cramer
join:2007-04-10
Raleigh, NC
kudos:7 | reply to mmay149q
Re: I almost wish they'd do this to me Actually, you can blame AT&T's provisioning systems. They cannot even begin the order process as long as the system shows the pair in use. A sane system would block at some point down the line waiting for the UNE to be released, but their system kills the entire order at step one. There are ways around all this, but they won't bother for residential services.
(Regulations do have something to do with it -- and for a damn good reason otherwise they'd be breaking services all over the place -- but a provisioning system won't even let you enter an order is going a bit too far.) |
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 mmay149qPremium
join:2009-03-05
Dallas, TX
kudos:48 | said by cramer:Actually, you can blame AT&T's provisioning systems. They cannot even begin the order process as long as the system shows the pair in use. A sane system would block at some point down the line waiting for the UNE to be released, but their system kills the entire order at step one. There are ways around all this, but they won't bother for residential services.
(Regulations do have something to do with it -- and for a damn good reason otherwise they'd be breaking services all over the place -- but a provisioning system won't even let you enter an order is going a bit too far.)
Yeah, internally I think they do that so that somewhere an employee/contractor doesn't either accidentally create the order disrupting the potential customers service, or does it just to please the potential customer and get them off the phone thus leaving that potential customer with broken services waiting for new service and at the same time AT&T getting slapped with huge fines and etc.
Of course it could be required as part of the regulations for the ordering system to do this, I know as a help desk/IT admin for a mortgage company here locally in Texas we had a regulation stating all PC's holding customer data (with the exception of the servers) had to be rebooted at 12AM every night, so as an admin I had to create a task every night to run shutdown -f -r -t 01 at 12AM and verify once a month that all PC's were in compliance and no one removed that task.
Want to talk about some pissed off users in your environment, try having about 700 people send in support tickets in one day because their PC rebooted while they were out of the office and they had to re-do 3 - 4 hours worth of work, and then those same people not accepting your reasoning when you sent them the federal regulation stating it had to be done or we could lose our license to do mortgaging..... That part of that job was the biggest headache for 3 months straight.
Matt
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cramer
join:2007-04-10
Raleigh, NC
kudos:7 | Not required by, but, yes, in response to regulations. The RBOCs and ILECs have such a horrible history of screwing with competing 3rd party services -- which can come with some of the most unimaginable legal consequences -- that their provisioning systems are programmed to not allow anyone to remotely affect a 3rd party circuit. If they weren't such clowns, they wouldn't have to setup such a dead-stupid system. (they're a large company; statistically, they're going to have a fair number of idiots on staff.) |
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JoelC707Premium
join:2002-07-09
West Point, GA
kudos:5 | reply to mmay149q
said by mmay149q:Want to talk about some pissed off users in your environment, try having about 700 people send in support tickets in one day because their PC rebooted while they were out of the office and they had to re-do 3 - 4 hours worth of work, and then those same people not accepting your reasoning when you sent them the federal regulation stating it had to be done or we could lose our license to do mortgaging..... That part of that job was the biggest headache for 3 months straight. Sadly the users were 100% to blame in that case. What were they doing leaving 3-4 hours of work UNSAVED? And it doesn't really matter whether they accept your answer as "it's federal regulation;, if they don't accept it, that's a problem between them and their boss. Hopefully their boss is smart enough to tell them to save their work more often and go pound sand.
Although I am curious why you had to reboot machines every night? Was it so they couldn't do exactly what they were doing? |
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mmay149qPremium
join:2009-03-05
Dallas, TX
kudos:48 | You know honestly that was about 5/6 years ago, so I may be a little off but I think it had to do with "human error" so for example, person leaves computer on over night (they all locked after 15 minutes due to group policy of course) hacker get's into computer and see's left open work as well as 1 or more customers personal information and takes that information and steals those people's identities and uses them to buy all kinds of stuff before caught.
With the PC being rebooted the hacker would then have to hack in to the PC system, hack into the customer database software, spend countless minutes/hours looking through emails/documents looking for customer information.
I think the other reason was to guarantee that another office worker (say cleaning or etc) couldn't just come up and access the information and walk off with the personal information as well as possibly walk off with credit card #'s and etc, I mean we handled this kind of stuff daily and on a large scale, when our main database crashed once we were looking at over $100 million in capital lost if it couldn't be recovered.... :-X
Matt
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I am no longer an AT&T Employee. Check out my kudos! »/profile/1626573
Have U-verse questions? Please email uversecare@att.com and they will assist you!! |
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