How NOT to Apply For a Job Tech Support |
- How NOT to Apply For a Job
- Screwdriver best practices
- Legacy Support of Client’s Computer, Part II
- Chain reaction
- "What's this?"
- TGI- Friday
| Posted: 14 Apr 2018 11:12 AM PDT I was responding to a post over in r/askReddit, and felt that some of the nuance might be lost. So I'm posting it here. At a former job, I wasn't the employer, but I was the one the company owner deferred to for selection during the hiring process. He wanted me to assist in hiring some front-end devs for a start-up, and he had no clue what he was doing (full disclosure, I was really young and didn't know either). So I created a simple exam for applicants to complete so that we could gauge their skill set. The base requirement was an understanding of XHTML (yes, the platform we built required all front-end docs to be XHTML compliant). The exam itself was all about creating a mock-up website within a limited time frame. I did this to gain a better understanding of how the applicant worked under pressure, since the job was extremely stressful with multiple deadlines daily. From the start of the exam, we inform the applicant that there is no expectation that they will complete the exam, and nothing that they create during the course of the exam will be used for anything aside from their application. Within the first week of interviewing front-end developers, I get a strange email from a woman out of state. Living about 1,500 miles away. I am not the point of contact, so I initially forward the email to the company owner. He responds by letting me know that he had given her my information, that he had pre-interviewed her, and he thought she was a great fit. From 1,500 miles away. For a position that required someone physically on site. So I sat and read, and re-read this woman's email. The first half was her life-story, talking about her husband and kids. It just sort of rambled on, and from the way she wrote, you could feel her desperation bleeding through the screen. The second half was a quick description of what should have been a resume. She briefly talks about her professional experience with about 4 or 5 different companies, but only gives the correct information for one. I do a quick cross-check and view the company website. Honestly, I've seen better Geocities sites in the late 90's and this one only worked half as well. View source, and it's evident to me that this was a copy + paste job as well. I go back to the owner and tell him I don't recommend continuing the application process with this woman. He insists that she's the diamond in the rough, that I should go ahead and schedule her for a phone interview and set up the exam for her to perform remotely. Okay then. I spend time over the next few days setting up a desktop off our internal network that she can remote in to. I send her a detailed list of instructions to follow for initiating the process, assume that this whole thing is going to be hassle, so I pad the usual half hour window with an hour start and hour finish and notify her that she should set aside 3 hours in total. Sure enough, she calls me so I can confirm that we're able to connect via VPN to the testing platform and that she's able to access the exam correctly, but it takes a solid 45 minutes of hand holding before I'm able to start the test. During that period of time, her demeanor starts to switch from being grateful for the opportunity, to why the hell did we make this so difficult. Right, because I had to go through assisting her with installing and setting up the VPN software we used, and it was evident from the get go that she hardly knew her way around a computer. So I remain patient, bide my time, and finally we have a solid VPN connection. The desktop she's remoted into is running Windows Vista (yeah, guess how many years ago this was) and had only the Adobe Creative Suite installed. Her instructions were to use Dreamweaver (preferred, but Notepad was also acceptable) to construct a simple template in XHTML using the guidelines I sent her, and she could access any of the other programs to create additional elements. She had half an hour to create one page. The test begins, and I hang up. I keep an eye on her screen and the timer while I work on other things. At the thirty minute mark, I check in. She's got Notepad and Dreamweaver opened on the desktop. All that she's managed to input is the HTML document tag. At this point, I'm not surprised. I figure she abandoned the test and left the connection open because she doesn't know how to close it. I take over the desktop and proceed to start closing the programs when my phone rings. Her voice rings through the other end, louder and clearer than a bell. "HEY! I WAS WORKING ON THAT!" She caught me off guard, so it takes a moment to gather my wits. I calmly explain that the exam is only 30 minutes long. She, again, pleads with me. Starts off with "but I thought I had 3 hours" and ends with "but I was almost done." Truthfully, I know that this isn't going to end well, and it's lunch time for me. After a few minutes of pretending to be a hard ass, I give in and say she has another hour. She thanks me, hangs up, and I head off to lunch. When I return, I log back into the machine the exam is housed on, and the screen looks identical to the way it did when I left. I screencap the desktop as she's left it, kill the VPN connection, and start to compose an email to the owner. Sure enough, she calls me about 15 minutes later. At first she tells me that there's something wrong with the connection and that she's been trying to reconnect for the past five minutes. I tell her that her hour was up 15 minutes ago, and the machine has been offline for at least that long. She then changes her story and blames the connection speed. I told her that she has 30 minutes to send me any html document that fits the parameters of the exam. Again, hangs up. I fire off my email to the owner, acknowledging that I gave her one last chance to redeem herself - just incase there was a technical issue. 