The Website Is Down!
June 24, 2008 1:09 PM   Subscribe

The Website is Down! is a short movie based on tech support horror stories. (Movie may have NSFW language and imagery)
posted by achmorrison (38 comments total) 39 users marked this as a favorite
 
Hey, that website is down!

Or, at least, the video is not loading for me.
posted by mrnutty at 1:36 PM on June 24, 2008


"The tech call is coming from inside the house!"
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:38 PM on June 24, 2008 [1 favorite]


fucking sales guy. i hate sales guy.
posted by Mach5 at 1:50 PM on June 24, 2008


this. is. awesome.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 1:51 PM on June 24, 2008


This was so very much fun.
posted by hojoki at 1:55 PM on June 24, 2008


Reminds me of YOU SUCK AT PHOTOSHOP. Perhaps that's why the voices are all digitized.
posted by Justinian at 1:55 PM on June 24, 2008


*spoilers below*

I watched this last night. It's actually really good - if you've worked in IT. There are some really astute details and nuances, like the part where the tech is swearing while playing Halo and it times up perfectly as though he's sharing the salesdude's panic. Or, "OMG MY MOUSE IS MOVING!!" Then there's the desktop icon clusterfuck. "Restore it to the way it was!!!" *thinking to self 'what, are you retarded!?'* "Fine, here you go." "Perfect!"

And then there's the angry, longhaired freak in the machine room. "WHY DID YOU REBOOT IT!? WHICH ONE IS IT? DO YOU HAVE ANY FUCKING CLUE HOW MANY MACHINES THERE ARE DOWN HERE? HERE, WHY DON'T I JUST REBOOT ALL OF THEM FOR YOU GODDAMNIT OH FOR A CLUE-BY-FOUR AND YOUR HEAD WITHIN ARMS REACH I SWEAR TO GOD I'M GOING TO INSTALL A RAID SAN IN YOUR ASS BY WAY OF A GAPING CHAINSAW WOUND" *click*

And then there's the frustrations being taken out in Halo. Yeah, repeated PK small arms fire to the groin on an idling teammate sounds about right.

I've actually seen all of these things in the wild.

Did you reboot it yet? Reboot it. Is your monitor on? Is it asleep? Move the mouse. Is it plugged in? Is your network cable plugged in?
posted by loquacious at 1:56 PM on June 24, 2008 [4 favorites]


Oh man that was freaking awesome. I also hate sales guy, as well as his close relative, clueless but doesn't know it web developer. It should be illegal for that guy to seek employment.
posted by tracert at 2:03 PM on June 24, 2008


Yeah....I think the icons being reset was the best. And the whining about having a meeting to go to so everything had to be done right NOW...
posted by achmorrison at 2:06 PM on June 24, 2008


Welcome to my daily hell.
posted by chillmost at 2:14 PM on June 24, 2008 [3 favorites]


'You can't arrange them by penis.'

Classic.
posted by slimepuppy at 2:18 PM on June 24, 2008 [3 favorites]


Actually, this video explains exactly why tiered support exists. Clueless kids who answer the phone and do whatever the sales dude says to do should not have root. Ever. They should have the power to pick up the phone and ask someone who knows what they're doing to help.

But yeah, I agree the details are entirely too true to life.
posted by majick at 2:19 PM on June 24, 2008 [1 favorite]


hits pretty close to home
posted by Mick at 2:22 PM on June 24, 2008


majick: we had a tier1 tech, and all he was allowed to do on our major mail server was run kerberos admin, passwd, and xemacs. "what could go wrong?" you would rightly ask. well, he left his xemacs running and disconnected, which caused xemacs to spin infinitely and take up 100% CPU. this caused the server to choke to the point where it was a challenge to do an ls. you can never win.
posted by Mach5 at 2:29 PM on June 24, 2008


Actually, this video explains exactly why tiered support exists.

