It boggles the mind what some people will actually do—to what ends they will go to try to “show up” someone or make themselves look better. What is even worse is when it is pure marketing bullshit.

I am sure that there are people who do this in every single line of work. But what disgusts me more than anything is someone who thinks that just because they did something like served in the military or got a degree of some sort that they know everything and that everyone else has to prove that they have two brain cells to rub together. Do you know what someone with a Ph.D. is good at? Marketing. They have to be.

You know what I hate with a passion? Marketing. Because most of the time it is hogwash.

What prompts this, you might wonder?

So today, I responded to an unexpected downtime call. Long story short (because details cannot be given out, for obvious reasons), this meant that I got up out of bed to answer it. No problem; it’s what I do. I go, I handle the problem, I encounter a couple of snags, find that I no longer have authorization to fix those snags, and go on about my day, providing a notification of the issues that I wasn’t able to fix—and why. As far as the “fix”, I had to switch to a backup connection on a mixed voice/data T1 (technically, DS1, but nobody calls it that except the engineers, I am pretty sure). No big deal; the equipment is setup to handle that, and it works just fine, albeit slower than anyone would like it to.

Enter Fatuous. Fatuous is someone who is employed as an “Information Technology” support person. Of course, that is not its real name, but it is suitable nonetheless.

Fatuous sends an email to the effect of “you cannot run data through the T1 because it will make voice calls suffer”. Let’s keep in mind here that this particular equipment does both voice and data, and it gives preference to voice calls. In other words, if all the circuits are busy handling voice calls, there is no more room for bandwidth. Sounds simple, right? It should, because it is.

So, I explain this little fact, and I get a mail back—oh, yeah, and half the office is needlessly carbon copied on this. Great! Let us fill everyone’s inboxes with a bunch of technical jargon that they will not care to read and (probably) have no desire to understand. Well, whatever. So the mail basically says, “Cite something, you’re wrong.” Wait a minute, what? Fatuous seriously does not understand what a T1 is. Now, if you have worked in the IT industry for any period of time, even if you have never used one, you should really know what a T1 is. Especially if you are over the age of, say, 25 or 30. Particularly if you are over the age of 40, since it is quite likely that’s what they were using for high-speed interlinks then (nevermind the fact that it is only a little bit faster than a low-end ARCNET card/network it was once considered high-speed connectivity, just as ARCNET was).

Fine, so I explain what this means in a high-level, cursory overview that hopefully had words small enough for Fatuous to understand. In the meantime, I am raving mad. I have dealt with Fatuous enough that it is readily apparent that there is no salvation here: its ignorance is willfully incurable, and that is terribly sad. I am not sure what is worse: the fact that it has a job doing something I am way overqualified for, or the fact that it has a job doing something that I am way overqualified for and makes a fuck of a lot more money than I do.

Sometimes, I really hate the universe.