How to apply for remote system access.

[reddragdiva]

1. Get the PDF from the intranet. This is the sort with fields you can fill in electronically.

2. Print it out.

3. Fill it in by hand (with the handwriting of a child).

4. Scan it.

5. Drop the scan into a PowerPoint slide.

6. Email that to us.

At least he didn't then drop the .ppt into a Word document, zip it and email us that.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I had no idea whatsoever you could do that with PDF. Does it work on xpdf or is this an acrobat only feature?

[smorgasbord.livejournal.com]

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

My word.
Your users are as stupid as mine.

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

I once asked someone who claimed to be a system administrator to confirm the IPs of the two mailservers on his domain. In response he sent me a 1600x1200x24bit screenshot of his desktop displaying the appropriate Exchange setup dialog box. It was like 4MB. And he sent it twice.

Re:

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

To be fair, maybe he thought he was pre-empting a whole bunch of other questions about his setup you might ask. Though even so, a screengrab isn't the best way.

Re:

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

Salient points: 4MB, twice

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall having filled one of these PDFs out in xpdf.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

... by email. Which 4 MB is now stored in his Exchange servers SQL Server backend at least once and probably twice, depending on how he named the file and whether they were actually identical files (and, thus, hashed to the same thing).

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

This squeals for posting in nmfp.

Get the PDF from the intranet.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Address? I think I can handle this simple task.

Re:

[reddragdiva]

It is a little-known feature. It's that he picked a PowerPoint document as the simplest and most obvious choice of file format to send the scan in that got me right there.

Re:

[reddragdiva]

The intent was clear enough that we couldn't really not process it. Assuming PowerPoint was the obvious choice of format was what really got me.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

I expect that, at some historical point, he wanted to scan a file and load it into PowerPoint. He uses some stand-alone scanning software that produces files of type <whatever> (or, more likely, with file extension .wvr). Then he double-clicked that file, didn't have whatever was appropriate, but wanted the image in a PowerPoint presentation, so chose "PowerPoint" from the list that Windows presented him. And from then forward that file type was associated with PowerPoint beyond his capabilities to revoke it.

That's a lot of presumption, though.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

I just want to point out that this post is fucking genius.

Re:

[steer.livejournal.com]

Yes, he should have printed it out, scanned it into photoshop and then sprayed in the ticks using the aerosol tool and returned it to you as a .rgb zipped, gzipped and uuencoded.

Re:

[reddragdiva]

No, it's talent. If it were genius, it would be in Flash.

(I have mercifully blanked the memory of where, but I have seen a 404 message that's a Flash animation. KILL TEH WEBMONKEY KILL KILL KILL)

Re:

[reddragdiva]

I suspect the "thought" process (what's the correct term for the thing that happens at the base of a luser's spine?) involved PowerPoint documents being his only mental model for all information storage on a computer. Like people who want their text editor to work like a spreadsheet. (These are not so common nowadays - Word goes with Excel like gastro with enteritis - but I had more than one in the early 1990s.)

[lothie.livejournal.com]

Heh. I got something like that in email last night.

The really weird part is that I'm tech support for our product offering, NOT for our infrastructure...

[death4breakfast.livejournal.com]

I recall reading an article at one point about using VisiCalc for text.

Mind you, this was long enough ago that at around the same time, I had to take my machine into the shop and have a physical modification made to it in order use my shift key (As opposed to a control sequence.) for indicating upper and lower case. And long enough ago that my machine used inverse characters to indicate upper case letters.

(But then again, I'm also old enough to remember playing "ADVENT" on an IBM 360/ series machine. :P)

[kest]

http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/434.aspx

Re:

[reddragdiva]

I do believe you've got it.