Exactly.... and in this video, the point where the guy in the racks accidentally powers down the Exchange server is where me & mine get involved.... ah.... critsit time...

It was cute, a little unrealistic but then again there are some truly clueless IT environments/help-desks out there....
posted by jkaczor at 2:30 PM on June 24, 2008


"How am I going to get online without AOL!?!"

Fucking gold, this is. Fucking gold.
posted by paddysat at 2:42 PM on June 24, 2008


I think the voices are sped up because it was probably slow and tiresome when they originally did it, so they just sped the whole thing up to keep it moving.
posted by davejay at 3:07 PM on June 24, 2008


Hahahahah! I am dying....

You folks have all seen The IT Crowd I trust, if not give it a watch.
posted by dougzilla at 3:10 PM on June 24, 2008


It was very hard to not burst out laughing and attract attention to the penis desktop on my screen
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 3:26 PM on June 24, 2008


This entire video is fantastic. My favorite part would probably have to be when It Guy closes Sales Guy's Notepad without saving (after, of course, deliberating for a second whether he should save or not).
posted by Brocktoon at 3:27 PM on June 24, 2008


I come here to MeFi to escape, people. Not to be reminded of my daily battles. Gah!
posted by Liosliath at 5:28 PM on June 24, 2008


odinstream: The original problem was a supposed 404 of the company website. Also, whatever the problem may have been, IT Guy was probably preferring to ignore all of it in favor of Halo. That, or just get Sales Guy off his back ASAP.
posted by Brocktoon at 5:38 PM on June 24, 2008


Not to split too fine a hair, but the problem reported was "the website is down" and the solution sales guy insisted on (b/c whatshername said techie had done it before) was reboot. Clearly sales guy's fault. I see no blame for Halo here ;-)
posted by jdfan at 5:58 PM on June 24, 2008


Oh. Damn. That's the sort of thing that really should suck, but was instead brilliant. I don't know if people still know about BOFH, or if that disappeared after the September that Never Ended, but this is basically BOFH as a very, very clever movie.
posted by waldo at 6:08 PM on June 24, 2008


I've worked IT support before.

There was the guy who called to complain that his workstation wouldn't turn on. I walked over to his cube, crawled under the desk, and plugged it in. Now, I know that if this guy tried to turn on his television, or his toaster, or his stereo, and nothing happened, the power cable would be the first thing he'd check. Hell, even the most technologically inept grandma understands this. But he needs a specially trained professional to figure out when his computer was unplugged? It really seems like people are scared to even try with computers.

Even worse: the guy who called and said he couldn't click on a particular button that he needed to click on. I couldn't make sense of what he was saying, so I just walked over to his desk. It turned out that the button was behind another window. I dragged the window out of the way.

This same guy called another time, greatly concerned and confused because the text on his screen was "really big". I didn't field that one, but you know what the problem was? He'd accidentally zoomed in on a document in InDesign; apparently, for the years he'd been using this software, he'd always kept the zoom level set at the default. Seriously? I mean, seriously? How did you get this job again?

Same guy, again (yeah, he's exquisitely retarded): always types his name, and the date/time, as the first lines of his emails, like so:

FROM: HARRY DUMBFUCK
TIME: 4:30PM THURSDAY


I patiently explained to him, several times, that he doesn't need to do that, because, y'know, it's email (which, again, he's used every day for years), and it does that automatically. He kept doing it anyway. I eventually gave up. And, the thing is...he's not the only one. There are several other people at that company who do the same thing. I tried explaining it to them, too.

I could go on. The time we told the graphic artists—many, many times—not to leave a particular application running overnight, because it'd crash the server. (And, of course, several times a week, they'd leave the application running, the server would crash, and they'll call us and bitch us out about it.) The bizarre webs of lies that people would spin to avoid admitting that they'd done something stupid that we'd told them not to do—even when it was blindingly obvious that they'd done something stupid that we'd told them not to do—even after we'd proven it three different ways. The elaborate, incredibly labor-intensive, Byzantine systems that evolved in various departments to make day-to-day business possible—which could have been replaced wholesale with simple, elegant, and zero-development-cost alternatives, had anyone taken their head out of their ass for half a second. Projects that transpired, from start to finish, without the overseeing manager once demonstrating the most fleeting comprehension of what the project was.

