Your employee lied to you Tech Support |
- Your employee lied to you
- Of slow cables
- Caught in a web of lies, after accusing me of lying
- For anyone who ever wanted to yell at their customer
- It's the end of the world, versions don't exactly match. (no contraband -third time's the charm?)
- Smartest Customer Ever Story.
- Don't be late
- I love meaningful error messages, and I really wish I got one once in a while.
- Older user complaining about his web browser crashing
- User threatened to quit because of the IT department trying to do the right thing.
| Posted: 30 Oct 2019 05:55 AM PDT We received a ticket Monday at 9:10. At 9:11 we responded with troubleshooting steps. When they didn't work the user called me at 9:15. I walked her through some more and none of them worked. Since the branch she was at was a 10 minute drive, I told her that I would need to send a tech and she would be out there in just a few minutes. 9:30, 20 minutes after the ticket was put in the user's immediate boss called me and said that her employee was down and we weren't doing anything to help her. I told her that yes we were, we did some troubleshooting and it didn't work, so I'm sending a tech out there, she is walking out the door now and should be there in the next 15 minutes. At 9:40 the branch manager calls me and says that she has a teller who hasn't been able to work for 40 minutes and she was told we aren't doing anything to help. I told her, that yes we are doing something, we troubleshot the basics and when that didn't work I sent a tech out there who should be arriving in the next 5 minutes. Then she asked me why her employees weren't told that. I mentioned that not only was the original teller told, but so was her headteller. But she responded that they say we told them nothing. I told her they were told and we record all our calls so I can send her the recordings. I guess she thought I was lying, so I sent her the recording with the title that she was misinformed. Also the ticket had been updated each time. The problem was fixed 3 minutes after the tech walked in the door. Turns out neither teller, nor head teller knew how to turn off a computer that was frozen. Troubleshooting steps included turning the computer off via the power button, they turned off the monitor instead. When I tried to get them to unplug to get it to turn off, you guessed it, the unplugged the monitor. They both said, they thought that was the computer and I never mentioned unplugging the modem. That's true, I never said the word modem, I said computer. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2019 12:43 AM PDT About 20 years ago. Our company is laying network cable at a customer location. CAT5E because it was finally time to expand the network to the other rooms. There is some existing cables already, specced CAT5 and checked both ends. There's a neat report about this. After everything is done, we have one user complaining about a slow connection to the server. We check and surely, 10Mbit is all we get. No matter how much we fiddle with the settings on the workstation or switch, 10Mbit, half duplex will work, anything other will not. Now then we follow the (existing old) cable where it should go. Strange, it's not going through the wall as expected per the drawing but up on the old false ceiling. Above the balcony. That is 4 meters high. Ok, any volunteers to go up there and crawl over 2x4 beams, 2 feet apart? So here we go. And halfway, we find it, this little 4-port HUB, a brand we've never heard of before. 10Mbit-only indeed. I guess what happened is they ran out of time, quickly ran the cable over the ceiling, found out it was more than 300ft and decided a no-name mini-hub was cheaper than doing it all over again. TL;DR: when a shortcuts becomes too long, bad things happen. [link] [comments] |
| Caught in a web of lies, after accusing me of lying Posted: 30 Oct 2019 12:05 PM PDT So a little background: I work for a large corporation and we have many branches all over the US. Part of my morning routine involves making sure every branch balanced their drawers and closed-out for the night, which prints out an End-of-Day report for them. Once a system is "closed-out" for the day, it can't be used again until the next day. If a branch doesn't close-out, I send out an email to Home Office, the branch, and their District Manager informing them that the branch didn't close-out. The employee responsible is usually written up for not closing out, and if it happens too often - they're let go. This morning, one of our branches didn't close-out, so I send out the typical email. About an hour later, the employee responsible hits reply-all, says that I'm lying and that she DID close-out and has the report to prove it. She also adds that the computer is messed up and she isn't able to login. So I start investigating. I remotely connect to her computer, check the system logs, and immediately see the problem; but I decide to have the employee verify first and write back (hitting reply-all as well)...
She does, and confirms my findings. I write back again...
