ICBM

Today has been – to be frank – shit. As most people will already know, diplomacy has never been my strong point, and it’s even less my strong-point when it comes to international bullshit.

The issue today has been one of our sites, which recently migrated from phpNuke to Mambo, which is an unholy piece of user-hostile shitpot crap that I’m rapidly learning to loathe. In fact it’s already been noted in the office that I think it’s a hunk of shit, and I can’t deny, I’m not keeping that opinion quiet. I use it because I have to – but I suspect that there’d be more functionality in a two legged leprosy-ridden pig with swine erysipelas.

The company that did this migration for us are based out in Bangalore, or Delhi, or some fucking out-sourcing hellhole. Which means they’re six hours ahead of us, time-wise. This makes problem solving into something of a challenge. What makes it more interesting still is that the servers we use are hosted in New York, and the person who maintains them is in LA. So the servers are something like 6 hours behind us, timewise, and the guy in LA is two hours or so behind that.

Today’s problems have meant that I’m trying to get the guys in Bangalore to fix a problem, which then comes to me to be uploaded (the paranoid berk in LA won’t give them access to the servers) on to the dev server, and when we’ve tested it, to then go on to the live server. In theory this shouldn’t be a problem, as I’ve got (in theory, remember) all the necessary passwords in order to SCP (not FTP, that’s not secure) the files across to the dev server, and then SSH over to the live server so that it can all go live.

Except that El Paranoid Berk has changed the passwords and permissions so that I can’t do that. So I have to contact him, wait ’til he wakes up and/or can be bothered, and get him to sort it out.

All told, today I’m covering something like 14 different time zones, three continents, and three people, all of whom have different ideas on how this shit should work. Which makes it an Intercontinental Ballistic Motherfucker of a day.