His Final Message Goodbye Tech Support |
- His Final Message Goodbye
- Lipton, or Tetly?
- This has been going on multiple times this month - oh really
- What do I do now?
- Customer cancels ISP install...
- "Connection problem? No, end user issue."
- I accidentally formatted my HDD and have lost my precious data, please help me retrieve it!
| Posted: 15 Apr 2018 05:10 PM PDT This is the story about the most emotional call I've ever taken. I work at an ISP as a tier 2 representative for tech support. Essentially, one of the jobs I have is programming calling features. This call in particular happened about a month ago. A ticket had came to my queue about a customer having trouble accessing her voicemails. I dug deeper and found it was full as well. No problem, there were some programming errors, which I fixed and called the customer who will be known as Sweet Elderly Woman. (SEW) SEW: Hello? Me: intro, verification So, I am calling because you reported an issue with your voicemail today. SEW: Oh yes! Is it fixed? Me: Yes! It should be. I found that your box is full. It has maximum amount of messages in it. SEW: Dear, I'd hate to be a bother but could I get you to go in and delete them for me? (We have a way of accessing the messages if the customer cannot, doesn't want to, etc.) Me: Absolutely. I will gladly do this for you, SEW and I'll call you back when I'm finished? SEW: Yes please! She thanks me and I hang up to go access the messages. Knowing full well that this is going to take at least 15 minutes, I go and read Wikipedia articles as the messages are playing. I eventually reach the last message and it catches my attention. I stopped reading, listened to it, began tearing up and saved it in her box. I compose myself before calling back. SEW: Hello? Me: Hi! It's /u/devdevo1919 again. I listened to all the messages and deleted them all except for one. SEW: Oh thank you, sweetheart! Why did you leave one? Me: SEW, I think you should listen to it. I will hang up to give you some time, okay? SEW: Okay, dear. I gave her time to listen to the message and called her back. She was crying when I called her back. It was then I learned the story. The message was from her husband who had passed away due to brain cancer 3 days after he left the message. It was him saying goodbye and that he loves SEW so much and he's "never felt more alive" all the years she spent with him. SEW was crying because he was deceased by the time she got to the hospital and had not heard his voice. She said I gave her part of herself back that she'd lost when he passed away. She thanked me and we disconnected the call. EDIT: To answer some of the comments I am seeing, no I do not have to listen to them but I explain crystal clear that the messages will start playing and I will hear who they're from. This person had the same last name as her which is why I listened to it and saved it. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2018 04:59 AM PDT $L1 = Myself, the L1 support venturing into the unknown. $L3 = An experienced technicain $Manager = My IT Manager $Customer = The gentlemen responsible for....you'll see $CustomerManager = The customer's manager Here $Myself sat. Level 1 HelpDesk technician fresh out of school. Never done physical networking. VLANS, routing, switching, heck even nslookup were all new to me. We'd been having this ongoing issue where a site would lose connectivity to the WAN (and in turn, internet) seemingly randomly for approximately 15 minutes.
I wander over to the business not knowing what to expect. In my head I'm thinking this is going to be some complex fault. I get to the site and lo and behold, exclamation signs on all the PCs, not able to web to anything. It's down.
Phew, $L3 was here. He's a God. I'm sure he has this fixed.
So I call $L3 and run through the issue. This is the response....to a L1 freshman.
I relay this to $Customer and $CustomerManager. Nonetheless this is all fun, so I trace down the IT room with all our IT gear. It's a mess. A literal dive. I poke around and pretend like I know what I'm doing. I look around and all the internet's back up and running, so whatver.
Yeah look, I'm not a wordsmith. An hour passes, and it's lunch time. I shoot over to the business as there is a cafe there as well. I get my lunch and decide to walk over to the IT room and take some pictures.
You're darn right it is.... I then watch as $Customer unplugs the router, and plugs in his kettle. ....he's brewing some tea.
Amazed, it makes sense. I realise that perhaps to 5 minutes to boil, and 10 minutes to get the internet back up and running. I watch and sure enough, that's what happens.
