Apparently, I don't know how to use a computer. Tech Support |
- Apparently, I don't know how to use a computer.
- Every... Single... Day...
- VIP Support. Why is this corrective action report signed by no one?
- Necromancy
- It's playing games!
- The problem's on your end, not mine!
- What do I do now?
- Assisting Customers With Downloading Software.
- Not his fault he got thrown in the deep end
- Documentation is how one thinks the software should work
- Dude, send me those benchmarks. I wanna prove ...
- The cable wasn't long enough
| Apparently, I don't know how to use a computer. Posted: 29 Mar 2018 10:58 AM PDT I work at the computer help desk for the university I go to. This morning, we had a professor come in with her laptop, saying that it was stuck in Airplane mode. Okay, no problem, should be a simple fix. I go to the Wireless settings, and see that the Airplane Mode switch is indeed on, but also greyed out. I figure that it needs admin rights to change, which she didn't have since it's a university-owned laptop. I write up a simple ticket to escalate to her departmental support (i.e. the person who has admin rights), and she leaves the laptop with us for the time being as per standard procedure. Anyway, about 20 minutes later, the admin comes by, and I bring out the laptop so that he can enter the password. He takes one look at it... and flips the switch on the front of the machine. A message immediately pops up on the screen: "Airplane mode disabled." My coworkers and I collectively facepalm - apparently, in this modern day and age, I had forgotten about the existence of physical Wifi switches. Needless to say, when I called back the client to say that her laptop was fixed, I thought it wise to leave out the exact details. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Mar 2018 08:51 AM PDT * Set Scene * Monday: Me: "I want to make all the testers aware: all of the triggers are in separate code bases, and this database change impacts all of them. This means every individual trigger needs to be tested separately. When you write a bug for a trigger, say WHICH trigger it's for, as it's likely the bug will not exist in other triggers. Tuesday: Me: "I have an obscure bug saying that there was a glitch "with the triggers". I need to know WHICH trigger. I have returned the bug to the tester so they can enter the name of the trigger they found the bug in. Just a reminder that if you find a bug in a trigger, it is likely a bug for that specific trigger. I need to know which trigger it is to fix it." Wednesday: Me: "I got another bug saying there's a glitch in "the triggers." Remember I cannot fix this unless I know WHICH trigger the glitch is in. Each trigger is a completely separate code base. I've returned the bug to the tester to fill out the reproduction steps." Five minutes ago: Them: "With the latest push to test, we seem to be regressing with the triggers." [link] [comments]  |
| VIP Support. Why is this corrective action report signed by no one? Posted: 29 Mar 2018 10:49 AM PDT In our company there are people with job titles that are nothing special, but that is by choice. They are so high profile and high producing that they have the CEOs ear. They can walk into the COOs office and tell them what to do. One of my techs received a call from one of these VIPs daughter two weeks ago. $V2 = VIP's Daughter. Not an employee. $Tech = duh $Me = Texasgunowner12
No call. No nothing for two days.
She hung up. One week later I am informed that a corrective action investigation is being generated on the incident where myself and my tech refused to change the password for a user. We were interviewed by two guys form another team as this corrective action investigation involved a supervisor. Normally I would do these. We gave them all of the information available and then called the vip themselves and got her fixed. Dont know whether it was a credential manager mismatch or a corrupted outlook profile as the guy who employed the fix wiped credential manager, deleted, and re-added the outlook profile. After reapplying her signatures, he got her back up and running in 5 minutes. The report was submitted and a meeting was held between the CIO, me, the tech involed, and some random HR person who said nothing during the entire meeting. They went over the original issue, discovered that the fix we suggested weeks ago worked and took less than 10 minutes to fix, and that we never once actually said no.
