Thinking for Two: A Help Desk Life

Tea soothes. Tea calms. Tea energizes and invigorates. Tea cures.

So I hope tea will work on me today, because I'm ready to tear the throat out of the fucking Australian bitch upstairs who never reads her own bounce messages. She gets one and automatically assumes that she needs to contact me to fix what's broken.

Shut your trap, you whore, open your goddamn eyes, and read the error message. I've had this problem with her before, and it always starts out the exact same way. "AOL is bouncing our mails again", she says. AOL used to bounce our messages — for a few days, many eons ago — before we had our ISP put a new PTR record in our DNS so that AOL's reverse DNS lookups would work. (This anti-spam technique is, by the way, utter bullshit and a complete waste of everyone's time.) So, yes, Whining Matilda, AOL bounced our mails once and I fixed it. Doing so was a big mistake.

That was, like, seven months ago, but patterns, once learned, are hard to forget. Whenever AOL rejects any message she's written, for any reason whatsoever, it's a phone call to me. "AOL is bouncing our mails again." No, they're not. Time and again, it's AOL rejecting one message — by definition, hers — for one reason of her own design. Last time it was because she'd sent a message to someone who did not exist. That was a phone call. This time, it's because she was sending a link, a URL in the form of "http://20.30.40.50/some/resource.html". AOL does not permit IP addresses in URLs. It is yet another one of their anti-spam techniques. They state this policy on their website: when their mail server bounces the message, it includes a URL to that very page. If you bother to click the link and read the explanation, you understand completely why your mail didn't go through. She didn't bother. She never bothers.

And thus the Aussie bitch hounds me with each and every one of her AOL-borne e-mail problems. I think I want to throw her on the barbie. Or perhaps pitch her off of Ayer's Rock.