Needless to say, Home Office was pissed. The District Manager questioned her and she finally admitted to everything. She still works for us, but I'm pretty sure she learned her lesson. [link] [comments] |
| For anyone who ever wanted to yell at their customer Posted: 30 Oct 2019 01:37 PM PDT If you've read any of my other posts, you'll know that I once worked for a small municipality. One of the offices that I supported was the police department. The chief of police was a very friendly man, but severe. There was a lot of turnover. This didn't engender a lot of trust on my part, so I tended to be cautious. Since it was a small organization, they had a tendency to be very cost conscious. This matters in this case because they didn't want any backups. You read that right! No backups at the PD. Too costly. So now the stage is set. On this particular occasion, I was called over to the PD where the chief of police (COP) was telling me that server wasn't letting them access their files. Sure enough, the system had crashed. It was a windows machine that was tasked with everything! and one of the drives in the raid array had failed. Why my predecessor didn't configure raid 5/6 is beyond me -- strike that. He was incompetent. I spent a lot of time undoing his mistakes. The good news was that the evidence locker kept hard copies of everything, all files related to cases were burned on CD, and their primary system was at the sheriff's office across the street. They had a fiber link under the street that connected them to the SO's servers. So no critical data was lost. The problem was that everyone needed their own login so they could access their own mail and do research. Unfortunately, because the AD/DNS/DHCP/File-server was now dead, they were all dead in the water. Well I kick into high gear and get a quote for a replacement server, including a backup system, and got it off to city hall for approval, which came back very quickly. Given the nature of the situation, we had it overnighted. I came in the next day and setup a VM environment with redundant DHCP and DNS servers, a Samba file server and redundant Samba4 AD servers. (To conserve money, I used those in as many places I could. They worked well and I had a good relationship with the developers so problems were usually fixed right away.) This takes most of the day, and closing time is approaching. Now, from the exterior, the building is pretty secure. However, with the exception of the evidence locker, the interior was not all that secure. (One day, due to a needed upgrade, and with the help of the commander, I broke into the Victim's Advocate's office -- all it took was my AutoZone card. She was a friend and wouldn't have minded.) Because of this lack of security, I was *NOT* comfortable spending the night in the PD. At night, there are only two officers on duty and if they are called away, I would have been in the PD by myself, for an extended period -- not good. Since everyone only required the ability to log in so that they could burn paperwork to CD and log into the SO system across the street, I created an account that everyone could share until I came back the next day. I gave this information to the officers on duty and told them to "spread it around." I made sure that they know that this was a shared account and that they needed to pass along the information during shift changes. Then I left for the night. You can see this coming. The next morning, I walked in and found chaos. Everyone was running around trying to answer phones and help people at the counter. The COP was furious and was ranting at me that this was unacceptable because no one could log in. I told him that I agreed with him. He then started to berate me as to why I didn't create logins for everyone. I told him that I didn't feel uncomfortable being at the PD at night because "I wanted to make sure that no one could claim that the PD allowed access to case files." I told him that I had created a temporary shared account and gave it to the night officers before I left. I told him that I gave them instructions to make sure that the information was passed along at shift changes. I showed him the note that I gave the night officers. When he continued to berate me, I looked him right in the eye. ------ Me with a nearly angry voice: You *cannot* blame me for not wanting to be in the PD at night! *You* could have *lost cases* if it came to light that a *contractor*, without proper credentials, spent the night, *alone*, in the PD! You *cannot* blame me that *your* officers didn't follow instructions! I am sorry that your staff are having trouble right now. I'll fix it, but I am *not* to blame for the current situation! Go talk to your officers! ------ I was mildly shaking with adrenaline, but I seem to remember thinking "Boy, that felt good." He continued to grumble and and later he talked to my boss, but when I explained the situation, my boss, who was the interim city manager, and therefore the his boss, backed me. In the end, he didn't have a leg to stand on. I had other run-ins with him from time-to-time, but he was never able to cause me any real harm -- I didn't work for him. [link] [comments] |
