| Monday, June 13, 2005 |
13:22 - Service sucks
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There have been some intermittent downtimes of this server over the past few days. The machine is randomly crashing. The crashes appear to be hardware-related, since I haven't installed any new software on the machine lately, and they happen at seemingly random times of the day or night.
Managed.com doesn't have phone support; rather, they have this bizarre e-mail-to-web-forum system whereby you e-mail the support address, and a trouble ticket is opened automatically, and a message thread in the online ticket viewing system is begun. This would work great if it weren't for a few small problems: a) Follow-up e-mails sent in response to the messages that are e-mailed to you from the system don't seem to get added into the web system, so if they respond to your request for help via e-mail (which also goes onto the web thread), and you make the mistake of answering in e-mail, it just disappears into the ether never to be seen or responded to again; and b) During most of the day and night, if you try to use the web support forum to post followups, when you click "Submit" it takes more than ten minutes on average to process your response—so the browser invariably times out, and you have no way of knowing whether the message was posted or not.
If they only had a phone number you could call, there would be none of this "E-mail a message asking for help with the repeatedly crashing server; get a response asking for your password; reply, only to have the reply disappear and not get posted to the web forum, which is the only thing they read, and where they close a ticket every time they respond to it, and only if you reply does it get reopened; wait twelve hours before realizing that they never got your response; find the link to the web forum thread; repost your response into the web form; wait half an hour while the browser times out and you try in desperation to get back into the system while it spins and chokes; e-mail a new trouble ticket; repeat" nonsense. But nooooo.
So I'm stuck with sending reboot requests to the reboot request queue, which is apparently staffed by onsite "techs" who are trained in the art of pushing the little button on the front of the box, but not in the art of anything else (like, say, looking on the console to see if any telltale kernel panic messages have been echoed to it, or telling me accurately whether the server was down because it crashed or because it was "disconnected", no matter how many times I ask for this information); and they refer me back to the support forums, where the techs alternate between irritably telling me to send reboot requests if the server goes down, petulantly telling me that "Well, I can ping it, so your server seems to be fine" right after it gets rebooted after a crash, and passing my case from one tech to another, each of which must be briefed on the entire case history from day one and shows no knowledge of my previously submitted diagnostic profiles, even though they're posted right at the top of the support forum thread. (I strongly suspect that there's only one support guy in the entire company, and he just keeps changing his name and feigning amnesia whenever I send a new support request; this way they won't have to fix anything, and I'll take my troublesome demanding "I would like for my server not to crash all the time" business to some other company. Fix bad RAM or CPU/motherboard? Bah! Who do these customers think they are, anyway?)
So there's that. And also there's my car. See, here's the timeline:
Last Thursday I took my Jetta in to Midas to install my new clutch. (This part, at least, went dreamily; it now drives like a whole new car.) At the same time, I asked them to take a look at the power outlet in the trunk, where I would like to plug in a GPS unit for the Alaska trip; I tested it a couple of weeks ago and it seemed not to be working. So when I got the car back, Midas told me they agreed it was broken, but couldn't find any loose fuses or anything; I'd have to take it to the dealership. Fine, I can deal with that.
On the way back to work, though, I noticed that my stereo system wouldn't turn on. Not "came up in Safe mode," or "all my radio stations had been reset" or anything—wouldn't turn on. At all. Completely dead. Also my clock had been reset, and the power windows seemed not to be working properly (they have a one-touch feature where if you push the button and release it, the window goes up or down all the way; but that only occurs if the engine is running or if the engine has been shut off but the doors haven't been opened yet. Now, however, they seemed not to be one-touch-capable even in the engine-off-doors-still-closed case.) I talked to the service person at Bob Lewis, and she told me confidently that the readiness codes simply needed to be reset, and these—stereo, clock, windows—were all common symptoms of a tripped readiness code. Okay, fine. Sounds nice and cheap. I made an appointment for Monday (today).
The following day (Friday), I took the car to a local smog place on De Anza—little mom-and-pop place that has been in the same location since 1969, well respected and a community fixture. They gave me the smog check I needed to renew my car registration. I got the certificate; all readings looked fine.
Yet when I started up the car to drive home at the end of the day, the "Check Engine" light came on. You know, otherwise known as the "Please insert $125" light. Because that's how much it costs to get the dealership to take a look and find out what the hell it's doing on. Mind you, I have just come from the smog check place, one of the functions of which is to identify any conditions that might cause the engine light to come on in the near future; and they found nothing. Later that same day, the engine light comes on. What the shoes did they do to my car?!