30 minutes later, I get a nearly empty html document with empty header, body, and table tags. In her poorly-typed email she claims that "she's done it" and that I should be more than happy with the free labor I've squeezed out of her. With glee, I forward the email, untouched, to the owner. I could hear the resounding "What the-" from his office down the hall when he opened it. I don't even bother waiting for a reply. I head to his office and we have an amusing chat about this applicant. Next day, he sent her a rejection email. It was polite and professional, and we thought it was the end of it. Three days later, she calls back, screaming and yelling at the owner for rejecting her. 3 days. After the email. How often does she check her email? She fluctuated between fits of anger and pleading for another chance. She accused me of all kinds of things, blamed technology, even blamed her husband for not taking her kids on the day of the exam, and so on. Owner gave her a warning, told her not to contact the company again. Idiot woman proceeded to call and harass us for the next week or so, before it finally stopped. The owner learned his lesson and handed full-control of hiring applicants over to me. Had the positions filled within another week, no additional problems. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2018 11:57 AM PDT I help support +-30 workstations on a shop floor for a local manufacturing company. Trust in the people that use these computers is currently at 0 and has led to the workstations being frozen with Deepfreeze and locked down to the point where they can only access one URL and print to a local Zebra printer. When a label printer goes down, it is a semi big deal as that is all these computers do. Me: Guy dude that does work User: Gung ho screwdriver user I'm at the office and I get an email from this company saying label printer is down so I head onsite and take a look. I try to print a label and notice the platen roller is spinning freely and not catching the labels, causing nothing to shoot out. I open the printer up and noticed the tab that locks the roller in place is up, so I close it, printer calibrates, and blamo the printer is back in business. After walking around the shop a bit I find the guy that uses the workstation. Me: Printer is back up, you should be good. User: Thanks! I tried to fix it with this screw driver but it wasn't working I'm trying to picture why this guy would need a screw driver to fix this printer, especially for an issue this simple. M: What did you need the screw driver for? U: The printer was jammed. Let me show you what I tried to do. We walk over to the printer. User opens the side panel and starts stabbing the assembly around the printhead. Not prying, poking, or screwing, but stabbing things with the end of the screwdriver. Taken aback, I watch him for a couple seconds before I mumble something along the lines of M: Ah, oh, uhhhh please stop.... what are you doing. U: Printer was jammed so I thought this would fix things. M: Errrr no. Next time you can check this tab to see if the roller is locked. Shouldn't have to use a screwdriver to fix these machines. U: Alright, thanks! tl;dr Title [link] [comments]  |
| Legacy Support of Client’s Computer, Part II Posted: 14 Apr 2018 05:57 PM PDT So today began day 3 of this crazy project. After spending about an hour working at my desk, I get a call from the client. They wanted to know what we were working on for their ticket today. I already had the idea and plan in place to do an on-site at their location, bringing the computer I had picked up yesterday at a small computer store. It's a 486 computer with plenty of ISA slots. So I drive over to the clients company, computer in tow and get shown around the manufacturing area. The icing on the cake was the mammoth control panel that housed the processor that they needed to be reprogrammed. Did I mention behind that control panel is an entire wing of manufacturing, just sitting there waiting for this to be finished. So I get started and have to sit on the factory floor, they don't have any chairs to be had. It smells of oil and usual manufacturing waste. I guess they do a lot of plastics processing. So we get the ISA card installed and get it booting. Installed the program and we hooked it up to the machine. Then began the bumbling around the program because I'm just a service tech, not a technician specializing in this craziness. Then I somehow get it sort of working, but in flipping through the massive binder of documentation, I find the little tidbit saying, oh BTW, this program only works with DOS 3.3 or 4.01. Now I had DOS floppies stashed that were version 6.22! Do you know how hard it is to find that old of DOS disks or even the bootable iso or image? Well sure you do, this wouldn't be Tales From Tech Support without it being insanely difficult to solve this insanity. So I go back and forth from my work to the clients company about 