I AM PUBLIC RELATIONS AND YOU ARE PAYING FOR ALL OF THIS!!!! Tech Support |
- I AM PUBLIC RELATIONS AND YOU ARE PAYING FOR ALL OF THIS!!!!
- Slinky Time: Password Reset
- I don't want to see your bathroom
- I'm sure this email will find its way on its own...
- The Case of the Broken Report
- Help Desk Means HELP DESK
| I AM PUBLIC RELATIONS AND YOU ARE PAYING FOR ALL OF THIS!!!! Posted: 30 Mar 2018 12:16 PM PDT I was reminded of this from an AskReddit about work place meltdowns and thought I would share it here, in TFTS fashion. I've also expanded on it a bit since I seem to have some time on my hands. It's also all flooding back to me the more I think about it. It is long, so for those of you who have responsibilities to handle TL;DR Angry PR lady threatened to make me personally pay for a plane ticket b/c she missed her flight. In reality, she did not miss her flight at all and she can't actually do that. It was all recorded and she got threatened with her job. Angry PR lady became nicest person in the company over night. For those of you that are having a nice, quiet (although boringly slow) Good Friday, I give you the Tale of the Always Angry PR Lady. The players involved LK - Me, the poor, innocent bystander. DSTech - The Desk side tech that originally had the ticket. He's in a different department and has a manager PR - The evil woman that the devil himself probably hid from. Top person to avoid at all costs unless you were just looking to be kicked Lead - My lead Director - My director and acting manager The setting Previous job, many years ago. Working a hybrid call center-desk side gig. Still the FNG. When the actual deskside techs would go home, that's when I started to be the Call Center/Deskside hybrid guy. As usual, our calls are recorded for training purposes, where We had this list of people that we would always secretly hand out to the new people when they finished their 2 week training. Our leads and director knew the list existed, and knew it for the joke that it was. The list was the Top 10 people that you were to ignore calls from if you were having a bad day. The call would roll to the next tech, so it was cool. Someone would handle it. Of course, we never officially did this. ;) Our number 1 person to avoid at all costs on a bad day, happened to work in the PR department. She also had a Blackberry with, and I am not kidding, over 65,000 contacts! BB's are notorious for taking forever to back up and restore on a good day. Never mind a good day with the entire population of Daytona Beach, FL. I'm willing to bet she still does and this was a decade ago. It probably has the population of NYC programmed into by now though. And so it begins From here until I come in, all of this info was in the notes/emails of the ticket or relayed to me by DSTech. On the day in question, PR has gotten another new BB. She is also getting ready to go on a business trip. PR was told at 8am by DSTech that if she wanted to take her new BB with her on her business trip that she needed to get her current BB to him before 10am. PR finally calls DSTech and gets her BB to him at 1pm and asks if it will be ready by 4pm. DSTech tells her that it is highly doubtful and that she should just take her current, working BB. She puts up a fuss about it, gets DSTech's manager involved. DSTech is told to just get it done however he can. As always, it fails the first couple of times on backing up her massive amounts of data, and then continues to fail when loading it to the new one. PR calls DSTech at 4pm asking where her new BB is. He explains the issues and tells her that not only is the new one not ready, but the old one is currently in the middle of a 3 hour back up. If he stops it, there is a chance she could lose all her data. This is a problem b/c she never backs up her phone to her laptop b/c it is not her job to make sure data is backed up. That's ITs job, not hers. Her words. PR is pissed and the melt down is brewing nicely now. PR sends a number of emails to DSTech about how terrible he is. She's also told him that her flight leaves at 5pm and now she's going to miss it b/c she cannot go without her BB. Here's where I come in. By this point in the day, I am the only one physically in the office. My lead is working from home, so he's technically there. DSTech comes to me at 5pm (his shift was 6a-3p) telling me what's going on, gives me the ticket number and says that when her phone is done with the backup, failed or not, take it to her if she is even still in the building. At least that way she will have the BB. The old BB finishes at 5:30 and I start calling PR. She never answers so I leave a VM. Call again at 6, 6:15 and 6:30. Left VMs each time, updated notes in ticket each time. I leave at 7 and I'm not planning on waiting around on her wrath. If 7 gets here and I haven't heard from PR, then oh well. At 6:45, she calls me directly, and she is 10 different kinds of pissed off. She's mad b/c original tech went home and won't answer her calls or emails, she pissed b/c I told her that the only phone that was done was her old BB. She pissed b/c she has left the building (lies, she was there, b/c caller ID....) and couldn't get her phone. She's pissed b/c her flight left an hour ago and she's stranded at the airport (more lies). She goes on and on ranting and raving about how we didn't come get her phone until 1pm, we didn't do what she asked, we never get anything right, someone will be driving to the airport to deliver her phone to her, etc. Typical "it's always the IT guy's fault" kind of stuff. She hangs up on me before I could even say a word. PR calls back 5 minutes later saying that she is now in the building (damn, that was a quick 15 mile drive) and