Month: July 2010

There’s a hole in my door, dear Renault – part 2

So I arranged to take my car in Saturday to have the bit-of-plastic-on-the-driver’s-door fitted. I turn up, chap at the desk expected me and was very helpful.

Him> Ahh yes, part’s right here, shouldn’t take a mo to fit, I’ll just get some tools.

Me> Super thanks.

<fx>fiddling with the door happens</fx>

Him> Just going to make a phonecall, this isn’t looking how I expected

Me> It doesn’t look like a door with a well understood piece of plastic missing, I didn’t say.

Me> Uhh, sure.

<fx>phone call happens</fx>

Him> Sorry, but it looks like I can’t fit this part.

Me> You can’t fit this part.

Him> No, I think the inside door panel needs to be removed.

Me> The inside door panel needs to be removed, you think.

Him> Yes, and I’m not qualified.

Me> You’re not qualified. Super. Thanks.

I still have a hole in my door.

Meanwhile, 75cm toward the rear of my car….

You may recall that Renault Romford mistakenly did work I didn’t ask them to do, then insisted I pay for said work or I couldn’t have my car back.  I decided to take them up on their offer to simply undo the work and put back the faulty door mechanism and then give me a full refund.

Me> I’ve decided to take you up on your offer to simply undo the work and put back the faulty door mechanism and then give me a full refund.

Renault Romford> We can’t, we’ve thrown the old parts away.

Me> You’ve thrown the old parts away. Can I have a refund?

Renault Romford> I’ll need to call customer services for you….

I’ve had no call from Renault UK Customer services today, I left messages, Yvonne’s been a bit busy.

Still, nice to know I’m dealing with a reputable professional company, and not some east-end railway-arch crook.

There’s a hole in my door, dear Renault

My nearly-four-years-old Renault Clio was due a bit of tender loving care.  The rear door lock had stopped being able to lock the doors, a small piece of plastic fell off the front driver’s side door and, the one that tipped it,  the driver side wing mirror was shattered; someone hit it in a car park – thanks!

I booked my car in to Renault Romford, dropped it in before work, and waited for a call back letting me know what everything was going to cost.  The call arrived and the suggested shopping list was a little longer than I expected.

  • Rear engine mount starting to split – £103.00
  • Front disks and pads should be replaced – £245.60
  • Coolant and brake fluid drain and refill – £49.99
  • Air conditioning service – £79.99
  • Replacing the bit of plastic that fell off – £7.76
  • Replacing the mirror – £27.87
  • Replacing the rear door handle – £365.68 – wait, what?

I totally accept that most of the stuff in that list falls under the categories of “normal wear and tear” and “you broke it”, but things like a door handle should reasonably last the lifetime of the car.  It’s not like it’s even the most commonly used door.  Had this been the driver’s door, I might have grumbled a bit but understood.

I asked Renault Romford to replace the glass, replace the bit of plastic and service the aircon, explaining that I would sort out the brakes etc next month and would call Renault UK Customer services to talk to them about the rear door handle.

Renault UK customers service have still not contacted me, despite Tweets, emails and a telephone message asking them to do so.

I got a call yesterday saying my car was ready to be picked up, and that I owed them some £450.00.  I was confused.  They’d changed the rear door lock, despite me very explicitly saying that I was going to talk to Renault customer services about it.  Opinions were exchanged, we agreed this was most likely a misunderstanding.

I went to pick up my car this morning.  The car would not be released to me unless I paid in full.  In other words, I have paid hundreds of pounds for parts and work I didn’t ask to be done.

Insult to injury?  Hell, yes.  The didn’t replace the tiny piece of plastic that fell off the front door, one of the three things I did very specifically ask them to fix.

THERE’S A HOLE IN MY DOOR, DEAR RENAULT.   And I’m hundreds of pounds out of pocket.

Running an oncall rota

Being part of an oncall rota is pretty much a certainty if you work in the systems or operations team at any IT orientated company. Stuff needs to be working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and therefore you need someone available to apply duct tape and staples when things go wrong out of normal working hours. It continually amazes me, therefore, that so many companies get the management and organisation of their rota badly wrong, sometimes to the point of it being a significant factor in staff moving on.

As someone who’s participated in oncall rotas at all levels, here’s how I think one should be organised:

  • Sysadmins should only participate in the rota after they have completed their probationary period. Think of the goal of the probation period as being getting someone up to speed so they can participate.
  • Each oncall shift should last one week, and rotate at 2.00pm on Tuesday. If you run a late shift, i.e. 11.00am to 8.00pm, make the person on that shift also be oncall. Get all the unsociable hours out of the way in one lump.
  • The bare minimum gap between oncall shifts should be 5 weeks. If your rota is shorter than this, then you don’t have enough qualified staff to cope with holidays, illness, paternity/maternity leave etc anyway.
  • The oncall shift should be mapped at least 3 months into the future. Staff should be free to swap oncall weeks providing that no-one is ever oncall two weeks in a row, and that all swaps are cleared with their line manager.
  • Issue the oncaller with a good quality mobile phone and 3G capable laptop. The phone should not be a smartphone, the aim should be for maximum battery life and talk time. The laptop should be more like a netbook than a desktop replacement, should come with a spare battery, and should dual boot to Windows and a useful Linux desktop distro. These days I’d shell out for a nice big SSD to stick in it too. Make sure there are no restrictions on international calling and no data caps for the phone and 3G card.
  • Don’t give the direct number of the oncall phone. Instead, use an answering service as filter.  During office hours, the answering service should redirect enquiries to the regular helpdesk/support number.  Out of hours, the answering service should accept calls, take details and then pass these on to the oncall number. Additionally this service should text and email call details so there’s a record.
  • Pay a fixed daily amount for being oncall. Pay 1.5 times this amount for being oncall on weekend days. Pay 2 times this amount for being oncall on a public holiday. Where someone is oncall on a public holiday, add one day to their holiday allowance.
  • Pay a per-incident fee when oncall is used. Each oncall use should be tracked in your ticketing system. Make using oncall a business cost, thus giving the business a reason to make sure oncall is not used trivially, and a reason to make sure problems are fixed permanently and not just temporarily alleviated.
  • When the oncall person has dealt with out of hours issues, don’t expect them in at the regular time the next day.  Expect them to use their judgement to make sure they are suitably rested.   You do not want an overly tired oncaller dealing with problems on production systems.
  • The person oncall should never be taking on “out of hours” work. Want a database dumped and reloaded? Want a disk unmounted and fscked overnight when a server’s not busy? All those things can be done, but not by the oncall person. That person is there to respond to problems, not to perform routine or planned maintenance.
  • Make it very clear that abuse of oncall is unacceptable. Oncall is there to fix customer or service affecting problems, not to help someone with Excel.
  • Have a clear demarcation between production and testing/development/QA systems. The latter group are not oncall’s responsibility to fix.
  • If you have offices around the world, have a “follow the sun” oncall system, get your offices to cover each other.
  • Have realistic expectations of oncall response times. If you need to guarantee that problems are attended to within 20-30 minutes then you should be running an overnight shift, not oncall.
  • Expect a daily report summarising the previous 24 hour oncall period, even if that report is “Nothing to report”. The weekend period could be lumped together on the Monday.
  • Have a weekly oncall handover meeting between the outgoing and incoming oncall staff.
  • During the day, have a junior or trainee sysadmin be oncall. It’s good practice for them.

Doing all of the above shows that you take oncall seriously, and you appreciate the impact being oncall has on someone’s life. Your oncall staff are the people who salvage the business’s reputation when the midden hits the windmill at some unworldly hour of the night. Keeping them happy and making them feel valued and respected can only be to the business’s benefit.

Game review: Sniper: Ghost Warrior

Sniper: Ghost Warrior is a standard first-person shooter based on the Chrome 4 engine.  The marketing suggests this game is aimed at those who prefer stealth and strategy over outright shoot’em’up action.   After a brief, optional, training run you are dropped into the action, sniper rifle in hand.

Visually I find the game very odd.  Environments are very rich indeed and this game features some of the best foliage I have seen in a PC game. Certainly better than Just Cause 2, somewhat better than Crysis, and yet, at the same time, you look at scenery such as buildings and vehicles and are disappointed.  There’s none of the beautiful detail that JC2 set the standard for.

As you start the game, it’s all pretty obvious, move from point A to point B, perhaps shooting some baddies on the way.  You quickly realise just how tightly scripted the game is, and how shallow some of the segments are, and you very quickly feel hemmed in by the tiny (I’ve been playing JC2) sections of world you can explore.

It’s when you start to move around that the worst part of the game makes itself obvious.  You are a sniper, wearing a ghillie suit and moving slowly and quietly around in dense jungle foliage.   Bullets will start pocking around you, you won’t have a clue where from bar a very vague red arrow in the middle of your screen.  What’s happened is that you’ve tripped over some enemy AI who’s managed to pick you out from a distance of about 150 meters.

You won’t be able to see him, but he’ll cheerfully keep shooting at you, not often hitting, until you stand up so your head is out of the undergrowth and eventually work out where he is.  By this time you’ll have moved enough that more eagle-eyed AI join in.  You die, you get to do it again.  It’s very very dull.

At this point you’ll realise that the sniping system is confusing and not very good.  Other than the target’s movement there are no real visual clues as to why the bullet mark is where it is.   It feels a bit random and sterile.

You’re not always just sniping, there are some sections of standard let-rip-on-full-auto.  You’re a fully trained, fit, agile sniper clearing out an oil rig.  Yet you somehow cannot make it over a knee-high rail to go down some stairs.  Eventually you’ll realise there’s a small panel you have to shoot to make a section of the rail disappear.  You’ll check your calendar to make sure it’s not 5 years ago.

The bullet camera is a straight ripoff, accidental or intentional, I don’t know,  of that given to us by Sniper Elite back in 2005.  Given the choice between the two games, I’d suggest picking up Sniper Elite and playing that instead.

If you’re really intent on buying this game, I’d just wait a bit.  It’ll be reduced in price quickly enough as it really is fairly poor.