Yeah, you heard it right. He was more concerned about the tea. Nevertheless, this was a great eye opener for me. Still unsure why Nagios wasn't reporting the router going down (think the refresh was too delayed) and why no-one checked the uptime, but knew there were much bigger fish to fry at the time. [link] [comments]  |
| This has been going on multiple times this month - oh really Posted: 15 Apr 2018 07:56 AM PDT Hello TFTS, this might be a bit long, so I'll try and keep it worthwhile. I love my family to bits, and always try to do whatever I can for them, but sometimes being family isn't enough. So my younger brother is totally into games, often playing on his laptop to no end. I wouldn't give two shits if he played his game forever, since it's his life, anyway. But the problem is, since we're located in China, if he launches up a game instance then he consumes all the bandwidth on the network. As a result, irate complaints about the Internet being slow kept coming in from my parents. Usually, this was followed by finger-pointing and blaming who was responsible, and if you have a younger brother you totally know they'll Often enough, they did not care, and only stern warnings were given. One day, I had enough, and just blacklisted his MAC address from the router console. Day 1 That day was a dark day. Convinced that I had somehow broken his Wi-Fi network card, my younger brother sneaked into the study where the server rack was, and tore a cable out of random from the switch and plugged it into his laptop. Except, that cable was from my server, and most of the services I was running on it crashed immediately. (This was where I learned the importance of separate machines. In this case, the alerting interface was on the server itself. I was relying on the server dutifully reporting its status - something it couldn't do when a dumbass pulls the cable literally out of the server. FML) Extreme shouting matches ensued when I got home. After a lot of bickering, rules were finally set into place. He'd only have one hour of allocated time on the network for doing homework, after which I was permitted to block his network usage outright. I set up whitelists on the router so that even if he did break into the rack and grab an Ethernet cable, the router would just drop all packets from unauthorized MACs. Day 2 Except, he did it again. This time, he stole into my mom's S8+. One of the useful features Samsung built in was something called Wi-Fi sharing, and I didn't even know it existed until I realized something was wrong with our network. My mom didn't even know how to open apps, and something on her phone was consuming most of our bandwidth. I realized my brother had set it up, and after confirming his laptop was stealing into our network, we changed all the passcodes and forbade him from touching any device that wasn't his. Day 3 When I got home that day, I did not expect to see what I saw. First off, my router's lights were all on, and not flashing. A pretty bad sign. Second off, there was a pen on the rack. A 0.5mm ballpoint pen. Looking at the back of the router, it was evident someone had squished a 0.5mm pen into the Reset button, judging by the streaks of ink dribbling down the grey finish. The problem was, the router held the configuration for the PPPoE settings - something the China Mobile engineers set up for us when we purchased the Internet service plan. I didn't have the credentials - which meant that we were locked out of Internet. I was 100% counting on my brother's ass getting handed back to him on a silver platter, but I was instead met with harsh criticism. My dad argued my stringent security policies were somehow to blame for all this mess. After showing him the logs, and the countless evidence I had stacked up (document everything, as always) my dad was still not convinced, and just asked me to deal with it and fix the problem. Except, it was on Sunday. Nobody worked on Sunday, and the problem would have to wait until Monday when the engineers could supply us with the correct configuration. My dad berated me for hours on end while I silently vowed to somehow disable my brother's laptop from running any games - ever. TL;DR - Don't do tech support for your family ever EDIT: Formatting and grammar. Also, just in case you guys are wondering how I managed to post this, mobile. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2018 11:35 PM PDT Hi TFTS :) This is a followup and a development of "Can I bring it?". I was going to answer in the original post, but due to this short, but funny, development, I decided to post a short story! Enjoy ;) As normal, I will be $Tech and problem user will be $PU. To update the aftermath on last topic: $PU did the 12 hour drive and showed up at my office, all happy. With him, he is carrying his new PC, his old PC and lo and behold, his monitor. As suspected, $PU did not even attempt to follow my instructions and when I asked why, he said "we didn't have time". This is a user who has bitched and cried about getting a new PC for months. Also the fact he said "we" makes me suspect his manager, who is famous for ignoringany IT policy and top management letting him get away with it, leaving Hell for IT-service. Anyway, I connect the PC and start the SCCM installation within 2 minutes and then turn to him and say in my most sarcastic tone "Didn't have time? 2 minutes was all it needed. 