4 times (hurrah for paid mileage) because I need floppy disks and floppy drives. I also grabbed some more hard drives because why not, don't want to go back and forth too many times. On one of those trips, I had the idea to try pulling all the data from the client's original hard drive. This is using that 486 computer I picked up yesterday. So I get back to the company and start digging into the 486 computer and hooking up the original hard drive. After some fiddling, I get that sucker recognized and boot into DOS 6.22. Miraculously, it recognized the original drive and actually had all the information still on it. I copied it over and finally had some concrete progress to show the client. Unfortunately, I was there for a total of 4 and a half hours and that the best progress was getting the hard drive info off. The rest of the time was used up trying, unsuccessfully to get a DOS image that was bootable using floppies. Yeah not easy... at least not for me. Anyway, after finishing up at the clients, I went back to work and worked with my head technician to get a damn bootable DOS floppy working. Only 45 minutes after we closed. My brain has been working overtime thinking of how to make all this crap work and get a massive positive review from this company. As of right now, my next idea is to try loading a newer program with XP or 98 and getting everything interfaced. I have the program and now just have to wait till Monday to go on another on-site. Thanks for the support on the first post! Part 3 will be coming on Monday night or Tuesday night. Who knows how many days these on-sites will go on for. Probably like a week or so. A week of being stressed out of my mind, but in a good way. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2018 08:56 PM PDT To staff tech for a convention there are two skills you need to have, an ability to think on your toes and a sense of humor. It is maybe for this reason that tech staff is the mostly likely team to have a toolbox, tape, mallets, and various odds and ends. The convention center, for liability reasons, would only provide keys for all of our convention rooms to general con logistics manager. Because of some logistics issues the tech lead and I were managing tech from a staging lock up and an outpost (literally a closet nearer the convention rooms). About midday during the first day I was tired of having to go to ops to access the lockup or being one man down because someone has to babysit the room. At one point the room was unlocked and we didn't have access to the keys to lock it. Luckily we had some chains and masterlocks in tech. The tech lockup had two sets of doors. I made sure one set was locked by the hotel key and I chain and masterlocked the other set of doors with some curious congoers looking on. The next day, Saturday of con. Saturdays are always hard on me because I usually wander into tech 2 to 3 hours before my shift due to my OCD not letting me just let the morning staff carry on as is. I plant myself in the lawnchair I brought from home and take up my usual roll of manging the flow of equipment and chitchatting with the tech staff that stop in between rounds of convention rooms. That evening, the party block is in full swing.
I look at the walkie talkie in horror. We have over 5,000 dollars in equipment unguarded in a room in which only two convention staff members have a key, me to the masterlock and the logicists manager with the hotel key. Logicists manager would have more of a hissy fit over any missing equipment than me and that's saying something. I fish into my lawnchair for the key and the extra masterlock I stored there. I then pull another chain from one of my boxes. When I stand up I look over to the tech person that had walked into the room.
I start briskly walking through the convention center and hotel all the while cursing whatever hotel staff member thought it was a good idea to come around and unlock a room we booked when we had it locked for more than half the convention. The party block was between me and my destination. There I was a tech geek in a staff shirt walking in a huff through a hall full of drunk or near drunk people with a six foot chain over my shoulder. I got more than one curious look sent my way. TL:DR- Hotel staff pisses off the tech equipment babysitter justifying both sixfoot chains in the tech staff possession. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2018 07:05 AM PDT We took on a small business client to do a migration to 365 for them. They had been running off of a SBS 2003 server, MS was really pushing for it to be gone at this point. The company had also recently been moving to more of a roaming user setup, so moving to cloud hosting was going to be a more appropriate anyway. We had got the migration mostly done at this point and the ageing server was down to a 'just there for roll-backs' role. This occurs soon after company files had been moved. The server was shut off for a scream test to ensure nothing it was doing was needed any-more. The client calls up looking to gain access to a file that they were thinking had been missed. We had left the server there as-is so they could just turn it back on if there was some urgent problem. However at some point someone wanted a network connection so the cable to the server's Ethernet cable had been unplugged. Client asked if it would be ok if they could do it to prevent us coming out. Nice and simple, if they plug it back in and turn the box back on, it would be fine.
