"Thanks for doing the impossible on such short notice. Now do it again. Twice." Tech Support |
- "Thanks for doing the impossible on such short notice. Now do it again. Twice."
- "Google has stopped working!"
- "but I want to keep everything from the network storage (300tb) available on the desktop PC! (1tb hdd)"
- It's the end of the world, versions don't exactly match.
- Client was lying.. but we had not proof
- Sometimes... you've had enough, but also don't want to get fired.
- Availability status (Lync 2010) isn’t working
| "Thanks for doing the impossible on such short notice. Now do it again. Twice." Posted: 28 Oct 2019 04:14 PM PDT Okay everyone. Here it is. This, so far, was the ONE holy-shit story I was going to tell once I got a new job, but I'm preemptively telling it - maybe for good luck? It's taken a good two weeks to calm down. I'm a pretty patient guy, but this makes me steam just thinking about it again. Let me set the stage for you: Friday morning. Happy it's finally Friday. The flowers smell sweeter. I walk through the baby-vomit colored halls to my office, and greet my co-worker -- the only other IT staff in this dozen+ building, multi-acre campus with nearly 1,000 users. I grab a styrofoam cup and instant coffee mix to make my coffee, as we are no longer allowed to bring in outside food or beverages (the people who work with me will REALLY know who I am now). "Hey, co-worker! I think I have a good game-plan for this backlog of upgrades to install today, let me get my notes --" BANG BANG BANG BANG goes the office door. There he is. I open it to find our Director, breathing heavily, eyes bulging ($D1 from here on out). $D1: "Why aren't you guys in $LAB_A??" Me, flabbergasted: ".. are we SUPPOSED TO BE?" $D1: "You were supposed to tear down $LAB_A, $LAB_B, and $LAB_C 15 MINUTES AGO!!!" Me, shaking my head: "where is the e-mail on this??" I sit at my computer, start searching for the current date. "Teardown". "LAB_NAME". NOTHING. $D1: "I know I sent it to you guys!!" Me: "Could you please re-send it?" $D1 runs back to his office. 30 seconds later I have an email from him, with a lengthy document attached, detailing the restructuring of these three computer labs. Let me pause for a minute to remark on how ASTONISHED I was. I was absolutely, positively, taken aback. Here, in my inbox, evidence of nearly 3 weeks of planning between a dozen managers, meeting minutes, 20+ pages of how this was going to happen, even down to time blocks of how IT was going to assist. Upper management clearly thought this was important, and actually MANAGED a PROJECT. Only they NEVER. TOLD. US. ABOUT. IT. Oh, I can still feel the rage building. Breathe, pukeforest.. Anyway, $coworker and I book it to the labs post-haste, and rip all the computers and peripherals and put them in isolated locations. I think there were roughly 30 computers per room. We are human blurs, getting them out of the way for the remodeling team. We finished seconds before they started demoing the areas. I thumbed again through the hefty, and oddly, PLANNED, email documentation. Next steps for IT - begin rebuilds of $LAB_A, $LAB_B, and $LAB_C Monday. Cool. Contractors will work through the rooms all day today and over the weekend as needed. Rest of the day goes oddly smooth. Well, almost. Email from $D1: "What is the status of $LAB_A and $LAB_B? They need to be operational before 0800 Monday morning." This was about 5 minutes before it was time for my day to end and my weekend to begin. I slammed my door so hard I thought the glass was going to break. I RUN to $LAB_A and $LAB_B, the rooms are done, furniture in place, paint still drying. I am THROWING machines on desks. Somehow I completed a miracle -- two labs, nearly 60 PCs and printers - done in 45 minutes or so. Out of breath, I knock on $D1's door on my way out. Me: "$LAB_A and $LAB_B are rebuilt. Is $LAB_C still a go for Monday? We have some outstanding items but I'll take care of it on my lunch break Monday to make it work." $D1: "That will be fine." Monday comes around. Busy as ever. Showing people how to print who magically forgot over the weekend. Remembering $LAB_C, I head there on my lunch break and get it all in line, and up and running. I send an email to all involved that the final lab is now up and operational. Keep in mind, $LAB_C is about a half mile from our main site and usually you have to walk there. NOTE - I actually had to step out of the room before I wrote the rest of this story About 10 minutes before I am set to leave, I get an e-mail from $D1. "Please make sure $LAB_C is operational by 0800 tomorrow. Thank you - $D1" I began typing "Thanks, but I already took care of -" when my stomach sank. I began the half-mile trek to $LAB_C, with growing despair every step of the way. I open the door, and.. The room had been completely moved around. 30+ PCs disconnected with no semblance of care by upper management. Ethernet ports RIPPED OUT of walls by people just yanking the Cat5 cables. Things plugged into wrong ports with the wrong VLAN configurations. No regard for the actual architecture, everything just wantonly thrown around and told to "fix it". Guys, upon seeing this, I literally fell to my knees. I dropped my keys on the floor. I can still recall that feeling; I wanted to weep. Dutifully, I spent the requisite time that evening getting EVERYTHING going. Needed to run new ethernet cabling and everything. I never said a word. Next I checked on the room, it was in use. I'm still exhausted, weeks later. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 29 Oct 2019 02:34 AM PDT I'm not strictly speaking in tech support, but I've learned the arcane art of turning things off and on again and so I'm the go-to problem solver in my office. Yesterday at 4:50pm I got this fun call from my boss that I needed to "fix her google" and I was sorely tempted to pretend I was not there and run out of the door. Against my better judgement I stayed on the phone. For context, my boss is a woman in her late 40s who knows how to use word/excel/powerpoint just enough to convince herself that she's good with computers. Spoiler: she's not. After a few questions I figured out her problem was that she needed a certain file that was on google drive and couldn't find it. She told me that the search function was broken. I searched for "project Q3 2019" (extremely generic search terms) from my account and the file data_for_project_Q3_2019.whatevs was something like the 6th result from the top. Told my boss as much but she insisted she couldn't find it. I gave her different search terms -- "data project", "data Q3 2019", etc -- no dice. Every time, the file would be among the first results for me, and my boss would say that she only found unrelated files and that her search was broken. When she started with the conspiracy theories about google hiding her files, I gave up and went to her office to see for myself. I asked her to search for "project Q3 2019" again. She typed it, stared at the screen from a moment, then looked smug and told me that she couldn't find her file. I leaned over, pressed the effing Enter key, and told her that her file was right there.
In case you didn't know, as you're typing in the search box google drive shows you a dropdown preview with the top 4/5 results that it thinks you might want. Obviously, if your result is not there, you press Enter to see all search results. Or, if you're my boss, you just stare at the screen blankly and shake your fist at the merciless google gods. Anyway that's the story of how I fixed an entire broken google all by myself with a single keystroke and was out of the office by 5:10pm. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 28 Oct 2019 05:40 AM PDT I work as a semi-sys admin/fix it man in a small TV station. Because of the cross over of IT and broadcast engineering we typically let the broadcast engineers have free reign over their equipment including work stations. I started noticing that all the desktop PCs were hitting 99% full on the local disk, so I went in to investigate. I found that Swedish Colleague #1 (Swe#1) had turned on "Keep Offline" on all of our attached network storage. The network storage is about 300tb. And so Windows was diligently caching as much as it could to the local drive.
Swe#1 has also created short cuts to all the attached network drives from the normal admin workstation, and then copied those short cuts to every other computer in the building. Naturally none of these shortcuts work because they don't have those drive letters mounted. Swe#1 also wrote a proposal to one of our clients about automating video file transcoding and movement with the method of transfer writing as "using Windows protocol". [link] [comments] |
| It's the end of the world, versions don't exactly match. Posted: 28 Oct 2019 11:42 PM PDT In 2008, I was working support on multiple clients as a part of a server management team. One of my clients, had some staff who were incredibly pedantic and not particularly knowledgeable about their systems. But they wanted to keep their jobs, so spent time basically trying to find stuff to complain about. They were the point they expected servers to be almost exact mirrors of each other. Now don't get me wrong, having consistency on your systems is important (if you are focusing on what matters). In the case of the servers this time around, there were 3 servers that provided print spooling. There was 1 and we had built 2 new servers to take on the load while the old one slowly got retired. So we got stuff up and working and then after about I guess a month or two, one of their nit pickers decided to look at the servers. Noticed that the print drivers had a difference. The original server had version 2.6.1.15 of the driver and the new boxes had 2.6.2.1. The guy making the complaint was escalating to their management and to the management's management and then to the client management structure themselves. When it finally reached me, I responded with a very short email (with everyone and their favourite canine cc'd on the message.). The crux of the reply is in the attached graphic which I've cleared some details off of to protect the guilty (me) because, yes... my sarcasm filter was set to high. And I really sent this to the IT management of a global mining company who were being pedantic. The image is right under my profile. Sorry, I can't post a link to it or upload it. https://i.redd.it/0mbd2644dfv31.png For those wanting more on Al, this was well over 10 years since I worked with him. But I am dredging up at least 1 more good story about Al. [link] [comments] |
