Tag Archives: Oracle

Exam woes

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Exam woes

I am putting this here instead of sending it to Pearson Vue for two reasons: they are not likely to take it seriously, and two, to avoid the very slim chance that it may negatively affect the “greeter” who probably was doing his best with his tools.

Hello Pearson Vue,
I am sure millions use your services so frankly I don’t expect anyone to take this seriously.
All the same I have to put it on record.
1. I logged in well ahead of time, launched the app and was kept waiting for over 30 mins.
I tried the suggested chat option which was offline and then sent a mail as well as call the office line (OOTO message). Finally someone came online and told me you had technical challenges. I am also in IT support, if something is not working I am sure you have a record of all those scheduled to write exams during that window and you could have sent out a message (email/SMS/phone call). You probably don’t know the emotional strain standing by to write an exam with no idea what was going on.
2. The gentleman then released the exam and all I got on my screen was a message to “refresh the page”, he tried about 3 times then suggested I restart my system. Which I did. When the system came back on, he informed me the window to release the exam had closed! I asked if I can reschedule it for today and he told me all slots were occupied (I would expect if you kept me waiting for that long, you would bend a little). On top of that, he had then discovered the reason why the exam wasn’t opening on my system. An “illegal” application was running. If he had said that to begin with maybe I wouldn’t have had to reboot my system and then find out the exam releease window (5mins?) had expired. The only thing running on the system was Free Alarm Clock, otherwise it is a completely bare system. I didn’t even have an antivirus (removed yesterday and rebooted my system) just to be sure nothing interfered with the exam.
3. Two things come to mind, I think your greeters need more training – because obviously he didn’t know what was causing the blank page I got. And two, please improve your application (it sounds as if all you have is some whitelist that blacklists everything it doesn’t understand even if it is harmless). Addendum to this second point, have whatever screen the greeter is looking at pop-up the name of the “illegal” application so that the greeter won’t resort to the “reboot your PC” as the default solution only to then say the release window had expired.
Please note that the free alarm clock was running minimized into the systray. But after getting off the phone with the greeter to whom I insisted there was nothing on the system. I went through an audit and that is the only thing on the system (outside chrome, firefox, and java). It is not good enough to just say there is something illegal (for that matter, only after the fact) on my system. Even if the exam release window had not expired, the reboot would likely not have helped because the alarm software auto-starts by default.

Rant over.

Best Regards,

NB: I still get to write the exam, I just have to re-schedule it to another date in the future.

Six degrees of separation: get me to Larry Ellison

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Six degrees of separation: get me to Larry Ellison

This is going to sound totally crazy. I am trying to get to Larry Ellison. No. I am not going to ask him for a cent.

Yeah. We have all ready about his exploits in and outside Oracle. Some not too flattering. Some consider him narcissistic. But I guess you don’t achieve what he has done by being a pansy (excuse the word). You are going to step on a lot of toes along the way -and it takes a certain “I am the best there is and I know it” attitude to do that. Not that I agree with that approach, but I can make a comment when I make my first billion. Lol.

I am not interested in all that for the moment. I am not interested in his money either (not right now).

What I am interested in is simple. I want him to send a personal birthday email (early July) to someone in his organization (Oracle). Of course mentioning me in passing as the “requester.”

If I am to believe the six degrees of separation theory (and Will Smith’s film), I should be able to get to him (Larry Ellison).

So how am I going to make this happen?

I assume there is an army of qualified assistants trolling the web for references (good or bad) to him and I am hoping one of them would pick this up. If “you” (whoever you may be are the one – note that you are my hero). Larry can chalk it up as his good did for the day!

Well, we shall see if the Oracle Juggernaut will pick this up and I suddenly get a communication (which I will verify of course) asking for more details.

Here is to the rich folks out there including Larry. It’s great to have unlimited wealth. I understand that only the few possess the “requirements” to achieve this and to the rest of us they aren’t usually “nice.” But hey, it comes with the territory.

Let’s see if “we” can convince him (Larry Ellison) to do something completely out of the ordinary for him – he may just be setting something monumental in motion.

To Larry! To Oracle! To the six degrees of separation! Let’s do this!