RA. The first time .........

A self-absorbed, narcissistic rant. Technical. Boring. You might want to go here instead.

She sits at my desk, all the while smiling. I mellow out, the stress of the relatively short day seems to lift somewhat.
Hi 0.5, how are you doing?
I am good. I am good.
Lets get started then. This will only take 20 minutes.
Okeee!
I open a telnet session. What do you want to know miss? She pulls out a thick, stapled stack of papers, and starts firing questions.
Pull this. Run this query. Let me see a list of the running services. Gee you are mad at this unix stuff, huh? Wow that is a really nice feature.
And for my part i get the information. Save for two or three queries which I did not know how to get the info out.
Sorry miss, I have no idea how to do that. I will ask T and get back to you on that. Honesty. It is drummed into your head continuously

The report.
About a week later I am walking to my desk only to find my boss there, grinning:
0.5 there is something I want you to see.
He hands over a 10 page document; There in is a verse that is very memorable.

The __ system, not only violates most of __'s security standards, but poses a high fraud risk. Some of our findings indicate .........In addition, the person assigned to the review is in-experienced or untrained at best, and seemed not to know what he was doing. We would like to request another resource who is better versed for another review.

Gotcha! How flattering. I was hurt, betrayed but most of all, angry. I was seething. What happened to "I understand"? "No worries. You can give the information later"? The report had gone very high up before it started trickling down. My boss found it all very amusing.

The revenge.
Another review was indeed scheduled and a person with greater knowledge than me assigned. Except he is Indian, with a poor grasp of English and phrasing everything in pure programming-speak. Dear girl and her team were treated to long lectures about Java, indexing, transactions, clustering and other such mundane stuff.
"Vat I tell you is, __ is totally object oriented!". I was nearby. It was hilarious. A day later they asked for me. My boss refused. Said I was too busy.

The war.
1 week later they were back. New demands, change of tact. A tersely worded email landed in my inbox (after trickling down the chain of course).
Hi 0.5, we would like you to extract data from date x1 to date x2 for analysis. I was not in a mood to accommodate anyone so I replied;
Hi back dear audit people, to maintain integrity of the end data, I suggest that you extract the data yourselves. This way there can be a system trail and a 100% guarantee that there has been no tampering. A proper account with select permissions only shall be created for your use.
It seemed a fair enough suggestion, didn't it? I put a disclaimer that it would be a lot of data. There were mail nods everywhere. I had an ace up my sleeve. The database is a jungle with thousands of tables. To wade through that to get the information required needed a really close familiarization with the 1500+ pages manual. Hihi. People got stuck. So another email started doing rounds.
IT was requested to avail this information and they have not done it. This is delaying blah ...blah.......Ok! You got me. I extracted the data. 500 characters per line. Pad with character ' '. Each file came to 30GB. Close to 150GB in total.
Hello ladies and gentlemen. I have your data ready.

The meeting.
0.5, we cannot work with the information you gave us.
And why not?
The files are too large. They cannot be loaded into our system.
Did not I warn you about the size of the information you requested?
That is beside the point. Even you cannot work with the files.
But I can. What do you want to see?

Its a black screen. fgrep and grep. I am extracting small chunks of information, just as they ask.
See? You can work with the file.
But you are an IT guy. You would know what to do. Ahhh....and you wouldn't.

It is very simple. If you will need my professional services in the future, don't f__k with me.

Then today (by the same sunny bunch):

Hi,
Below is a list of services running on the __ box and need to be shutdown because they can be exploited in an attack on the system.
1. RPC service
2. Sendmail
3. TCP service
4. dtspcp
5. rexcd
6. FTP

Yeah. Shutdown RPC, TCP and FTP and then tell me how a server is supposed to work? I should have asked them if they intended to hook up a plastic pipe to the server and connect it to every other desktop PC.
Cr_p!

Trivia
1. Do not start watching 24 if you are going to work the following day
2. I wanted Mourinho to be humiliated. Get nothing. Still losing out on the premier league and champion's league ought to have plastered enough egg on his face. Why not just approach FA, UEFA and FIFA; Hey dudes, here is ₤500 million apiece, just give us the trophies! Then bribe every club with ₤50 million in the leagues as compensation pay for lost revenues! Guess we can't always get what we want.