| Client was lying.. but we had not proof Posted: 28 Oct 2019 04:51 PM PDT This story explains how we implemented a new policy when checking out a computer. At a previous job I worked at, clients would bring in their computers to have fixed, and they would come to pick it up a day or two later. Pretty simple. One day we had a client bring in his laptop because it wasn't working (I don't remember the exact issue). We did our usual thing and I'm pretty sure the guy got his computer back the same day. Whenever I grab a computer off of the outgoing shelf, if it's a laptop the client usually opens it up to play around and make sure it's fixed, all their stuff is there, etc. While they're doing that, I'm making note that the computer is picked up and I take their payment and all is good. In this case, the client didn't open up the laptop (no particular reason as it happens here and there) and was out the door. This was a routine siutation... until he came back the next day. He sets his laptop at our front desk, opens up the lip and, low and behold, the screen is cracked. Now, the initial issue he brought the computer in for was definitely not a cracked screen. I was a little confused as to what happened until he said: "When I brought my computer home and opened it up, the screen was cracked. I want a refund and you guys to replace it immediately." Now, the tech who worked on it is a good friend of mine and is very knowledgeable in the realm of computers and networking. The company actually took a pretty big hit once he left but I digress. My point is, he isn't the guy to give a computer back with a cracked screen. So, I did my usual customer service thing of "I'm so sorry, I'll contact my boss and the technician and we will be in contact with you soon. We apologize for your inconvenience." When my boss, the tech and I were discussing this, of course, my friend says there is no way in hell he did that. We believed him as he wouldn't jeopardize the rapport of the company like that. We were trying to figure out if maybe something fell on it while it was on the shelf, or if I set it down funny, etc. Since it wasn't opened in the store and it being a new location, our cameras weren't recording yet, we couldn't prove it wasn't cracked in the store. Until we actually looked at the crack. A perfect thumb print. The guy must have grabbed the laptop by the screen and pushed the screen into the point where it cracked. Like I said, since we couldn't prove it (as he wouldn't admit it) and after some back and forth, the guy ended up paying for the screen but we did the repair for free. Still annoys me that he got away with that. If it were my decision, I would have charged him more. [link] [comments] |
| Sometimes... you've had enough, but also don't want to get fired. Posted: 28 Oct 2019 07:39 AM PDT I work in general PC Remote Software support helping people with random misc. issues. I think I'm a fairly patient person, but as I'm sure is the case with the rest of you, I am not without my limits. I've dealt with many a customer whose PC knowledge has ranged from "How do I turn it on?" to "I want to make sure these two routers are working properly and everything is as efficient as possible." To start, let me explain my name flair: "It says not connected, is it connected?" - Fairly simple, normal call... just a lady and her printer not working, but she made me stop and wonder for a second - how much reading comprehension are some of these customers equipped with? I'm fairly certain that question just bloody answered itself. That isn't the beginning nor the end of it though. I've also had a few common sense disappearances as well. For instance: Me: Can I get the email address on the account? Alternatively phonetics are difficult: Me: Tap the letter R as in Roger After a few phone calls like this where getting connected to the computer is a struggle, sometimes you just get a smidge apathetic. Normally this isn't a problem and doesn't actually go into my phone calls, but sometimes I just get a little... direct and take things face value. For instance: Me: Go ahead and click ok and yes to anything else that comes up. and mayyybe this one was a bit much but for god's sake I'm tech support not an education service: C4: I'm trying to learn this computer, but I can't find it. - (quite literally her first sentence) Moral of the story: Read, then think about what you read, and listen to the person you call for tech support if you're calling for tech support! [link] [comments] |
| Availability status (Lync 2010) isn’t working Posted: 28 Oct 2019 02:32 PM PDT I worked in a role for a large organization years ago where we were largely responsible for delivery of net new enterprise-wide technologies that was employee facing (or currency for existing platforms); we largely focused on the MS suite like Exchange mail, SharePoint, etc. That said, we also took escalations from our help desk/support teams if there seemed to be product or deployment specific issues. We received an escalation for Lync 2010 from one particular manager who indicated presence/availability was simply not working for one of her employees. I chatted with her a bit to understand the general situation, was the client logging on without issue, chatting, and so on and confirmed it was just a presence issue. So what's actually happening here? The client seems to go on "Away" status and isn't going back to "Available" automatically. At this point I'm chuckling a bit to myself and red flags are going up, however I entertain her and maintain professionalism.
TL;DR - Manager wasted the time of help desk, operational support, and engineering to try to prove an employee wasn't working by looking at his Lync status. Please, please, learn to manage your employees and deal with HR issues through HR. Technology support staff cannot and should not be involved in this unless you're looking at forensics for internal and/or criminal investigation (in which case there are teams and processes for that). [link] [comments] |
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