Martin,

Finger pointing and blame laying is the perfect weapon for those who don't 
want to take the time (or haven't the ability) to properly analyze the 
problem.  Case in point: tech support types who blame our screen readers for 
unrelated problems.  Heaven knows that screen readers are far from perfect, 
but they don't cause the problems they've been blamed for.

Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin G. McCormick" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: December 29, 2014 14:12
Subject: Re: Off Topic: Jaws incorrect version Installation Mystery Solved


> I love it. I worked my last regular day for our IT
> organization on December 23. I worked in Network Operations. We
> do both the telephones and the network for the campus and there
> are 3 hams in my group so we don't have a lot of that sort of
> finger pointing right here but you would be totally amazed at
> the amount of shot-gun finger pointing that goes on every time
> something doesn't quite work right. It's always the network's
> fault even though we can take them right to the bad stuff and
> basically rub their noses in it and they stil think it is some
> network Voodoo that we pulled on them just to make them
> miserable.
>
> I was running our domain name server as well as our DHCP
> server and I wish I had a Dollar, heck, a Dime would do for
> every time I heard something like the following:
>
> "Is DNS running okay?" My answer was usually that this was the
> first time I heard of any trouble but I would check on it.
>
> I would check and, 999 times out of a thousand, it was
> fine.
>
> DNS is a finger-pointer's dream come true because it is
> a world-wide distributed data base meaning that nobody keeps it
> all in a central repository. Oklahoma State University's DNS
> keeps all the records for Oklahoma State University. Iowa
> State's DNS does the same for Iowa State and North Korea's DNS
> does all their DNS stuff and none of those systems are even
> aware of all the others.
>
> When something goes wrong at Kansas State or
> Microsoft.com, people on the Oklahoma State campus get the long
> timeout or the "page not found" error so it kind of looks like
> something must be wrong here and they ring my phone and I should
> be able to turn off the Stupid switch, hit the magic clicky
> button that puts us in smart mode and it all works again.
>
> I wish that was true. Also, if something is wrong at
> some remote site, we get the call that goes, "We can resolve
> this domain off campus but not on campus. When are you going to
> fix it?"
>
> We tell them that we will find out what is happening.
> When we start to dig, we find out that xyz.com blocks all
> traffic from universities or maybe just ours because somebody
> here did something nasty to them and they think blocking the
> whole network fixes everything.
>
> If it's a good day, you get hold of somebody at the
> remote site who A. knows what you are talking about and B. feels
> compelled to fix it and everybody goes home happy.
>
> On a normal day, you can't seem to find anybody
> responsible on the other end and then, one day, it all starts
> working and you never know who did what.
>
> I always enjoyed solving mysteries, but I am not going
> to miss the finger pointing one bit. It serves no constructive
> purpose at all and is just wrong an amazing per cent of the
> time.
>
> I admit to having done my share of finger pointing,
> also, but as one gets older, you kind of get shy about it until
> you have the smoking gun right before you and even then one
> wonders if every stone has been turned.
> "Dr. Ronald E. Milliman]\\\\`" writes:
>> I can commiserate with Tom's situation. When I was still on the faculty 
>> at
>> Western Kentucky University, at the beginning of every single semester,
>> without exception, I would find out that the university's Information
>> Technology people had been busy between semesters making changes to our
>> computers, both in our offices and in our classrooms. I learned that I
>> needed to go into my classrooms immediately before the semester 
>> officially
>> started to check everything out, to see what the I T people had messed up
>