5 if uncertain and follow my instructions.". (I can tell the $PU how I really feel since I've resigned and will leave the company anyway. What are they gonna do, fire me?). $PU looks a bit sheepish but still tries to convince me he did nothing wrong and asked why his printer, which is installed on his old PC didn't work on his new as well as not being able to logon to the $CRM_System. I proceed to tell him a new PC does not have any info from his old PC and on top of that, he did not do the required installation so there is no company installation on the new PC. $PU looks puzzled (yes, he's that tech savvy). Then on to the famous "keyboard not working in monitor" issue. The problem was that he got the "no signal" error message, but he did not read the entire message to me when I asked him. Now that I could see, it said "No signal" indeed, but it also specified digital. So I switched source to analogue, and lo and behold, it worked. So his "keyboard" was actually his PC/docking station. Now for the next stage of the story: as part of my initial setup of a PC, we activate Bitlocker. This is a company policy and required on all PC's. I activate it, explain to $PU how to enter the code, let him pick his code and watch him punch it once and see the PC booting. I explain to him this code will never change, and he ALWAYS has to punch it before the PC will boot to Windows. $PU nods and says he understands. Today I get a mail with an upside-down picture of a black screen with some text on it. The text is the Bitlocker recovery key request. $PU proceeds to write "It started this way." Now, I could always look up the recovery key in the AD, but you know what? First stop (company policy) is Servicedesk, not me. So maybe I logged a ticket with them, telling them to help. Maybe. I hope this is the last post about this specific $PU, I only have 1 month left on my resignation, but you never know... Edit: To explain, this SD is in English and that is not native to $PU. $PU's English is not super, if I put it that way. [link] [comments]  |
| Customer cancels ISP install... Posted: 15 Apr 2018 01:35 PM PDT Customer moves into a new office and refuses to schedule ISP Install ahead of time. There is a free ISP provided hotspot, we will be fine customer tells me. I tell him we should just wait for the ISP and he refuses. We setup an N2000 with DDWRT... works great for two weeks. Customer cancels install request (without telling me) because jeryrigged temp solution is working so well. The business next door moves out no more internet. Full rack with POS, SAN, and ERP servers now have no internet and the ISP is available Tuesday to install. Business is losing $90,000 a day... [link] [comments]  |
| "Connection problem? No, end user issue." Posted: 15 Apr 2018 12:38 PM PDT The idea that the network, and by extension his job, existed to facilitate the business of the college and the day to day work of the students, staff and faculty at $MidwestCollege was utterly lost on $Red. $Red's job existed so his kids could get an education at the school. The fact that hundreds of people depended on the facilities he managed to get their work done was way down in the list below his kid's education, his paycheck, and his vacation time. As you know, when troubleshooting complex issues, especially computer things, you need to kind of move in a step-by-step process, eliminating potential causes as you go and avoid "jumping around" to avoid going down the wrong path and making a bad assumption. Not so with $Red. His troubleshooting method was like watching a meth-addled monkey at work. He leapt from potential cause to potential cause with the frequency of a cheap ham radio, regardless of other information or clear indications to the contrary.. He'd be troubleshooting a data-link layer problem, a bad cable or fiber GBIC, and then he'd suddenly decide, no, its a transport layer issue. And of course, because he'd had only a cursory grasp of how these things worked (remember the DHCP server?), often I swear it was like he was using a dartboard to make decisions. $Red didn't like tools, either. Like Nessus or MRTG. Nothing that gave him any status of traffic or whatever. I think because it required knowledge and skill he didn't have, or he didn't know how to interpret the information and it would make him look stupid to admit that. Back in those days, spyware was just becoming a thing, and a lot of the stuff that the students got on their systems when off-campus would create a lot of broadcast traffic on the network while it tried to do its thing (this was after $Red "flattened" the network into one gigantic subnet, but before we implemented the new switches and NAC system), $Red had no way to determine the actual source of any broadcast traffic using traffic graphs or packet counts or whatever, but even if he did, he'd likely have refused to use them. One day, I'd been at the college maybe 2 months or so, and the network was getting beaten up by a broadcast storm. The Help Desk had lit up with people not being able to get to servers, etc. The problems seemed to be moving across the campus. I went over to the NOC to see if $Red knew what was going on and maybe had a handle on it. My confidence in this was low, of course, based on his track record so far. I open the door to the NOC and there's $Red, on one side of the NOC, standing in front of the