Mar 05, 2010 18:20
Apologies to all the Lahndahn posse. I was there yesterday. I didn't say so.
That's my third visit over the past fortnight. I'm doing some troubleshooting support for a company which uses software which should be BURNED WITH FIRE and who have other issues, such as their sysadmin running off to Norway and vanishing in the Cold Wastes without giving notice or leaving any documentation, including server passwords, available to those Left Behind.
The software I refer to is not server based- except peer-to-peer database sharing which doesn't work - but it creates many many problems of its own. It was written in Visual Foxpro. It runs and relies on connections to till receipt printers over RS232-D.
As such, the XP boxes it's running on are now very old and very slow. So the new MD bought some nice shiny Win7 Pro boxes to run it on. Yeah.
Oh, and they're Dells. Oh, and they don't have RS232 ports. Oh, and they're 64bit Win7.
So, as well as having been instructed to illegally hack the shit out of all the main servers (now done), I've also had to find USB-Serial cables. I've also had to try to find drivers for them. Eventually, I had to write my own for 64bit. And then I had to make that software - which they PAID MONEY FOR AN UPDATE TO LAST MONTH BUT IS STILL USING VFP - run on a completely unsupported platform. And share data.
So I haven't finished work before 9:30pm on any of these visits and that's only because the offices get locked about then. So I barely got the last train home - and I am not paying for more than a same-day train ticket - in any case. Which is why I didn't say anything.
Sorry.
I am currently fighting back a savage need to rewrite that piece of shit software and steal the supplier's customer base completely in retribution. And then visit Norway with murder in my heart. Is that bad?
work,
life