A *help*desk?

Last week I arrived back at uni, and tried to connect to IRC in the evening to talk to Kevin. The only response I received was "Connection timed out". I didn't really think much of it at the time; just picked up the phone instead as a (relatively expensive) alternative.

When I couldn't get a connection the following night, I began to wonder whether the university had blocked the relevant ports. So I ventured online to their IT services department, found a Help and Assistance form, and filled it out. Their nice little Perl script promised me a response within a day, so I sat back and waited.

And waited.

Once it was fairly clear an answer wouldn't be forthcoming I fired up another browser tab to do their form again — thinking that perhaps they placed higher priority on people with university email addresses or some such thing. When I was there I actually noticed the little warning in the middle of the form:

Do not use any of the following characters in the form fields as they will cause your information to be lost when you submit the form: | ' < > * ;

I tell you, it really gave me confidence that they'd be able to help me out once I got through to them. Since there was probably a 50-50 chance of my having used a semi-colon the day before, I figured that was the reason I hadn't received even a confirmatory email telling me they'd got my request.

Not so. My next step was to email them directly, with the email they provided (helpdesk@). Before I went to bed I found that it had bounced with "permanent fatal errors", including the following useful line of information:

procmail: Couldn't create "/var/spool/mail/helpdesk"

Create? As in, that email account doesn't actually exist? Wonderful. With nothing left but my dignity pride irritation, I went with the last resort — a phone call.

Me

Hi, I'm in halls of residence and since I returned on Tuesday I've not been able to connect to IRC at all. Do you know—

Helpdesk

Yeah, that's right, we've blocked the IRC ports.

Me

I wondered if it might have been that.

Helpdesk

Yeah, you see, we were getting viruses through those ports, so we blocked them.

Silence

............

Me

So... can you tell me any way I can connect to IRC now?

Helpdesk

No, I'm afraid I don't know anything about that, all I know is we've blocked those ports.

Me

Oh.

Helpdesk

Yeah, we can't support individual software, you see, so I can't tell you what you can do.

Me

Right... Um. Is there anyone there who I could talk to who might know what to do?

Helpdesk

No, 'cause you see, we can't support all the software. All we know is that we've had to block the ports 6660-7000 because of viruses coming through, no one here will be able to tell you anything different.

Me

Oh. Right. *gritted teeth* Thank you.

Helpdesk

Thanks, byyyye

Me

*seethe*

So far I've had a couple of suggestions of alternative ports to try (from other, helpful, people who aren't Warwick's IT helpdesk), but nada. In the meantime — and what is looking like it will be the permanent solution — Kevin and I have had to resort to the dreaded Yahoo! Messenger. The horror! (Although I have in the long-distant past used MSN Messenger, I actually hacked Windows on this machine (with Google's aid, naturally) in order to uninstall MSN.)

Yahoo! Messenger is a bit of a shock when you're used to plain ol' mIRC. It has, like, user-adjustable fonts. It makes sparkly noises when someone says something to you! You can play games with people you're chatting to! It's just Sick and wrong.

Oh, the user-defined fonts? I hunted through until I found FixedSys, the fixed-width font that mIRC uses. Some things just cannot change.