Oh yeah, and over the weekend the engine hesitated on startup a couple of times. Which is real reassuring when I picture it happening at a remote campground somewhere between Whitehorse and Haines Junction. I figure it's another symptom of the electrical system being screwed, possibly coupled with having the smog check done; after all, my radio still won't come on, and the windows are still being a little unpredictable.
The car is now back in at Bob Lewis, where they're going to charge me a big wad of cash to fix something that apparently broke while I was getting the smog check done, possibly complicated by something that apparently broke while I was getting my clutch fixed and the fuses looked at. Seems like every time I get someone to fix my car, they break something else.
While it's in there, I'm also asking that they fix the little piece of plastic buried inside the latch mechanism of my armrest, which is dangling over a piece of wire and making a rattling and buzzing sound at highway speeds; also, if I'm lucky, they'll fix that rear power outlet that was the cause of all this in the first place. I'm sure it'll cost me the entire profits I've made from the latest book, and considering that I'm about to send in the Estimated Tax Payments on it to the state and fed, I'm going to end up owing money on balance. If they can't fix the armrest cheaply, I'm just going to drip some Elmer's glue in there.
What else? Oh yes: Cartoon Network has its audio all screwed up. None of the other channels. If I switch to Cartoon Network in the middle of the night, the right audio channel is cranked WAY UP LOUD to the point where it's clipping. I can turn the balance knob back and forth on my stereo and verify this: the left channel is barely audible at all, and the right channel is blaring and grating. I have verified that it happens on no other channels, and it happens on other TVs in the same house.
So I sent Comcast an e-mail through their handy little "Ask Comcast" e-mail gateway. (I'd tried their "24/7 Web Assistant" thing, which I discovered to my dismay was merely an AI bot designed to scan your questions for keywords and give out canned answers.) My hopes weren't high, but the notes on the e-mail gateway said that a technician would respond "usually within 24 hours", which said to me that an actual person would reply to my carefully explained problem, which outlined precisely the methods I'd used to isolate the behavior of the audio channel and verify that it was not in any way the fault of my equipment or configuration.
And—surprise, surprise—I got a canned response back explaining to me how to properly seat the coaxial F-connector for better reception and how to set up porn-blocking for my kids. And a little footnote at the bottom that said, "If you exhaust all of these options and are still experiencing poor reception, a tiling picture, a "One Moment please" message, or a communication error, please call Customer Care at 1-800-xxx-xxxx. A technician may need to visit your home to rectify the issue."
Boy, I sure hope someone got paid handsomely for setting up all these barricades between clueless customers like me and any hope of getting competent assistance.
Oh, and I'm not even going to get into how many bugs I've filed against Tiger Mail and its infuriating behaviors such as downloading and caching every single message in my Junk and Deleted folders when I come in on Monday, which after a typical weekend usually comes to some 10,000 messages or more, meaning that my computer is useless for about two hours while it keeps trying to grab thousands of messages at a time and cache them locally, while I stand there with my mouse posed over the Activity palette like a Whac-a-Mole game killing the sync processes every time they start.
And how my machine here at work seems to have got it into its head that I want my Keychain to lock itself automatically every time I step away from my desk, so I come back to find that all my apps have popped up cascades of "So-and-so wants access to your Keychain!" authentication dialog boxes which jumble up against each other and drag the system to a standstill.
I must be at some kind of karmic confluence of misfortune at the hands of all those who provide service to me on which I depend. Sounds like a perfect time to be driving merrily off into the Northern wilderness!
UPDATE: Kenny B. writes:
I imagine that at this point you might be considering a wagon, oxen, compass, map, and log book for this trip.
If you do, don't forget to bring a barrel of axle grease and a couple of extra wagon wheels. :)
I'll just stop off at Hiram's shop. If he can't sell me what I need, at least I'll be able to find solace of another kind.
UPDATE: Seems it was the mass airflow sensor that went out. A paltry $350, plus the cost of investigation labor and installation.
As for the stereo not turning on, Bob Lewis discovered that the reason was that the unit had been unplugged, in the back—it had been yanked out and unplugged when Midas checked for reasons why my trunk-mounted power outlet wasn't working. (BL also said that the stereo faceplate is now fitting loosely, like there was some damage to the unit. Funny, it was fine this morning.)
And the reason why the trunk-mounted power outlet wasn't working? It had been ... unplugged. Sometime between 1999 and now.
Moral of the story: don't ask Midas to check anything electrical, as they will apparently manhandle your stereo out of its socket, leave it unplugged, damage it, and then cram it back in and hope you don't notice that it's not working anymore.
And this also means that I somehow managed to pass the smog check with a bad airflow sensor, which I can only assume means that the smog check place is crappy.
There are fewer and fewer places around here that I feel I can trust with my car.
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Brian Tiemann