is coming to get her phone. Hangs up on me again. She then calls from her desk phone again 10 minute later b/c she can't get through the doors on our floor after leaving the elevator lobby (and people like her is why it's locked down). I told her I would be happy to bring it down to her, or meet her in the lobby. We met in the lobby of her floor, she yanked the phone out of my hand and stormed off to her office. As I am getting back to my desk to pack up and leave, she calls me again. It's after 7pm now and I am supposed to be off, but figure, WTH. Might was well see what crap she has to say now. She gives it to me for 10 minutes straight. Tells me how this is all my fault that she missed her flight, how I locked her out of her BB causing her to get the password wrong 10 times and getting her BB wiped (when asked what she wanted it set to on her new BB, she wrote in an email ab1234. The password for her old BB was AB1234 and was unchanged) In the time it took me to get on the elevator go up 1 floor and walk to my desk, she had managed to wipe her BB by putting in the wrong password, then spelling out BLACKBERRY with the wrong password 10 times. Instead of asking me to reset it through the server, she nuked it. I can still hear her words to this day. PR finally ended the call by saying PR: >I am Public Relations and I am the face of Company! I will be giving your name and department to my director so that he can charge you personally for my plane ticket! You are the reason I have missed my flight! You are the reason I will be late to this important meeting to Company and you, Mr. LK, will pay for every bit of this! She then hung up again. In 30 minutes I've managed to say Tech support, this is LK to her 3 times and Here is your Blackber.... All I could think after that last phone call was No, you work in PR, have an assistant as toxic as you are and no, in fact, you can't actually do that. I'm kinda glad she hung up on me, I didn't get a chance to tell her how big of a bitch she was. Which I am 80% sure I could have gotten away with at that point. At 730, I called Lead, explained everything to him b/c I knew this was going to blow way up the ladder before it was over and told him I was going home. He told me to log an hour of OT and come in an hour late to make up for the trouble. He said he'd get the phone guys to pull all the recording from her phone to our department and the original techs department for the entire day and see what all she said. Fast forward a week or so. PR calls and I get her call on my phone. I somewhat loudly exclaim that PR LADY IS CALLING ME AGAIN!!!! ARGH!! Director, whose office is next to my cube, hears this and comes out. He waits until I hang up and asks
He then smiled and walked into his office without saying another word. I found out later that day from LEAD that LEAD, Director, PR, PR-Manager and PR-Director all had a come to Jesus meeting earlier that morning. It turns out that
PR got written up and given a final warning all in one shot. The next one would presumably involve HR, Security, a cardboard box and the front door. From that day until she was transferred to another state, she was the nicest person who ever called. EDIT - Some formatting EDIT 2 - More formatting to make my story more readable that I hope u/thetoastmonster will appreciate. :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2018 07:49 AM PDT On dark days, I remember a coworker's advice: "Users are like Slinkys. They serve no useful purpose, but it's fun to give them a little push off the top stair". tl;dr - Password Resets are a secret test to see if users are too dumb to be allowed on a computer. I have a few candidates for the Slinky treatment. To set the stage, one of the metrics we're graded on is "Reopened Tickets". Our target is pretty low, say 1 in 100. Some tickets don't count, which we refer to as the "user is an idiot" loophole: user reopens ticket to ask for something complete different, more information, or say "Thanks!". Because managers watch the metric and discuss it weekly, when the ticket is complete, we ask the user if the ticket can be closed and try to head off any problems. 4 times this month, I've had a ticket reopened. In the previous 12 months, I had 1 ticket reopened: "Thanks! This Really Fixed it!". Waiting on a vendor to get back to me, so I grab a simple ticket from the queue: "Please Reset my Password". Most password resets are self-service, or done by level-one, but this is a legacy application they don't I reset the password and account expiration; in about half these tickets, the user's password has expired since they haven't logged in in 60 days. In our standard process, the temporary password is sent to the user in an email from the Incident management software. I always end the email with "Please let me know if I can close this ticket" or something similar. If they reply to the email, it's automatically logged to the ticket. I also set the status of the ticket to "Waiting on Customer". It doesn't stop the clock, but the system will email the user daily until they update the ticket. There was no contact from user after 3 daily attempts so I closed the ticket on the 4th day. 3 days later the user reopens ticket, "Please advise new Password". Arrrgh! Sent him the new password again, and added it to the ticket. Since it's set to required changing on login, this is allowed. Set the ticket to "Waiting on Customer". A day later, he responds - "Thanks, it works". The kicker - He created the same ticket a couple of days later. I set the same temp password, sent it via email, and put it in the ticket. That's allowed, since it is set to change-on-first-login. No contact after three attempts, on the fourth attempt "What is new password?". Emailed him, CC'd his manager: I wanted to say "Password Test Failed. Please Report to Soylent Green, Inc. for Processing". I submitted these as a table, and it was rejected as "Not A Story". Let's see if these work in narrative form. [link] [comments]  |