This garnered a snorting laugh from the HR person. We were dismissed with the promise of both HR person and CIO that this would be buried for a month before being quietly filed. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Mar 2018 03:39 PM PDT I'm just hired for my first real engineering/technician job by company X. I'd done some freelance programming before this but that's about it. Company Y makes widgets for government, but stopped 10 years ago due to the economic situation and the lack of government budgets. Recently, they wanted to start making the widgets again, and contracted with company X to make that happen. I was, of course, handed a compiled binary for the embedded processor on the widgets, and told to make it work. No source code, only the barest whiff of documentation, and none of the people who worked on the original project still work there. Of course, it couldn't be some kind of normal embedded processor compatible with modern tools. Instead, the widget uses a 15-year old digital signal processor with a toolchain that only runs on Windows XP. After two weeks spent trying to get it to work, I have a (partial) solution. None of the computers that were available worked with XP, but I could run it in a virtual machine. Windows XP boots, the toolchain loads, and it even recognizes that there's a widget board plugged in. And the moment I attempt to program the widget board, the entire hypervisor crashes. Spend the next week trawling the google, trying various suggestions. Eventually determine that it's a problem with USB passthrough, so I add a USB PCI card and do PCI passthrough. Still doesn't work, but this time it fails differently! Progress! Spend another week trawling the google, and finally determined that the computer I was running the VM from wasn't compatible, because the CPU lacked a particular feature. So I get another computer with that feature. Getting closer, this time failed with a BSOD when installing the USB drivers in XP, so I try a few other cards. None of them work either, but they all failed differently! Eventually order a dozen different USB cards from amazon, and one works! It's a super-expensive $110 card, but at this point it doesn't matter. I'm able to flash the widgets. Then the hard part: I can flash the widgets, but none of them work. Well, the old ones that already worked still work, but none of the newly-manufactured widgets work. Remember there's no source code - believe me I asked, company Y doesn't have it either. Now if you thought understanding x86 or ARM assembly was hard, let me tell you, DSP assembly is far worse. Unlike on sane processors, where things like multiplication and branch instructions actually make sense, on a DSP there is no logic or reason for anything. Every single opcode is capable of running concurrently with any other opcode, any opcode can be a branch instruction depending on whether it feels like it at the moment, and the only way to tell if (or which) branch will be taken is to wait and see, because it depends not only on the opcode result, but also on a bunch of extra flag registers, the phase of the moon, and whether you sacrificed enough goats to the computer gods that morning. So I spend the next week trying to puzzle out exactly what's going on here, and eventually manage to narrow it down to a problem with the serial communication. The particular serial chip is a slightly later revision than the one used on the original widgets, but the datasheets are identical and the manufacturer asserts they should work exactly the same. Of course, I don't believe them, and rig everything up with a logic analyzer to be sure, and go over the datasheets with a fine-tooth comb to try and find anything at all that might be different. Eventually I find it - apparently the new chip has a special mode it can be put in by setting all of it's registers to particular values. No biggie, the original datasheet says very clearly not to do that even on the old version of the chip, so it should be fine right? Nope, dig through the assembly, the original programmers apparently just ignored every piece of advice in the original datasheet about how to use the chip and just happened to engage this special mode on accident. So, now to fix it. By this point I've got a basic idea for how to write code for this thing, so I begin working on an assembly patch, finish it, and try it out. Lo and behold, apparently only the _dis_assembler works, and any time I try to use the assembler everything crashes. So now I'm in a hex editor, hand-assembling code like it's 1950. Eventually manage to patch the code, doesn't work. Try a bunch of other ways to fix it, still doesn't work. Eventually we manage to find a supplier that has a bunch of old stock of the old part revision and we purchase it all, and swap the new chip out for the old one on a bunch of widgets, and.... still none of the new widgets work. Go back to the debugger, still a problem with serial communication. Eventually after another week trying to figure this out, managed to figure out that it's actually a problem with the chip's quartz crystal circuit. I'm completely out of my depth at this point - to be honest I was already out of my depth, but I had literally no idea what to try here, so managed to get one of the analog design engineers at the company to help. Finally after months of effort, I was able to ship the first set of new widgets to Company Y. In our next expisode: Return of Company Y! How long can our hero survive the clutches of master control program? Big Brother is always watching, but why is the bitrate so low? When lightning strikes at the eleventh hour, will the failover system come online? When things heat up after prolonged sunlight exposure, can our hero cool off enough to stay sane? Will he be arrested by Mexican border control? Will last-minute script-fu save the day? Tune in next time to find out! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Mar 2018 01:13 PM PDT This was one of my first onsite gigs as a beginner back in the late 90s or early 00s. Customer calls us and tells us that when they power up their PC, it starts playing Wolfenstein 3D. No matter what button is pressed, it just keeps on going. I asked about what LEDs are lit on the PC, and learn it indeed is powered on and judging the HDD light flickering it also has loaded the OS or at least attempts it. The game however can't be stopped and I drive out to the customer. The PC is powered down as I arrive. It's one of those older machines with AT PSU that also powers up the monitor. I turn on the machine and whoa, I first get "Check VGA cable!" and then the familiar early 90s DOS game-looking maze. It obviously wasn't Wolf 3D, but looked very much like it, closer to the 3D maze screensaver in early Windows NTs. I look behind the PC and immediately locate the problem: the VGA cable is unplugged. After I reconnect the cable I'm greeted with Windows 98 login screen. Apparently whoever wrote the firmware for the huge CRT screen had had too much time on their hands and they had recreated the maze screensaver to it instead of the typical bouncing box with "NO SIGNAL". [link] [comments]  |
| The problem's on your end, not mine! Posted: 29 Mar 2018 05:47 PM PDT Confession: I am not IT support myself, but my job does involve assisting users with some distantly IT-related stuff. I work in a call center for a lab. We produce patient reports. Doctors can access these reports online via our provider portal. The portal is great. It is far superior to faxed reports. It's clearer than fax, it's in color, it's interactive, it's less wasteful, you can download PDFs right there and immediately upload them to your medical records system, you can share reports instantly with your colleagues and patients and its pages won't get lost in the shuffle. But alas, sometimes not even a medical degree can help you if you don't understand the basics of computers and the internet. So I get a call from a physician. She sounds young and on top of it. She can't get in to the portal. She has requested to reset her password, receives the reset password email, but the link brings her to a page telling her she cannot access this site. I may not be an IT person but this one's obvious. It's her security settings. She works at a county hospital, so this doesn't surprise me. Their systems are all out of date and their security restrictions are a pain to work around. There is nothing I can do on my end to change her security settings, and I explain all this to her. I throw in the word "firewall" for good measure. She seems to understand and says she'll access the portal on her home computer instead. Great, fine. Otherwise, she'll need to contact her IT team. She doesn't tell me this is urgent, and flat out says she'll just work on it at home, so I leave it at that. She calls back a little bit later and tells me the same thing as above. I'm a little confused (did we not just go over this?) and I try to explain to her again why this isn't something I can fix for her. I ask if she has contacted her IT team, and she says, a little smugly, "No, and I'm not going to because it's not on our end. I've tried several other computers here and my colleague confirmed he has had trouble with the link, too. It's a dead link." Again, I am not IT. I can't dazzle her with IT talk about why she can't access the link on other computers that are all using the same internet connection and are subject to the same security restrictions. Also, I'm now working OT at this point. So whatever, it's our fault, we are sending "dead links", and it doesn't matter that our 100s of other users use the portal everyday just fine. I offered to secure email the report to her, but no, she was also having issues with that link. That puts into question whether she even knows how to use activation links at all, but I don't care to argue with her, I really should be off by now and there is one last resort... the dreadfully wasteful, slow, black and white fax. Fax it is, then! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Mar 2018 08:40 AM PDT This has been a repeat tale at my job this week where I get people who just do NOT follow direction. It always goes something like this: I'll fix something on their account and then say "Ok I need you to log out of your account and then log back in." Customer: Ok I can do that Me: Waits...... Customer: Ok what do I do now? Me: Have you successfully logged out and then logged back in? Customer: Yup Me: Ok so now I need you to click yes when I request permission to remote in. Customer: Ok let me just turn my computer back on. Me:......... I thought you said you'd logged back in. Customer: Yup! Me: Sigh Please turn on your computer and then log on... waits Customer: Ok the computer is on. What do I do now? Me: Click yes when I ask to remote in. Customer: Oh ok let me just log on. Me: Sigh.... eye twitching Ok! Customer: Shit! I forgot my password Me: Mutes microphone OH FOR GODS SAKE!!!!!! [link] [comments]  |
| Assisting Customers With Downloading Software. Posted: 29 Mar 2018 10:26 AM PDT The company I work for, develops and supports software. Unfortunately this industry is an older one. We may be dealing with someone who is 20-40, but a lot of the time we are dealing with people who are 70+.
Fast forward 25+ minutes walking them through using forgot username/password.
