Things You Really Shouldn't Say To Customers ============================================ (but you want to, you know you do) Dear Sir/Madam: Thank you for submitting your latest work order. Thank you for sending me an instant message to let me know that you'd submitted it. I took note of the date and time you opened the request, and I was really impressed; I must have gotten your instant message before your screen finished refreshing! I also noticed, with great interest, the date and time that you say this work must be completed by. To make it possible for me to meet your deadline, I wonder if you could do me a favor? Could you please loan me your time machine? Failing that, could you please share some of the drugs that you're so obviously using? But seriously, I do thank you for your request, because we were all sitting around the office, with nothing to do, just waiting for a request to come in, and your submission gave us all a good hearty laugh. While you wait for us to complete it, here's a little article about a novel concept that you might want to consider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning Thank you, Your friendly local system administrator ----- And you should definitely not succumb to temptation and do this! http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:mvideo:cmt.com:40319 ----- And you should not send this. Thank you for your recent e-mail to everyone in Unix, everyone in a couple of other departments, the marketing staff at GE, and Santa Claus's younger brother. Because, of course, that's the quickest way to solve a problem on a production server. We also thank you for the 6 MB screen shot you enclosed, to illustrate the problem, because a department full of Unix administrators just might not know what a failed ftp attempt looks like. And we all enjoyed your screen background. That must be the absolutely loveliest cat in the whole wide fuzzy world. Kumbayah. Of course, we do have a well-established ticketing system in place; if it's a priority-1 or -2 it will even page the on-call team automatically! Isn't that clever? Lots and lots of people use that system, and rely on it daily, to solve a whole range of problems. Even failed ftp jobs! But those are ordinary problems. Your problem is very, very special; we here in Unix Land understand that. And we just live to serve you. Kumbayah. ----- And, under no circumstances, should you ever send this one. So your filesystem is full. Again. The Unix on-call team was paged out at 4:03 AM because it's a critical filesystem on a production server. One of us immediately logged in, and found that the full filesystem was /uploads What an absolute surprise! You see, it was only the third time this week. What were the odds that it would happen again? Actually, the odds might be a little better than you might think. You see, filesystems are like glasses of water. Really, really big glasses of water. Some servers have juice glasses, some have tumblers, and some have 48 oz. mega-systems. Yours has a water tumbler. And, just like a water glass, if you keep pouring into it, the water eventually reaches the top. Your choices, at that point, are to: 1. Stop pouring, 2. Drain some water out, 3. Or watch the pretty waterfall when it overflows. Right now, you're relying on surface tension. On a regular basis. But, there's one teensey-tiny little difference between your server and a water glass. It's subtle, so this is what may be confusing you. You see, the operating system is smart. It won't let your disks overflow, because it knows that it's a bad thing if you get water all over the inside of your system, where the disks are located. That would be a bad thing. Don't you agree? I knew you would. So that leaves only options 1 or 2. And we have to eliminate option 1, also. You see, your filesystem is a very important storage place on a very important server. We can demonstrate this by observing that we get paged out every time it gets full. And every time we get paged we take temporary remediation steps. And we send you a note. And that note asks you to set up a script or other system to regularly purge old files. We've sent you two of those notes this week. And here we are, at four-something in the morning, compressing files, while you get your beauty rest. We really don't mind this, we believe that you need all the beauty sleep you can get. But still, we really can't go on like this. You see, we do not own the application. You do. We don't know how it works. You do. And only you know which files are safe to delete, trim, archive, or compress. That's your job. If you can't do it, maybe you ought to consider finding another one. Just don't try being a barista, though. When you spill the coffee-woffie over the top of the cuppie-wuppie, it's all hot and it might give you an ouchie-wouchie. Have I successfully explained this at your level now? Thank you, Your friendly local system administrator And, however tempted you might be to use this as your status message in the internal Instant Messaging client, someone is bound to see it, and not get the humor: A lack of planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on ours. But that's only in my fantasy world. In this one, Unix will mumble rude things about you while on mute, but we'll pull your sorry butt out of the bonfire again, even though you could have prevented the blaze entirely, with even a modicum of planning.