| I don't want to see your bathroom Posted: 30 Mar 2018 01:30 PM PDT LTR, FTP, mobile format etc. I work second line software support. I'll avoid saying what exactly our software does but if I told you next week is our busiest week of the year you may get an idea. Recently our industry had a small change made to our process which required us to issue a hotfix for the software in order for people to keep using it. It's fairly idiot proof, you download a zip file from the website, inside is an exe. Double click, done. It's been up for a few weeks and there's been no big issues with it. Couple of people needed guidance on where the download could be found but that's it. But yesterday a first line tech came to me with an issue is never heard before. 1L - First liner M - Me 1L: "Hey ManMan, I have a customer on the line who has a problem with the hotfix. When they open it instead of the hotfix they get 40 pictures of bathroom tiles and bathroom floor plans. No I'm not joking" M: "... sorry, say that again?" 1L: "Bathroom pictures. Instead of the hotfix" M: "They have the right link?" 1L: "I've watched them on Teamviewer. They've downloaded it like 3 times. Every time the same." M: "I have to see this" Our first line is pretty good when it comes to the software and the industry but are sometimes not that technical. I trust, but I verify. To save time I wheel round to 1L's desk and watch the process myself. It's normal, the link is right. The file downloads and then instead of an exe I do indeed see 40 pictures of mostly black and white chequered bathroom tile and some floorplans. There is a moment of panic that spreads between myself and a small group of 2nd liners who had overheard the issue and gathered. M: "Can someone check the hotfix download please?" This hotfix is pretty much mandatory. We have thousands of clients and most have downloaded it in the last few weeks but there are plenty of stragglers. If someone had messed up the file and put their bathroom plans up instead the exposure would be massive and embarrassing for the company. From the 2nd line bank I can hear people calling out "works for me!" and managers calling the hosting team. Right as they get someone on the line I spot something in the bottom of the chrome window. The downloaded zip file, but the logo seems wrong. It's not a 7zip or zip icon. It's red and different. I pull up the file associations in control panel and there it is. Zip files are associated with a random photo gallery style program that looks close enough to a file explorer menu that none of us noticed on first glance, so distracted we were by the tile. Turns out this image editor was failing to open the hotfix and instead showing a window with all of the recently opened files in it. The poor customer didn't know her colleague had been planning a bathroom redesign on her pc. I set the association back to file explorer and all became right with the world. Nearby a manager said "nevermind" and hung up the phone. Two banks of desks breathed a sigh of relief. TLDR: Customer thinks a vital hotfix has been replaced by bathroom pics. The service desk stops breathing until we find out it's just the digital equivalent of trying to eat soup with a fork. [link] [comments]  |
| I'm sure this email will find its way on its own... Posted: 31 Mar 2018 02:44 AM PDT Hi there, So I work for a small company in databases/applications ; let's call my company "Oignon Inc" for now on. I once had an old customer calling me to discuss what went wrong on his application. We had a long talk, as he was not really a computer person ; as he seemed to have a long list of things to change in his application, I just told him to send me an email with the list of things to change. He has been our customer for quite a while, so I assumed that he had my email address. 2 days later, the guy phones again. He doesn't understand that I didn't replied. I tell him that I never got his email. Turns out he didn't knew my name, just my first name (Vincent). So this guy just sent his email to : "vincent.?@oignoninc.com", and believed that the mail would eventually get to me. Edit : formating [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2018 11:13 AM PDT I work second level support for a company that processes payrolls. We have an online system that allows clients to log in and do their own payroll, manage employees, run reports, etc. I was finally able to close a ticket that had been opened for over a week, resulted in two WebEx recordings with the client from the first-level tech, one of which was 3 hours and 46 minutes that only contained a six minute presentation at the beginning and a 17 minute presentation at the end, leaving over 3 hours of blank space in between, and finally an hour long conference call with the client explaining that the report is not faulty, she is (in a nice manner, of course!). Second level techs rarely deal directly with the clients, that is the job of the first level tech. However, some situations necessitate us having to actually talk to them. This ticket was one of those cases because the first level tech didn't want to "further frustrate the client" by explaining that she was doing the report wrong. The first level tech opened a Webex so that we could connect to the client's computer to see what she was doing. Here is the gist of the call: $Me: obviously, me $user: the client (Note: the first level tech never said a word other than, "Hello" and "Thanks! Goodbye" $Me: "Okay, show me what you are doing to get the report." $user: "I need a report of all employees that are NOT assigned to a job." (runs the report) "See! No results. This report is broken." $Me: "The report is not broken. All of your employees ARE assigned to a job so no one fits that criteria." $user: "Oh. Okay" (retries the report, selecting employees that ARE assigned to jobs, but only assigned to a specific location in the company) "See! No results! This report is broken!" $Me: (looking at a report on my system) "I'm not seeing that any employees in that location were paid on that date, so there would be nothing to report." $user: "Well, no, they wouldn't have been paid. We didn't add this location to the system until the next payroll." $Me: (what??) "So, you're trying to get employees that were paid in LOCATION on 03/01/18, but you didn't actually add LOCATION until 03/08/18?" $user: "Yes." $Me: ..... $user: "Wait, that won't work, will it?" $Me: "Um, no." $user: "Okay." (retries report, selecting the payroll for ALL job codes and ALL locations for 03/01/18) "See! No results! This report is broken!" $Me: (looking at information on my screen) " I don't see that you processed a payroll on 03/01/18. You did process on 03/02/18. Try using that date." $user: "But I want it for 03/01" $Me: "But you didn't process on 03/01. You processed on 03/02" $user: "So I can't use 03/01?" $Me: "No, you have to use the date of an actual payroll." $user: (retries report using the correct date, gets results) "Hey! You fixed it!" $Me: "Yes... I fixed it." (facepalm) tl;dr: client kept insisting report was broken because all of the options she selected didn't apply to her payroll and resulted in no data. Finally convinced the client she was the one that was broken, not the report. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2018 09:38 AM PDT So this story starts of in 2007, I just got out of the military and landed my first civilian job working at a Large Houston Hospital's Help Desk department. It was the basic shit you would expect from a help desk, forgot my password, hardware and software issues nothing too special until the day I got a call from a VERY special customer.... I will call him MR. CFD. Me: "Large Houston Hospital" Help Desk how may I assist you? CFD: Yes, hello? Um... I need help. Me: That's no problem sir, what seems to the issue this morning? CFD: Well... (software name) isn't working... Me: Ok sir, what happens when you try to run your program. CFD: When I run this (software name I don't remember) it gives me a compiling error... Now I'm thinking to myself... compiling? Was this some shitty propriety software we had goosed up in some I.T. small developer area... Best part was no one knew of this software, it wasn't in our Knowledge Base and had no history of being part of our I.T. support software in tickets. So, I went back for more questioning to figure out what the hell this software was for, the customer explained it was for EMRs (Electronic Medical Records). My first assumption was this was a nurse, medical tech, or a Dr. Dipshit as I tend to call all the Dr.'s there, but that's a story for another time. So, we go through the usual battery of restart your computer, I try to remote it but I cannot... Guys on a funky VPN of some sort. It's been a fucking hour and this guy just repeats the same shit over and fucking over of "Failed to run compiling error nonsense" and he explains furthermore... CFD: Yeah, I really need this software to work, this is my third day and I am so behind and my boss is really harping on me, you got to help me. Me: Ok, let's try using this software to remote in... (HOLY SHIT IT WORKS MY GAWD I'M IN... BALLS DEEP INTO THIS FUCKING PC AND... wha?! I looked around... I see the error as this customer excitedly moves his mouse towards it... but I'm no longer concerned with that... I'm looking at the entirety of the situation.... Now I have done some coding at this point in my life and I know what code looks like, even if I'm not familiar with the code itself, what I'm looking at looks like a compiler. Now why in the hell is a medical tech... wait...... this guy wasn't a med tech or Doc... I asked him his title and departments name which turned out to be a fucking developer department and he was a fucking programmer… or so he told H.R. during the interview process... I have no idea how he got hired... Me: Sir, are you asking me to assist you in developing this application? CFD: Well, I need some help, see this application is being made in ColdFusion (CFD = ColdFusion Developer) and I need some help because I don't really know ColdFusion ColdFusion was part of his job title when he sounded off. Well I'm dumbfounded, I decided to first to go ahead and get this goof off the phone as I asked for his boss's name as I bullshit the reasoning is for our logging purposes which he was kind of resistant to provide but I lied saying it was policy here. Me: Well sir, I went over some of your code and realized that we are not developers at this help desk, we are technical support center for desktop and network related issues, we cannot assist you in programming this software. Now I'm just being an asshole at this point. CFD REALLY panics fucking hard. CFD: YOU HAVE TOO! YOU ARE THE HELP! DESK! DO YOU UNDERstand... Guy calms down somewhat or maybe he has a heart condition... hell I don't know but then I explain to Mr. CFD that this is insanely beyond our scope here and you should talk to your boss. CFD: I just got this job, what do I do after telling my boss I don't know ColdFusion. I think for a moment... Me: Sir... update your resume. [link] [comments]  |
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