It goes on and on like this for hours. [link] [comments]  |
| Not his fault he got thrown in the deep end Posted: 29 Mar 2018 05:06 AM PDT The project was written mostly in Java, with some shell scripts to glue it together, and ran on Solaris. They were notorious within COMPANY for resisting rules, processes, best practices, standards; if somebody else wrote it down they immediately refused to follow it, and they refused to write anything down themselves. Constant headaches, but what they did was a critical part of our business so we couldn't just let them faceplant. The application had a problem and barfed on our monitoring, it wasn't clear to the L1 guys whether it was an us problem or a them problem, and it was my week in the SA oncall barrel, so they paged me. I saw pretty quickly that the problem was in the app somewhere; whether it was code, data, or both was not my problem, I called the app team's oncall. DEV was new. Like, probably didn't have his door badge yet new, hired late the previous week; yet for some reason they'd put him on call. There were only two possibilities; either he was that good, or they didn't care and just threw him in there. I knew immediately it was the latter, but I wasn't going to cut this guy's ankles off by going over his head, so I told him the errors and he said he'd get back to me. A couple of hours later he came to me with a patch to his software that he said would fix the problem, and said he didn't know how to load it. No problem, we actually did the software loads for this team at the time, so I told him what document to fill out and where to put the tarball so the software distribution tool could pick it up. Then I explained what "tar" was because he had never heard of it, and didn't know we couldn't just pick up a bunch of random files and move them wherever. At this point I knew this wasn't going to go well, because he couldn't even have gotten through testing without having this ready for load, but since the RFC he was going to have to create was going to require test documentation and be signed by his manager, I figured they'd educate him on that end. Go ahead and laugh, I deserve it. The RFC comes in and it's a travesty; the test documentation was just the word "yes", and the filename of the patch made it clear it wasn't something our tool could push, and after making the tarball he'd compressed it separately with Zip (our tool expected either a naked tarball, or one compressed with UNIX "compress" or "gzip", and some of the metadata necessary for pushing a patch is found in the filename.) Yet somehow his manager had signed off on all of this. So I coached him through renaming the tarball something rational, and since it was small just leaving off the compression entirely. Then I coached him through moving it into the right directory so our tool would find it. Amazingly, the patch actually applied cleanly once all this was done; unsurprisingly, the software wouldn't even start after applying it. Now remember, this is a Java application running on Solaris. The errors involved inability to find various files in C:\Program Files, C:\Windows, etc. Queue Excedrin Headache Number PEBKAC. I contacted DEV:
I didn't walk him through it. I called the manager and told him the app was down, and that he needed to get somebody to box up their damn lunch and get back to the office because his users were twiddling their thumbs. Turns out they were already on their way back, because users had started calling him directly about the delay. The new guy actually stuck around and learned how to do his job. I don't blame him for any of this stuff, I blame the manager. tl;dr: development team hired a new guy, told him basically nothing about the environment, and put him on Production oncall so they could go to lunch in peace. Hilarity ensued. [link] [comments]  |
| Documentation is how one thinks the software should work Posted: 29 Mar 2018 04:13 PM PDT Hi everyone o/, LTL FTP, also mobile formatting, so sorry for the cancer. Names are made up to fit within the rules This happened in the middle of last semester So our characters in this tale are:
BackgroundI'm a 9th grade student at $STEMSchool, who is affiliated with $University. $University lets us use their Office 365 and Exchange. Their $CuteMammelThemedHelpDesk helped me setup their email service on my phone through IMAP. StoryI walk into the building and walk up stairs to $Jeff's office. $Jeff welcomes me and shows me around the office. Afterward, we go to his office and start working on tickets. One to open up all of the ports on an IP phone. A few password resets etc. During this time I asked some questions and learned more about how things like the helpdesk. We went to lunch and came back to something fun. Someone was moving their email service from $ExchangeProvider1 to $ExchangeProvider2.
If only we knew.... We only had to move 5 inboxes, so moving data between the Exchange Servers would have been overkill, not to mention $ExchangeProvider1's policies making that kind of move difficult. Instead, everyone at $ClientCompany just switched to temporary passwords and we moved the inboxes. Just one problem... The providers servers didn't like mailbox exchanges, so, after a few fruitless attempts, we moved to IMAP based methods, which outlook won't do without a valid outbound server on the sending end because.... reasons? Anyway, the only way to get IMAP/SMTP access through $ExchangeProvider1's "free" Office 365 inclusion, more specifically, the OWA. OWA refused to help at first, blocking the screen with failed Cross-Site Security Checks. Inspect Element worked to fix it though So we go to the IMAP settings in OWA.
and put them into Outlook So we go to the IMAP settings in OWA.
They didn't work... We tried solutions to fix this in many ways. Then I decided to try something in a last ditch attempt
I then go to my email app and open settings for Outbound mail...
