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.