Thus Spake Russ

Posted By Russ Emerson on June 22, 2012 at 4:48 pm

After dealing with an exceedingly demanding and finicky customer:

Russ(4:19:05 PM): I dunno about you – I always log that crap on those tickets
JSmith(4:22:30 PM): thanks. i’m sorta waiting for the day someone tells me i caused an SLA miss on one of these. i might be behind bars after that.
Russ(4:23:07 PM): what’ll put me behind bars is if I ever find out who invented Voice Over IP
Russ(4:23:39 PM): I’m kind of of the “if you use VOIP you deserve all the problems you have” school of thought
JSmith(4:24:51 PM): that’s a fair point. it’s way cheaper and relatively new technology, so get ready for an occasional issue. i actually tell customers that.
Russ(4:27:36 PM): yeah… a century ago, old Ethel on the switchboard wasn’t doing much better than VOIP does now
JSmith(4:29:29 PM): that’s another good one to help customer adjust their expectations.. haha…
Russ(4:29:55 PM): <<<< Master of Analogies
. . .
Russ(4:35:26 PM): I am so blogging this conversation
Russ(4:35:38 PM): names will be changed to protect the innocent

I don’t necessarily agree with Luddites… but I sure can understand what might, in part, motivate them.

Category: Geekery | Comments Off on Instant Message Excerpts: On Being a Network Engineer, 15
Tags: networking

Posted By Russ Emerson on June 21, 2012 at 2:03 pm

_{[Much of what follows is taken directly from an email conversation I had with someone of very long acquaintance who just happens to be liberal.]}

It was recently recommended to me that I might want to read a book called Mornings in Jenin. I demurred; I was not and am not interested in Palestinian propaganda, however packaged.

Jenin, of course, was the site of the altogether fictional “Jenin Massacre,” which in a time before the internet might have stuck as a media-driven libel against the state of Israel. As it was, the lie was debunked in nearly record time.

No, I have no interest in Palestinian propaganda. They, as a “society,” have made their bed, now they must lie in it.

They allow themselves to be — choose to be — ruled by terrorist organizations. They send their children to schools where they are taught that killing Jews is the greatest good. Their home-grown TV channels are a non-stop anti-Jew, anti-Christian hate-fest. They murder men, women and children indiscriminately.

They celebrated the deaths of 3,000 Americans by dancing in the streets.

If it had been up to me, we’d have broken up those celebrations with cluster bombs, then razed a square kilometer of Gaza, scraped it bare, and sown it with salt.

But that’s just me.

(No it’s not.)

There are plenty of people in the world — Haitians, many (most?) sub-Saharan Africans, Egyptian Coptic Christians, and so on — who are in dire circumstances not necessarily of their own making, who are trying to better their own conditions, who don’t then go around firing rockets at civilian towns, sending squads out to kill farmers and their families, or strapping bombs on themselves to blow up buses. I reserve my sympathy for them.

For the Palestinians, I’ve got nothing.

Got. Nothing.

Category: Barbarians, Terrorism | Comments Off on Sympathies Reserved
Tags: rant