| It's the end of the world, versions don't exactly match. (no contraband -third time's the charm?) Posted: 30 Oct 2019 11:45 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 was something that I sent them called explanation.filetype because, yes... my sarcasm filter was set to high (it's a persistent issue with me). And I really sent a "filetype" to explain this to the IT management of a global mining company who were being pedantic. Ok.. twice this was removed for Rule 4 relating to the *thing that shall not be named*. Now, close your ey.. oh wait. right... that won't work. Imagine the following: A white image with three Windows server login screens. One has an arrow pointed to it with the word "Apple" and the other two are below and have "Oranges" and an arrow pointed at them. The one that has "Apple" pointing to it says "Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server - Built on NT Technology". The two that have "Oranges" pointing to them, shows "Microsoft Windows Server 2003 - Standard Edition". With a clever justaposition of the images differentiating the old from the new in a humourous light. 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. I also have a few Marilyn stories... Marilyn was Karen before Karen existed. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 30 Oct 2019 10:45 AM PDT Let us use aliases, our team member is SupportGuy, call the customer Mr.ID10T as this will be relevant in the following contexture. We are a file storage solution for on-premise data consolidation, this is also relevant for further understanding. A customer had called in with a priority 1 escalation about a month ago after hours, and as I am the on-call engineer, SupportGuy assisted. The same customer called in, with the same issue, while threatening legal action last night. The following is a pseudo transcript between the customer and SupportGuy during the first remote session. Mr.ID10T: "Hi SupportGuy, I'm having an issue with your product, I can't access my data." SupportGuy: "Hi Mr.ID10T, I assume you have a priority 1 escalation?" Mr.ID10T: "Yes, your software is not working, I tried everything." SupportGuy: "Let me take a look for you bud." Mr.ID10T: "I backed up the server and now it doesn't work. Does your software retain configuration settings? Because it doesn't seem like it." SupportGuy: "Mr.ID10T, we retain configuration settings permanently, even through upgrades. Something must've happened, let's take a look." SupportGuy proceeds to start our simple configuration, 5 minutes later the data is accessible, the customer is grateful, SupportGuy ceases further troubleshooting, hang up and grab a beer, successful p1 avoided. Fast forward almost exactly a month, a second transcript below..... Mr.ID10T: "Hi SupportGuy, Your stuff doesn't work, I can't access my data." SupportGuy: "Hi Mr.ID10T, what has changed? This was configured correctly a month ago." Mr.ID10T: "It just stopped working." SupportGuy initiates a remote session with Mr.ID10T and find out that the server is again, unconfigured. SupportGuy: "This server seems to have been unconfigured, did your team make any unauthorized changes to the solution?" Mr.ID10T: "We haven't made changes, are you accusing me of changing things? Your software changed it, it's not good software, you shouldn't let this happen." SupportGuy: "Let me take a deeper look into what happened." Continue to delve through our application logs to no avail. Move onto 3rd party application logs. No dice. Move onto infrastructure, the first thing SupportGuy checks is the hypervisor logs on the ESXi cluster. BINGO!!! Logs show that a snapshot had been reverted 4 hours before our call from Mr.ID10T's AD Account. SupportGuy: "Mr.ID10T, can you explain to me why you reverted to a base server snapshot? This is the cause of this issue and is not caused by our application. Which person on your team initiated a "Revert to Current Snapshot"? Mr.ID10T: "You're accusing me again of wiping the configuration from the software? Why would you think I am that stupid to do that? You will be hearing from my lawyer. Send me an e-mail with your manager's contact information as this is defamation." SupportGuy: "Have a good day Mr.ID10T. I will write a summary." Proceeded to write up a summary of the issue, cause, and resolution with a direct embedded recording of the remote session. Our team has to review the sessions any time there is a threat of legal action. SupportGuy specifically highlighted the timeframe from where we see the cause and it shows clearly where the customer reverted to the snapshot. Now, a conference call is setup with irate Mr. ID10T, SupportGuy, and the Director of Operations. DOP: "Mr.ID10T, could you please explain in detail, the issue you had, and why legal action was threatened against our engineer?" Bring up the entire recording and move forward to 18:38 in the video where the hypervisor logs are being analyzed. At 18:52 it shows in BOLD where the revert to current snapshot was ordered, and from which AD account. The AD account shown, just happened to be, PEBCAK.BIDNISS/MR.ID10T. Mr.ID10T: "Oh....at that time is when I performed a snapshot backup! It must be the hypervisor being faulty." Mr.ID10T proceeds to the VSphere desktop client, right clicks on the server and selects Snapshot->Revert to Current Snapshot. SupportGuy: "Mr.ID10T, that is reverting to the base snapshot. You literally just unconfigured the server again. Please do not click that ever again, you need to use TAKE SNAPSHOT instead of REVERT." DOP: "Mr.ID10T, I will be contacting your CTO to discuss your actions during our calls, as they have all been recorded. Please do not escalate further issues regarding unconfigured software or we will be forced to deny all support requests moving forward. Have a nice day." TLDR: Mr.ID10T reverted to current snapshot multiple times which was a base install of Windows 2019 with our software INSTALLED but not configured, then threatened legal action, then was embarrassed when SupportGuy proved he caused the issue and told SupportGuy to go F*** himself. