so we finally made the announcement about the impending doom, this past weekend.

people who don’t work here don’t realize the painstaking effort that goes into these mailings. i mean, we argue about every word. see where it says “probable”? there was a debate about that. originally, it was “likely.” or at least, there used to be a huge debate about everything. now i guess it’s just techline arguing amongst themselves. we got tired of them arguing with us over stupid shit (and look, i’m sorry that you don’t like the damn hyphen, but the Chicago Manual of Style says it’s e-mail and we are the goddamn University of Chicago, and i’m going to go by the goddamn CMS for formal communications, so put that in your pipe and smoke it), and we got tired of being told that we didn’t respect the users and didn’t know how to treat people, so we kind of threw up our collective hands and said “fuck it, whatever, you do it if you want it so fucking bad.” i mean, you’d think we’d be involved with announcing the stuff that we are the ones actually doing it, but according to everyone else, we filthy sysadmins are not as knowledgable as all of them on what the users want out of their email experience, and we are therefore not qualified to write announcements.

fuck it, whatever. that isn’t what i came to rant to you about.

(“i came to talk about the draft.” eh, uh, i mean–)

so, support writes this email, and it goes through minimal revision with us — trust me, three days is fucking infinitesimal relative to some of the previous arguments we’ve had — and it goes out to all 27,000-some-odd people. there’s just this one thing, and i’ll admit that in some respects it’s petty: the address was sent in greg’s name and signed by him, and the from header/reply-to were set to support. you’ll notice that each of these has ABSOLUTELY FUCK-ALL TO DO WITH MY GROUP, WHICH IS ACTUALLY DOING ALL THE FUCKING WORK.

that’s okay. it’s not like we wanted to get the credit for something we’re goddamn doing right for a change. we like having people scream at us that we should be “taken out behind the woodshed” and beaten because webmail is slow. we enjoy having them call us “the ashcrofts of chicago” because we shove the horribly unreasonable and draconian use of ssl-imap and -pop down their perfectly-secure-if-it-weren’t-for-us throats. we absolutely love it when the maroon takes a quote out of context and twists it to put the absolute worst spin on it, so that we look like incompetent assholes who can’t be trusted with shoes that don’t velcro closed (“When told that webmail was unavailable for much of the day on July 29, [Bob] Bartlett said NSIT was unaware of any problem.” free clue: it’s because it wasn’t down that day. it’s not like there isn’t legitimate bitching to be done about webmail that you gotta make shit up, either.). man, if someone was nice to us for once, i wouldn’t know what to do. probably start weeping hysterically or something.

so yeah, i’m angry. bob should have let max sign the letter. it’s our goddamn work! i don’t give a good goddamn if we’re a part of “NSIT” and the letter said that it was “NSIT” doing this. i fail to give a shit that this happened under greg’s leadership. it should have been max’s name on it. instead, max left at five like max always leaves and like anyone could have predicted he was going to leave, and bob wouldn’t hold off, and since the man is incapable of picking up a telephone and calling people, he just asked greg if he wanted to sign the letter. and of course greg says yes, because who’s going to turn down getting the love for turning on spam filtering, which everyone has been begging for for ages? never mind that max goes around every day of every week looking like he’s already had his head cut off and is just waiting for his body to fall down; never mind his favorite joke is insulting himself by proclaiming that — another user’s insult — he is responsible for this madness.

and the replies to the letter have to go to support, because we aren’t trusted, and we aren’t good enough. never mind that when we turned on RBLs, the replies to that announcement came to us, and that somehow went all right. no one ran screaming from having the horrible, horrible mean sysadmins say “you’re welcome, thanks for your input.” no, we’re not customer service, so we’re not allowed to talk to them. we can’t be let out of our dank, dark cages; we haven’t had enough socialization and we might bite the children.

this morning, the support team lead IMed me to ask me a question, and he happened to mention that the vast majority of the responses they’re getting to the spam announcement are positive, and people saying “thank you.” well, bully for you: i wouldn’t know. i’m not trusted enough to let me see a single fucking bit of user appreciation for this project that has been killing me for months, and is going to continue to kill me for minimally the next two weeks. and that’s assuming the production rollout on thursday goes perfectly. if it goes tits-up, i’m fucked for months, plus we get super-sized helpings of “can’t you people do anything right.” that’s okay. the stress is good for me. never mind that i put ten pounds back on since early summer — ten really fucking hard to lose pounds, fuck you very much — or that i am smoking too much or that i can’t sleep anymore because i worry about work shit all the goddamn time, or that i am thinking about getting my gp to refer me to a shrink for depression primarily because of work-related stress. no, no, that’s all right. greg, you keep the credit because you wouldn’t want anyone to not know how personally involved you are with making them happy, and support line, you keep the credit because you know how to deal with people. we’ll just sit in our holes and try not to fuck things up too much for the rest of you.

i fucking hate my workplace.

and any of you out there reading this that work on support line, or for all i know greg is reading this, i don’t fucking want to hear it. this is my goddamn blog, and this is my goddamn rant about MY GODDAMN PROJECT, and so long as you people are getting the credit for my work you can fucking suck it up that i’m pissed.