core switch, looking over his shoulder at his laptop visible thru the door into his office. "What the..?" was my first thought. Sure enough: $Red's method to isolate a broadcasting computer was to login to the traffic management appliance (a device we'll call a $PayloadAdjuster) and find the source IP address of the broadcast traffic. Then, not having any interest or desire in using any management tools that would ID the location of that source IP on the network (ie. switch and port), he would just start a continuous ping of the offending IP from his laptop, open the door to the MDF in the NOC (20 ft from his desk) and pull each of the campus fiber link connections from the core switch until the IP until he got a "no reply" message. This was his method of narrowing down which building on campus the offending device was located in. Apparently, sometimes, $Red would then call the Help Desk and get a tech to dispatch, or he'd just grab his laptop himself, head for the offending building, and do it all over again with the Ethernet cables on the switches in the building until the process narrowed it down to a specific port. I had no idea this was his "method" and I was completely horrified. Of course, never mind the people trying to get actual work done in some building. Here's $Red just randomly interrupting their connectivity at the NOC. Normally, if it was just web browsing or connectivity to Outlook, not that big of a deal. But the client for our Student Information System (talking to Oracle) didn't survive connectivity outages at all. Too bad if you were in the ERP at the time. People would be working along and boom, $Red would pull the fiber to their building and "so long!" Even worse, when $Red plugged the fiber back in and moved on to the next building, the user would try to login again, they'd get an "account in use" error of some sort because their session was unexpectedly interrupted in Oracle and still hanging open. Then the Oracle team would have to get involved and kill the user's original session so they could login again. But this would entail 2-3 phone calls back and forth between the user, the help desk, the Oracle team, etc. Multiply that by however many people were actively using Oracle in just the Admin building and you can imagine the Help Desk would get pretty resentful when $Red used this "troubleshooting" method on a random Monday morning. I finally convinced him there were probably better ways to go about this than just yanking fiber, but that was quickly overtaken by the NAC project wth all the new switches, VLANs and the NAC management interfaces. The NAC system would monitor for "top talkers" and other anomalous behavior next to automagically. It would flag a port using too much bandwidth or putting out too many packets and would shut it down and move it to a quarantine VLAN and then alert $Red. Who would promptly ignore the alerts. Even after the NAC came on line, $Red refused to take ownership of anything. The Help Desk would call "We have a guy who says he got kicked off the network.." (ie. due to being put into the VLAN quarantine) and $Red would refuse to look up the computer in the NAC interface. He'd just say "User issue. Don't bug me" and hang up the phone. Yeah, probably 35% of my job running the support side of the house was mitigating conflicts between $Red & my Help Desk or $Red & the rest of the user community. tl;dr $Red's troubleshooting technique was reminiscent of the this guy: https://imgur.com/a/vkngr [link] [comments]  |
| I accidentally formatted my HDD and have lost my precious data, please help me retrieve it! Posted: 15 Apr 2018 02:28 PM PDT This started out as a reply to a comment in the AskReddit thread, but the story got rather long so i decided to put my first story on here. So LTL;FTP. I work first line tech support at my university, handling students almost exclusively. Most of the problems are fucked up windows installations, failing hardware or help with installing software. And then there are the other problems. One time, a guy ($customer) came into our university tech support. He accidentally wiped his drive trying to install a dualboot windows/ubuntu on it and asked if we could perform a data retrieval. We do have such software, because when you maintain thousands of people this will happen sooner or later (usually about twice a week). So I ask him, what kind of data and how much are we talking about? 'Not too much, some personal stuff'. Hmkay, unscrew the drive, hook it to our retrieval system, start the scan. Leave it on overnight so colleagues can check it out in the morning. Apparently it was a busy day, when I got in the day after my colleagues hadn't done anything to the drive as there were clients who needed to be helped. No problem. Data scan was successful and it looks like there's a hell of a lot of stuff on there. Call up the dude:
Cue next morning: Morning is fine and easy, dude swings by just as I'm about to go on break. I go to the retrieval PC and log in.
facepalm Whilst I scroll down to the folder to see if there's any non-pirated content in there I ask him if he's aware that I can't be assisting users acquire illegally obtained files. He said there probably was a slim chance I would and that his important uni/work documents were backed up anyways so it is all fine. [link] [comments]  |
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