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 30 Oct 2019 01:05 PM PDT I have a story from my first job as a computer operator for a small specialist bank back in the 80's. I will obscure some details to protect anonymity. We had a programmer who I will call Steve for the sake of the story. Steve was a bit odd, looking back now he maybe had Asbergers, but that wasn't really a thing we knew about back in those days. I kind of liked him, but he had an uncanny way of talking to you and winding you up without realising. While Steve was an excellent programmer in our business environment, his real passion was programming games, he had this job to pay the bills to fund his game dev ambitions. At our bank all the development work was done on dumb RS232 terminals connected to our mainframe/mini computer (whatever the definition of huge big black boxes with flashing lights and tape drives was then), and one day Steve showed me a game he had written in his spare time of a very impressive rendition of a popular early arcade game running on said terminal. It wasn't done with ASCII art, and to be frank I was very impressed with what he had achieved which I thought was well beyond the capabilities of the terminals. On to the fateful day. I used to work shifts, and the morning shift started at 07:30, where we come in, check the overnight processing have gone through, do a backup and collate the reports printed overnight. I am normally very punctual, and the way the trains ran for the commute, I was normally in the office at 07:15. However that day for the first time I managed to sleep through my alarm and consequently missed a couple of trains and got in I think at 07:50. I hate being late, so walked in the door very flustered. What greeted me when I walked into our computer operations office was every manager in my department, the accounts director, the Chief Executive of the bank and a few programmers all looking very stony faced, none of whom should be in the building that early. The only good thing for me was that they were so pissed off with what was happening they weren't overly bothered with my lateness. What had happened overnight was that our mainframe had been running really really slowly and the overnight processing that should have finished hours ago, was still going on. They had got to the bottom of it just before I got there. Steve had been running his game the night before, and switched off the terminal when he finished rather than end the process and logout. On the weird mainframe we had, this would cause the CPU's to spike and slow everything down to a crawl, but it could be very hard to isolate what was causing it. Once the problem had been found, the system returned to normal and was able to carry on processing and the business was able to continue an hour or so late. I didn't witness it, but when Steve came in at 9am, he was hauled into the managers office and sacked on the spot! My lesson that day was to have a backup alarm and I have never been late to work due to oversleeping again. [link] [comments] |
| I love meaningful error messages, and I really wish I got one once in a while. Posted: 30 Oct 2019 09:25 AM PDT We bought two new locations from another retailer, but they're keeping a third. So the first step is to clone the main server, to keep all the money going to the right bank accounts and separate all the business records going forward. This is a complicated, delicate process, but the vendor has considerable expertise in doing this, and we've done it once before. Most of the arcane stuff is in the vendor's hands, but we - which is to say, I - have to do the physical installation of the temp server and the data restore. No problem. While "we," as a company, have done this before, I have never done a server restore. So I did a dry run, twice, at the home office before I head 300 miles to the new location. Successfully. Nothing too difficult. I get on the scene, set the server up, and fire it up and make sure the hardware survived the drive. Everything looks good. To avoid some of the worst traffic in the world, I'd left at 5:00 AM and arrived about 12 hours before the real restore was to begin. I had other stuff to do, too, but I had plenty of time to do another dry run (or two, or three) using the previous night's backup from the server we're cloning. Just to be sure. Everything went pretty smooth on the OS install phase, but when it got to the data restore part, I get an error message that says the tape is formatted to an older version of the OS than is needed. Huh? This is from the very same install disk that was used to set up the server that made the tape. Maybe there's a conflict in the tape drive hardware, despite appearing to be the same model? OK, I put in the backup tape that it had successfully restored from three days earlier. Same error. OK, something else is going on. After a bit of poking around, I discovered that "Tape is formatted for a previous version of the OS" actually means "No tape drive detected." The SATA cable had come unplugged. (The power cable was still there, so from the front, the drive looked like it was operating normally.) It was a long, long trip, despite only being two days. [link] [comments] |