Not that it's made me bitter or anything.
posted by greenie2600 at 6:23 PM on June 24, 2008


I'm curious. What's the thing he did to delete the email from his boss's Sent folder?
posted by yoHighness at 7:23 PM on June 24, 2008


Excellent!
posted by chance at 7:42 PM on June 24, 2008


There's sort of a bonus track available if you reboot the server from that little unix prompt, plus a few easter eggs. I managed to get r00t and am about to haXx0r the site!!1!
posted by whir at 7:51 PM on June 24, 2008


Pure awesome. Deleting the email. Awesome. "I don't know, you must not have sent it." Awesome.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:33 PM on June 24, 2008


I'm curious. What's the thing he did to delete the email from his boss's Sent folder?

Simple - add another IMAP account to your mail client.
posted by DreamerFi at 11:38 PM on June 24, 2008


The part that really rang true was the girl in the background asking, "Why did he reboot the web server?" and Sales Dude lying and saying he had no idea. That kind of shit perfectly illustrates why we use a ticket system for things like this... it's not enough for someone to ask you to do something, because if it all goes horribly wrong you want to be able to point to a written request. C.Y.A.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:51 AM on June 25, 2008


Yeah, well, thank goodness those days are behind me... what's that mum? You've got a virus... oh jesus...
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:00 AM on June 25, 2008


The part that really rang true was the girl in the background asking, "Why did he reboot the web server?" and Sales Dude lying and saying he had no idea. That kind of shit perfectly illustrates why we use a ticket system for things like this... it's not enough for someone to ask you to do something, because if it all goes horribly wrong you want to be able to point to a written request. C.Y.A.

OK, so raise your hand if a) you are a sysadmin and b) nobody, I mean nobody in the company has the authority to make a pissed-off phone call and request you reboot a system immediately.

Not seeing many hands up there...
posted by StandardObfuscatingProcedure at 3:15 AM on June 25, 2008


Metafilter: It's the tip of the penis!
posted by Yer-Ol-Pal at 6:51 AM on June 25, 2008 [2 favorites]


"OK, so raise your hand if a) you are a sysadmin and b) nobody, I mean nobody in the company has the authority to make a pissed-off phone call and request you reboot a system immediately."

That'd be me. I'm one of three people with administrative access to production devices, one of whom I report to but he's actually even more cantankerous than I am and trusts my judgement more than everyone else's. The decision to reboot any box pretty much lands on me and only me. There is nobody -- all the way up to the CEO -- with the authority to make a technical decision for me.

(There's one other guy who's vulnerable to "Do it anyway" requests, but he's smart enough to check with me.)

I like my job. The SA work doesn't take up much time leaving me to work on less routine stuff, and somehow I never get shafted.
posted by majick at 8:35 AM on June 25, 2008 [1 favorite]


Crap. I try to do The Right Thing, both grammatically and technically, and MeFi turns my beautiful em-dashes into 8212;s.


greenie2600,
I enjoyed your rant enormously - even though I'm the sort of Luddite idiot who deserves your ire. But then I enjoyed your em-dash screwup even more:)
posted by Jody Tresidder at 9:19 AM on June 25, 2008


Crazy thing won't load. I get a "missing ; before statement" error and a big blank monitor.

I have to say, I'm unimpressed.
posted by Imperfect at 3:08 PM on June 25, 2008


Hokay, a quick bit of google-fu later and I think I've found the youtube link:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=BcQ7RkyBoBc
posted by Imperfect at 3:11 PM on June 25, 2008


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