It worked. Later, we told $Joe how we fixed it, and he said some words of wisdom I will never forget
At this point we wrapped up for the day, and I ended up with a story in how tech support works that changed my view. END Edit: Edited to fit the rules of the subreddit, and to format [link] [comments]  |
| Dude, send me those benchmarks. I wanna prove ... Posted: 29 Mar 2018 03:10 PM PDT I work for a version control vendor, and we focus on chip design companies, but we also cut pro-bono licenses for educational institutions on occasion. We cut one a while back for $DoeEyes, a large research university whose name you know. By a while back, I mean around Thanksgiving. To make matters fun, a grad student is in charge here. Now we pride ourselves on having speedy software, and a lot.of that is we insist on dedicated hardware with metadata stored locally. This is not negotiable. I'm sure you see where this is going. Around Christmas, the guy in charge finally benchmarked their hardware, and had some changes made. They wanted to host the binaries locally and everything else on NFS. Not happening - we need metadata locally. And eventually this gets done. Then radio silence. Last week, we hear back - they have licensing questions and are ready to install. Eyes are rolled, caffeine is consumed, all is alright with the world. We figure out what's needed, and then set up and installation meeting for two hours ago. I log onto WebEx and get their IT guy on the phone. $DudeBroIT: Hey dude <loud clacking of mechanical keyboard> will we need to share screens? <More clacking> Cause this isn't really working. $Me: Yeah. Are you on Linux? Cause that's not going to work. Can you ssh in from Windows? $DudeBroIT: <loud clacking for 15 seconds> yeah man, no problem Ten minutes and WebEx breaking on my machine later, we're ready to go. I'm looking at their ssh interface interestedly 'cause I've never seen it before. TigerVNC and No machine are what I see a lot. I get the dependencies installed and notice the hostname has changed from the alphabet soup it used to be. And df -hT shows a grand total of 25 GB disk space. There used to be 1.8TB. The grad student in charge has joined is in the meantime $Me: This looks like a different machine than what was qualified. Where'd all the disk space go? $DudeBroIT: Uhhh ... I dunno. Hey $GradPeon, what's happening now? $GradPeon: Uhhh ... I dunno dude. We were gonna put everything on NFS $Me: Well, the metadata needs to be kept locally. Can you add some drives to the machine? Like around 250GB? $DudeBroIT: Yeah, sure, gimme a sec $Me: <looking at the interface closer> Wait. Is this a VM $GradPeon: Uhh ... yeahhhh $Me: Ok, let me get my boss in the loop. It's a pro-bono setup, maybe they don't care. Either way, my boss ($Al) gets to handle this. I just install shit. $Me: Hey, we've got a problem. $DoeEyes is trying to set up on a VM $Al: <looks up from underwear shopping. truly a lowlight of the day> What? I'm calling $VPSales. Stall a moment. <pulls out phone, dials, starts talking> Meanwhile the dudebro engineer and IT guy are getting annoyed. Why can't we just keep going? Cause minimum standards are local hardware. Can we install here and then move it over next week to hardware? Lolno. That's a pain in my ass. I can hear them talking, probably to a lab supervisor or professor. Can't make out what they're saying cause their keyboards are stupid loud still. Eventually they ask for minimum specs. Back to sales, cause I know minimum rack server model only. They hear the specs and are insulated, a bit. 4 cores, 8 GB ram, RAID 1. Ask why they can't use the VM. The answer is disk speed. Writes and reads are slower. Sorry, not my rule. Eventually, they can down a bit and sign off. Just before we're completely done, I hear one mutter about benchmarking the VM so they can prove it's fast enough. Good luck, I saw the number of VMs hosted on that server. The benchmarks are almost exclusively file reads and writes. Honestly, they're not a large team, just get a skull canyon for this, add two NVMes and 8GB ram, and you'll be fine. Seriously. It'll cost less than a year of a one person license. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Mar 2018 01:41 PM PDT This just happened, and I really wish I was making this up. I am the sysadmin/phone support and anything the techs can't do which turns out is quite a bit. Some background: we just replaced all of our network gear and put AP's in every class room we support. We are replacing our old Cisco 7941's this summer and I have no spares so its duct tape and bailing wire for now. We've told the techs to take out all dumb switches and utilize Wi-Fi for several reasons, not to mention Wi-Fi works just fucking fine. Also the tech who created this fiasco was with me on site when I purposely left several 30 ft cables in the MDF for him to use. Any who.... I get a ticket today that reads Phone is No working, yes that's what is says. Ok so I take a look in call manager and the phone is getting an IP but isn't registered, so I jump over to the Meraki dashboard, find the port the phone is in and it has power but no client no data transferring, weird I reboot the port nada. So I grab my trusty backpack and head out, why not it's a lovely drive and starting to snow. I arrive on site and thankfully no one is in the room so I investigate. Let me set the scene, on one side of the room is a phone about 20 feet away are 2 MACs and the wall jack. I see a cable going from the wall to the phone, then a cable coming out of the phone about 10 feet, back towards the MACs, and there sits in all her glory an 8 port linksys switch another 5 feet from there a beautiful 4 port netgear switch that is connected to the 2 MACs. I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at this point. I removed the switches rebooted the phone and what do you know everything is coming up Millhouse. I login to the MAC's, wireless is on and connected to the guest network, of course why the fuck not, redundancy ya know. I put them on the right network pack up and throw the switches in the dumpster when I leave. I texted my boss and told him we need to have a beer and a discussion about dumb switches after work. [link] [comments]  |
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