| Older user complaining about his web browser crashing Posted: 30 Oct 2019 01:04 PM PDT So this is a first for me. I had a user send in a ticket saying that their web browser is crashing. At first I thought that in just needed to be repaired as we use Edge as the main browser (I hate Edge with a passion but the boss man wants everyone to solely use it). So I try to repair Edge and that didn't seem to work. I tried to get Windows 10 to version 1903 of its feature updates but that didn't work either. So I go digging around the settings to see if there are any strange addons. There was nothing out of the usual there. Then... I get to his favorites. THERE ARE 13,000 FAVORITES IN HIS FAVORITES FOLDER. I'm simply astounded by the fact that someone can accumulate this many favorites. It takes me a minute to process this staggering amount and begin to wonder if the user just clicks that little star button on each page they find interesting. I say that they need to be removed. It simply couldn't handle the vast amount of favorites that the user has collected over the years. But the user starts complaining saying that the favorites are all important. I had to hold back from laughing as I thought "How the hell would they know what each favorite is". But I moved them to a network location so they can access it again to sate them. So user is now happy and their browser hasn't crashed since. [link] [comments] |
| User threatened to quit because of the IT department trying to do the right thing. Posted: 30 Oct 2019 09:07 AM PDT This had happened a few weeks ago but was one of the reasons I'm so tired of my current job. I work at a growing company of healthcare where everything is just crawling along with updating and upgrading. Nothing gets updated or upgraded (lack of funding) until shit hits the fan. For the same reason, like always, the upgrading to Windows 10 gets pushed back towards the end of the year because we found out that much of our many services/software do not support Windows 10 and are in need of server/hardware upgrades. So administration is being bitten in the ass due to their own incompetence. So now we are racing to get everyone over to Windows 10 so they can get security updates. So along with all the other shit that I need to be doing we are pushing out Windows 10 updates as fast as possible. (There are a lot of stories so far but I will leave that for later) Now at my company there are these special users that are one of the biggest thorn in the helpdesk side. As helpdesk all I hear is people complain about stupid shit and these special users always get their way because administration won't grow a spine and say "No" because that user knows a shareholder at the company. One Monday morning I'm doing my work as a helpdesk/network/voip/AnyOtherJobThatGoesBeyondHelpdesk technician. I get a user that calls who says that her laptop is doing an update that she had no option of saying 'do later'. This is absolutely wrong because if there is an update that is necessary there is an option to do the update later. I did not push the update to the nurse but I got the angry call to only be chewed out. Well this update is taking a long time and I don't really want to be on the phone with her anymore. I look up the laptop that she has and she has one of the old laptops that are completely different and doesn't fit into our hardware scheme. It is an old Toughbook and at this time I think it is going to be a perfect time to get her over to Windows 10 and get that dinosaur off our network. I grab a laptop and assign it to her and drive over to the clinic to meet her. When I get to her I find that the laptop is still doing an update and she is there playing on her phone waiting for me. I go ahead and start up the 'new' laptop and tell her that I'm going to upgrade her and get her going. She takes one look at it and looks defensive.
I'm not sure that the laptop does support Windows 10 but I want to get the laptop off our network because of security reasons and also we have to have a special SSID to support them.
For a second I thought she was just joking but her tone stated otherwise and I wouldn't put it past some of the nurses here.
At that time her old laptop finished the updates and now usable again. I did not feel like fighting with her because I honestly feel like I should be billing the clinic for emotional abuse by now. I take the 'new' laptop and begin to leave.
She goes back to work and I go back to our horrible office that might just be a ploy for administration to kill us all with the mold and dust. I tell my boss what had happened. I let the anger boil in my stomach about what just happened. A waste of gas and time. I get a text later from her doctor (who I actually like) asking if we could get this other tough book for her. He has screenshots of a printout (which I know she printed out instead of doing work) showing a toughbook that supports Windows 10. I ask him why she would need a toughbook which he says because it is small and big keyboards hurt her hands, that she likes the strap on the bottom of it. I don't respond. I'm honestly tired of trying to fight with individuals who want to be special and put patient information at a risk. She will be surprised when Jan 2nd rolls around and finds that all Windows 7 devices are being removed from the network. Don't know where she will get a healthcare job that will still have Windows 7. [link] [comments] |
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