Instead of working, I blog.

OK, this is where the rant portion of this blog comes in. I'm completely at a loss and I just don't know where to go from here.

I was approached by a dev/admin the other day with a problem on his SQL box. His job isn't kicking off and there are no errors or anything. It's just not being run by the Agent. And when he runs it by hand, the history isn't logged. OK, so I check the usual suspects and don't seem to get any love. So I start asking him... has anything changed, have you added anything, have you deleted anything, etc.

He says no, nothing has changed and it just started having problems Mon. So I dug a little deeper and did some testing and was able to reproduce the problem with ease, which is a huge advantage in something like this. So I made a couple changes that looked like they may fix the problem. So the next day when his job ran he had the same problem. OK, so back to the drawing board.

I looked into a couple things only now it's getting pretty dry, right? The number of things that could cause this problem is dwindling. I managed to make a small change and now there was nothing to do but wait. So the next day came and the same issue was there.

So I went to ask him again... has anything changed, anything at all... I need to know if you've changed the wallpaper or put a txt file out there. No matter how insignificant you think the change is, I need to know about it. What's changed? \

Again, I get the answer, nothing has changed.

So I spend another day looking at this and I found that there were a bunch of Agent jobs that had been hung for a long time. And apparently this is happening every day.
I burped the services and all was well. However, the next day the problem came back and so did the hung jobs.

And this guy, with whom I've been working for almost a week, and for whom I've been racking my brains, tells someone else that he wishes he could finally get this issue worked out because it's been happening off and on for months... ever since they moved it to the new box. WHAT? What the shit dude? Didn't I just spend almost a week asking you if anything had changed? And somehow you didn't find it relevant to tell me that you had switched boxes and that this was an ongoing issue?

I'm just at a loss. I don't know how many more ways I can ask you what's changed on the box. What does it seriously take to get you to tell me something major like that?

But this is the nature of our work isn't it? All support people deal with stuff like this, and it seems that even IT people are prone to this as well. I would figure that since he's in IT, and an admin himself, that he would be able to give me at least the large pieces of info like this. So I guess when people have problems with something they're not responsible for, they just turn off their brains or something. I don't know.