Speaking of poor communication

Well, you all know the problems I had with hosting and how much it peeves me when companies don’t communicate, so today what do we have at work? Turns out the company who acts as our ISP switched their ISP without bothering to tell us ahead of time. So while the new name server information for our email domain propagates around the internet, we are not getting any email addressed to it. I’ve been trying to explain and handle frantic co-workers and outsiders as they try to understand why our email isn’t coming in, but we can send it out fine. Have you ever tried to explain the idea of getting updated DNS info around the internet to people who can barely understand what a browser is? It’s not fun. I’ve tried a post office analogy (It’s sort of like a forward mail order, except every post office needs to get it to know where to send your mail now, not just the local one.), but I’m not sure that really stuck with anyone.

This is, of course, on top of the website problems we had yesterday, which somehow wound up being my responsibility to figure out. Details; we don’t host the website, I’ve been purposely left out of the loop by the people who create the content and design of the website when it came to dealing with the company that hosts it and does the back-end programming for it. I assume because they are afraid it’ll become my baby instead of theirs and well, we can’t have that can we? So why, when some of the back-end programming doesn’t appear to work, do I get called in to figure out what the problem is? By the way, I figured out what the problem was, and even emailed the company the solution, along with the data they had lost which caused the problem to begin with, and today it works again. I’m guessing we’ll still get billed like 4-8 hours from them for it, no one will even see that as a problem and I’ll go back to not being involved in any of it again. Office politics rock, I tell ya’!

Similar Posts

  • OneNote

    By the way, as part of doing these staff interviews and research into ethics policies, I’m loving having access to a copy of OneNote to organize all of my notes and various other scraps of information. My only wish is that the other members of the team had OneNote as well so we could take…

  • Eleven Minutes

    I just wanted to share a little story of good tech support. I needed to set up a mailing list, and on my hosting account the tool available to do that is a program called EZMLM. It works fairly well, but I needed to make a small edit to one of the configuration files for…

  • Follow ups

    Lots of discussion about this post from yesterday going on around various places. Notably Geek News Central and Joy. To follow up Joy’s point, she’s right. I’m not going to sit here and tell you one version of software is better hands down, because it’s all relative. MS stuff is better for me in my…

  • I have the power, not!

    As my wife described last night, after about 11 hours of travelling back from Virginia, including a couple of stops, I arrived home to news that our file and database server at work was dead. We quickly unloaded the car and I loaded back into it to go off to the office, where I discovered…

  • |

    Linked – Tech Giants Brace for Europe’s New Data Privacy Rules

    This is going to be interesting… “Ms. Jourová said as the new rules take effect, countries outside Europe could begin demanding similar data protection measures for their citizens. “There will be a moment, especially as more and more people in the U.S. find themselves uncomfortable with the channels monitoring their private lives,” she said.” I…

  • Loose ends

    First off, yes I know that basically since I mentioned the support forums, THC’s site has been unreachable. It figures, like anything, the second you tell other people about it, it’s gone. 🙂 In other news, it’s an exciting time online, last night the email-to-blog feature for Blogger Pro went live, the Google API was…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)