A few seconds pass.
What?
Great, I organised to go out, they weren't that far away. I get there to see Client is the only one in the office, I can find a bit more about what happened. I pick up the server and put it on the desk so I can inspect it. The server was a little ml110, a nice workhorse of small businesses, but is basically a desktop case with a server components in. Looking at the back of the server there is nice square hole where I was expecting an Ethernet socket. Whelp, with no networking we will have to use a USB drive. I ask Client if they had a USB hard drive. They did and asked if I can put all the files on to it anyway, they don't want have to turn on the server again later. I nicked the connections for the desk I was on and booted up the server so I can start the copy. It's quite slow, and without networking windows has to wait for a bunch of services to fail. Being nosy and wanting something to do while windows boots, I decided to open up the case so I can look at the damage that Client did to the network adapter. Being that Client is not techy, they wanted to see inside as well, so they hover near by. First thing I noticed is how much dust there was. It had apparently been running behind a desk on the floor for a long time. It's a carpeted room so the dust is not that surprising then. I (carefully) reach in and pick up the Ethernet socket. It had been completely broken off the add-in card, I guess they pushed a bit too hard. I turned to show Client, but something else had caught their eye.
Their hand starts reaching into something inside the server. Something Pink. I don't stop them for two reasons. They own the server, they can break it if they want (they already did,) and I realised what they were reaching for. Slowly out comes a brown grey box with some pink patches visible through the dust. It's about 3 inches wide. We weren't aware of any USB backup being setup.
I logon to the server after it boots up and take a look at any backup programs. None are setup to go to a USB Hard Drive. I take another look at My Computer and all the company files are on a D: drive. I then try to eject any USB devices. The D: drive disappears. Oh. I unplug the drive and give it a big blow. I then pass the now almost completely hot pink box to $Client.
Yes. Yes it was. TLDR: Client breaks server network port, leads to discovery that company data had been running off of a consumer external hard drive. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2018 09:45 AM PDT I work techical escalations for an ISP. However, the powers that be decided to queue my team to assist with inital call overflow because we are too efficient right now. About a year the auto populate feature broke. It has always had a temper and for the esclation teams already had a 50/50 shot of displaying an internal number. Now it had decided that 2 out of every 3 auto populated calls were all located in the same state; right account number and pin but wrong state code (and not even the state of our office or corporate). With the auto-populate mostly useless, I wasn't too concerned when five months ago I changed desks and the feature wasn't working on my computer. About a month ago, I finally submitted a ticket, and set it to low priority. The ticket asks when and how I would be available. I only indicate im. I give my work days and when my shift starts and ends indicating my time zone. The next day, a day off, I check my work email and there is an email advising me that I didn't include a phone number so they could call me to address the issue that day. The day after I come into work and an email stating I hadn't replied to the first email. I reply that I don't have a work number and reiterated my hours. A week later, I mention in passing the issue to a deskside guy. He said he would look into it. My guess is he forgot. I don't want to add to his work load, and he already calls me "Care bear" for an incident two years ago. Now we come to the current week. It is Thursday and I get an initial tier call.
He gives it to me. After being cranky at me for not accepting "the account holder" as an answer for who I am talking with and getting an earful for asking him for his pin, I get him through power cycling his modem and router. His router just didn't have a valid IPv4. The next day, I pull up my it ticket and it is still open. I add an additional comment stating the issue is not resolved and affected a call. IT pops up soon after asking if I am free to have the issue looked at. I watch the remote person clearing my temp files and it looks like she might have emptied my trash folder. I sigh, chalking it down to policy. After she is done with the routine maintenance steps, I can tell from the down time she is finally checking my profile credentials and software.
I show her the folder for $phonesoftwareXX. Most of our machines have 2 files in this folder. Agents are advised to only use $phonesoftwareXXA However, both are near identical files, and most agents just call the entire system including the physical phones $phonesoftware. I only have file $phonesoftwareXXB.
I walk over to my manger's office. He is chatting with our director.
TL:DR- Cranky customer leads me to me being a little bit more of a problem child than usual. [link] [comments]  |
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