Hi fellow chatroom guys and gals:
I want to thank each of you for your kind words. I can truly say that the 'consultant' thread was my all-time favorite.
1) Rita - you ain't fooling nobody. You're as smart as they come.
2) JRF, JimT, Patrick, and Rita - I certainly enjoyed meeting you in person and look forward to seeing you all again this year.
3) Wodisch - we have no problem understanding your English and your UNIX is excellent.
4) Harry, thanks (I think) for sharing the now infamous thread with the world.
5) Mary - if I hit you with a brick it was to keep from installing a patch that would have in no way helped on what I presume was a production box.
6) Alexander - please tell your son when he does his first undergraduate seminar presentation and he is ripped to pieces by his fellow students and faculty that it is not personal. That's just part of the learning experience. In seminars, everyone tries to find weaknesses in your presentation so that truth emerges. In that environment, very high praise is 'you didn't mess that up too badly'. A sense of humor helps. In that environment it is expected that your son respond in kind even to very senior faculty. Some will leave holes in their arguments just to be corrected.
7) Finally, to my co-worker, Mark. If you're going to tell a story, at least tell it correctly. Mark really can't help it; his idea of system administration is to insert a CD and run setup.exe. His UNIX is coming along these days, however. Mark started the tale off correctly. My present employer was basically a PC/AS400 environment before the company started a large-scale ERP project. My old employer was a very heterogeneous environment with many HP, Sun, DEC, SGI, and IBM servers and workstations. The new company was to be one flavor of UNIX; in this case HP but one flavor and more importantly one set of Service Agreements. Don't we all love to deal with those? Well, the two guys (who were then generally considered experts) showed up during my first week and started talking about Citrix. That was fine and it was all PC stuff to me so what did I care? Then the conversation drifted into firewalls. At the time, our firewall was running on an NT server and was crashing with this colorful blue screen on a regular basis. I knew that this same vendor's software would run on UNIX and I suggested that as an alternative. I suppose that because these two guys just happen to sell Sun boxes that they suggested that we purchase a Sun box or two to serve as firewall servers. I then said "I think we will stick with HP." The 'tech' wizard of the pair then proceeded to tell me that he could teach me all I needed to know about Sun and Solaris in two or three days. It was then that I turned to him with an absolutely straight face and said "I've forgotten more UNIX than you will ever know". There was stunned silence for several seconds and then they agreed that yes the software would run on an HP box as well.
I think that I am almost as good at dealing with vendors as I am with consultants.
Again, thanks to everyone.
Warm-fuzzy chatroom regards, Clay
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
