Kiss Me, I'm Irate

This is the first in what will hopefully be a long line of posts about things I just like.  And it’s about something that annoys me, except when I can’t help but laugh at it.

In my line of work, and the schedule I work, I get a lot of odd English expressions that come from various dialects.  Things like “raise a ticket”, which I understand is actually English (the country) in origin but still strikes me as weird, and “do the needful”, which seems to be an Indian Subcontinent thing that has crept into the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere.  One of my favorites is a phrase we get a lot from one of our resellers, informing us that they will “chase the customer” about an issue.  I’m pretty sure they mean “chase down the customer” but we’ve never corrected them because that would be rude and it brightens our day anyway.

Today we received an email from a help desk agent at one of our customers’ contractors (the communication structures get weird) in Saudi Arabia.  Now they’ve been having an issue with their VPN connection to our customer, and it’s been taking a long time to troubleshoot, as these things sometimes can.  When one of his users traveled to the UK, the VPN connection worked there.  And so he assumes the problem is with our customer’s firewall, not his company’s network – which doesn’t make any sense, but let’s set that aside.  This is what the end of the email said.

So please   look IN YOUR Collars  first and then point to others. Our PCs, our  connection are  100%  correct.
Now it is crystal clear that our connection is blocked on your firewall, unless you get changes on your side  it  just beat  the bushes and  waste  our  time and yours.

Now, like I said, the conclusion is emphatically wrong.  When you move from network A to network B and suddenly your connection to server C works, the problem is network A, not the firewall on server C, even without knowing it isn’t configured that way.  Simple logic.  If it was addressed to us, it might be annoying.  But it isn’t.

It’s just funny, because I have now seen someone berating someone else to look in their collars first before beating the bushes and wasting their time.  The fact that he’s wrong makes it funnier.

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Now playing: Dr. Bombay – Calcutta (Taxi, Taxi, Taxi)
via FoxyTunes

Yes, I know Calcutta isn’t anywhere near Saudi Arabia, and that song is probably horribly racist (or at least posting it here is).  But it’s funny, dammit.

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Update: the entire email was in this tone, very confrontational.  The kind of thing you expect to turn up on somebody’s tumblelog about their crazy landlord.  Well, not quite, but I wanted to give a shout-out because that tumblelog has brought me much amusement recently.  A few minutes later we received a reply from the person it was addressed to asking them to please be professional and then soundly refuting their conclusion.

Yes, let’s start this with an advertisement.

Really though, this isn’t.  I only mention the brands to differentiate these things.

It’s like this little ball of wax on this funky little metal stand thing, with a wick sticking up the middle.  It goes in a special holder that amounts to a very shallow bowl, but with this little bump in the middle that has a magnet in it.

You put little candle on stand thing on the bump in the middle and light the wick.  Candle proceeds to melt into a pool of wax in the holder.  This pretty much amounts to turning a candle the size of a tea-light into a pool of wax the size of that found in a jar candle.  The packaging has some stuff about how this dissipates the scent or whatever, and oddly enough it actually does work.  More surface area, more evaporation.  Or something.

As the wax remaining on the stand thing melts, the wick continues to burn even after it’s surrounded by a couple of metal tines and the bottom of the wick is about a quarter inch above the liquid wax.  There are these little slits in the side of the stand that let it suck up the wax using capillary action.  It’s kind of a nifty design, and I like that.

Also I like that the Oust ones (”odor neutralizing”) actually do work rather well, which was kind of unexpected.  I’d expect the Glade and whatever other brand ones work fine as well, it’s pretty hard to screw up a scented candle.

Starting in the next day or so, I’m going to start a series of posts on my blog about things I like, things I don’t hate, and occasionally things I do hate.  Most of the latter will follow posts in one of the other categories and will amount to caveats.

This series, unwittingly inspired by a good friend who may never know how helpful she’s been, is part self discovery and part self therapy.  I’m trying to be a happier person, or more optimistic, or something.  Maybe I’ll find a better definition as all this goes on.

If anyone should ever direct their attention to these, may they be as inspiring for you as I hope they’ll be for me.