that’s all my grandfather likes! So myself and my uncle set them up with sky (sky.com if anyone interested), basically a satellite package with all the movies/sports/music channels etc.

So every saturday my grandmother has to sit through 5 hours of the horse racing, and then my grandfather has to sit through 5 hours of quiz shows/the religious channel/talk shows/etc.

As my uncle commented, “the son they never had”. And they had 5 of them.

So this is Halloween week, and most of the movie channels are showing horror movies. Now, my grandmother is very religious and even saying “shit” in front of her gets you a slap. We were keeping the movie channels away from them really.

Anyhoo, the other night she calls my aunt in demanding she put on a horror movie. Horror movie, my grandmother wanted a horror movie. And not just any horror, it HAD to be one with werewolves. She loves werewolves!

I think we corrupted them.

So anyway, Sunday night and she’s watching The Omen (yeah I know, we’re doomed), and my aunt, uncle, myself and a neighbour are in the kitchen having drinks and chatting away.

My neighbour is very………………………………..spiritual (i.e. fucking nuts). And she gets into this discussion with my uncle about life, death, heaven, hell, purgatory, philosophy, etc etc with my uncle, who just LOVES this.

Mega deep coversation. FOR THREE HOURS.

3!

I made my exit about 1am, was the only chance I had to escape and if I didn’t take it I’d have been there another 2. I mean they went in depth, mega in depth. Angels, different levels of purgatory, fortune tellers, ghost stories and aliens (which were actually cool), etc.

3 hours, and 2 after I left.

Nuts. Now in fairness, it’s what she believes and lives by and more power to her, but man, 3 hours? /cry

The second I got home I watched Constantine.

Victim of myself again.

AC/DC tickets for a concert in Dublin went on sale last Friday at 9AM. My uncle, the one in the credit card story below, asked me to get as many tickets as I could for him. Sigh, well, I wanted to get them for myself anyway so figured why not. He swore he’d have the money on Saturday for me.

Tickets sold out in a matter of minutes, got none, not too bothered about it. Checked ebay later, while at work hehe, and saw some going for 5-600. No thanks.
My uncle calls me later Friday night and asks me to check ebay for them. I tell him the prices as I’d already looked and he asked me to bid on one, ugh.

I did try, seriously, a lot. The one I was bidding on the seller was messing with it and increased the price from 320-485-620. Who does that? Seriously. Anyway, so they were out, too much. Then he decides maybe he will go with the 620 ones, but I talked him out of that as they were TicketFast tickets, not actual tickets themselves, and unless I bought them direct from ticketmaster or whoever, I wouldn’t trust them.

Thank god, 600 saved from the credit card. Why I can’t just say no, I don’t know.

Anyhoo, so this morning he calls me again and asks to check the prices on ebay. So I do and they’re pretty much the same, some have even gone upto 700 (nutters). I mean, I like AC/Dc, but not that much. I wouldn’t even pay that much to see Orlando Bloom. Ok actually, when I think about it - I may actually have paid that much to see Orlando bloom, between flights/tickets/hotel for 3 nights, but it wasn’t directly to see him so I get away with it. Moving on…

So he says, check out the ones in London/Manchester, and low and behold, there’s some really good pricing here. I mean I decided to be utterly nice and work out flights/hotel etc, the lot and once the price of the tickets didn’t go up too high (were at about 120 sterling/160 euro), he could have 2 tickets, flights, hotel and some spending money left over out of that 600 he was willing to pay to go to Dublin!

Make sure you get them, he said. I will, I said. Bet 200, I did. Winning the tickets, I am. Call me later and say he changed his mind and doesn’t want to go to Manchester, he did.

ARGH!

SO, NOW I am probably going to win this auction for 2 tickets to AC/DC in Manchester and pay for them, and do absolutely nothing with them.

Now, it may not be tooooo bad. I have an uncle living in Manchester, he probably knows someone who’d buy them - but jesus.

Just shoot me.

So far this week has been better than I thought, and it’s only Wednesday, for both good and bad reasons.

The rabbit is in hospital, suspected appendicitisthingy. His x-rays, ultrasound, bloods, etc all came up clear, so they’ll probably let him out with some pain killers or something.

He had asked unibrow yesterday to bring him over a toothbrush/toothpaste, so unibrow goes to the rabbit’s home and takes what was literally the dirtiest toothbursh he could find.

The rabbit was filling me in on this. He showed me the brush and it was disgusting, it was so obviously not a healthy tootkbrush, and it’s because it’s the one the rabbit uses for cleaning stuff. So did unibrow not look at what he was doing, or do it delibrately? Who knows…

Anyhoo, now the hospital is in lock down due to a vomiting bug, so no one can get in or out today. Thankfully, I gave the rabbit my Nintendo DS yesterday to keep him away from the light/boredom, so he’s well happy, even though still stuck in there.

But it’s been heaven in work, heaven. Well ok, maybe not, it’s unibrow - there’s always something. But there’s none of the crap he goes at when the rabbit is here. I’m actually realising how often he talks to me. Never noticed that before. Kinda creepy.

Not only that, but my credit card was paid off in full yesterday (yay!).

Today is 6 weeks to Spain (yay), and until I start returning my credit card to it’s previous status (boo!). Nah, I’m gunna be better with it this time ’round.

My uncle (credit card, give no money, expect the world guy) asked me to get tickets to AC/DC which go on sale on Friday, AND, he already paid me. That is good.

Looking good, looking good….