The system is down for maintenance. Tech Support |
- The system is down for maintenance.
- When Incompetence Strike You Back
- When absolutely vital and important features don't work
- Huh, that's a small, but annoying, problem
- Finding Solutions FAR Outside My Scope of Work. I Wonder If I Should Have Sent Them A Bill?
- More from Aviation Maintenance: Altered Paths
- The "Technical Solution"
- The Kiosk
- Young Wrath and the Eldritch Machine!
- The day when we helped tech support...
- Two-factor file cabinet.
- Mouse doesn’t work.....
- My screens are flipped
| The system is down for maintenance. Posted: 17 Apr 2018 10:28 PM PDT So we got this lovely gem of a call earlier. Me: Welcome to [Company] how can I help? Customer: The account systems not working, it says it down for maintenance? Me: Yes, it's down for routine maintenance like it says on the message, it will be back up shortly. Customer: Oh but I really need to do the thing now, can you not just put the system online for a few minutes for me? Me: Sadly that's not how this works, I'm sorry you're going to have to wait the same as everyone else. Customer: Ok, well that doesn't work for me. Can I speak to manager please? Me: Ok... but he won't be able to help either since it's routine maintenance that needs to be done and can't be stopped once it's starter. Please hold. So I go get my manager, explain that 'customer' won't take no for an answer and put them on the call. Manager: I'm sorry that you're unable to do anything on the system, but this maintenance has been planned for two weeks and you will have got emails advising you it will be down between 12:00 and 15:00. Customer: I got the email I just don't believe you really have to take it down for that long, or at all. If you're not going to help me I'm going to write a formal complaint to my manager and yours. Manager: Feel free to write a formal complaint and please copy in [Director of IT] since this will go to him anyway. Have a nice day. -hangs up on customer- Next day the Director of IT comes in and we all have a laugh about this, and how the customer has been told that if a system is down and she has email before hand saying it is going to be down, don't call up to see why it's not working. [link] [comments]  |
| When Incompetence Strike You Back Posted: 17 Apr 2018 09:32 AM PDT This story takes place at an old employer. They were a nonprofit private school. Overall, they were great but were limited by funds for a two man IT department. Most days consisted of me doing the planned upgrade or maintenance and wasting time since I was part-time and needed to be a warm body there to take home a paycheck. Part of my duties was help desk type support. Most people were more than understanding about my lack of time and would actually communicate if something could wait or if they needed me to get there ASAP. They respected my time and I in turn would actually come if it was an emergency that kept them from doing any work. Anyways we had this one user who I will call Debbie. Debbie was a nice lady who had no idea what the word emergency meant. After the first few times, I stopped going to her immediately and would make her wait for a bit since more than likely she was just doing something stupid and would figure it out or would figure a way around it for a while. One day Debbie was exceptionally frantic. She called me and I could tell in her voice that there was a big problem.
So I go down to her computer and look at what she is trying to do. Now I am not into design so I have to spend a few minutes just getting familiar with the Adobe program. All along she is trying to rush me while I am telling her "it will take as long as it takes because I don't know anything about this program" and "you have more experience with this program than I do." I figure out the little thing she wanted thanks to finally giving up and googling it. I show her how, ask if she needs anything else, and leave. About 15 minutes later I get another frantic call from her. Realizing that this is just another user training, I decide to finish what I am doing before I go down. I tell her I will come down when I can. Five minutes after that I get a frantic call from her begging me to come down now. I figure she is probably just having a bad day so I go ahead and go down, Google what she needed to know, show her how to Google then leave. I tell her if she has anymore stuff she needs to know how to do, look there first. At this point I am pretty proud of myself, I have taught a man (or woman) to fish as they say and I start back on my domain controller migration (which went really smooth despite being interrupted) and finish my work for the day. The next day I have another series of random calls where I end up going to retrain her how to use Google. After some time, I go to my boss's office and complain about her. (Note: my boss focuses on empathy but knows with just two of us that there are things we shouldn't waste time on). I estimate how much time I have been spending over at Debbbie and am really just trying to get some empathy from someone who knows her and knows how difficult she can be. He listens and asks if I showed her Google. I told him of coarse but she clearly doesn't get Google so how is she going to understand this Adobe program. He tells me he will take care of it from now on and that anytime she calls just get him to go down there so I don't end up saying something I will regret. A few days later, I notice him meeting with the dean who is her boss. I don't think anything of it since they both deal with communications. I figure they are planning some layout of something and am glad I don't have to be a part of it. However, a few days after that all of a sudden Debbie is reassigned to the receptionist and the receptionist is moved to her position. Basically Debbie from then on just answers the phone and greets people at the door. I still had my occasional freak out from her such as if Facebook was down or her mouse won't scroll again. But anytime that 0 extension called, I would just check the voicemail because it was always her complaining over not understanding how the internet works, or a sales call. [link] [comments]  |
| When absolutely vital and important features don't work Posted: 18 Apr 2018 02:26 AM PDT TL;DR: Absolutely vital feature turns out to never have worked after a year and nobody had noticed. Developer feels very appreciated /s I need this off my chest. I'm a web developer at a relatively small company. About a year ago, I was developing an application to manage dossiers with licenses etc. It involved cad drawings, and a system that sent out mails to project leaders so that they could approve/disapprove these cad drawings with a comment. At the time the cad department wanted to be able to upload .DWG files as well as the "to be approved revisions". So that the project leaders could directly download those files after they approved the revision.
A year later I'm developing an extra feature for the comments, so that an attachment can be added to them... ...and I notice that the .DWG files' download button doesn't work.After staring at my code with a puzzled face for a few minutes, I realise that
So these people that demanded this "absolutely vital feature" had a completely unusable set of download buttons that nobody complained about, or even noticed, for over a year. Thx for reading. I'm off to implement some more "absolutely vital features". sigh [link] [comments]  |
| Huh, that's a small, but annoying, problem Posted: 17 Apr 2018 08:28 PM PDT This is a tiny story, but I'm going to tell it slowly so you can see if you can figure out the problem and solution before the reveal. I think we've all done things like this. We front line techs are, at heart, people who look for problems because problems spotted early are often, not always, problems that are fixed fast. I installed a new computer for Sarah, a nice bespectacled middle aged woman, who was confident with office software and didn't know or need to know anything else about computers. As I asked her to put her password in various places, I noticed she was tilting her head back repeatedly. What? I looked at the monitor. It wasn't top of the line, but the viewing angle was just fine. The position relative to her eyes was normal, certainly nothing to cause that much neck strain. Then I looked at her glasses and knew what was happening. Me: Sarah, do you happen to have bifocals, by any chance? Sarah: Yes, is it that obvious? Me: Not really, you've just been tilting your head up to read the screen. That's going to get painful eventually. Do you have a few more minutes so I can adjust some settings and show you some helpful tricks? Sarah was thrilled with her new display resolution and the magic of ctrl+scrolling. [link] [comments]  |
| Finding Solutions FAR Outside My Scope of Work. I Wonder If I Should Have Sent Them A Bill? Posted: 17 Apr 2018 04:16 PM PDT Afternoon all! LTL, FTP, and all that jazz. The post by /u/abschatten reminded me of one that happened to me once. It was a simple fix but I was pretty proud of myself for getting it working under the circumstances. My first job out of college was at a small business we'll call ABCDirect. It had 16 employees, and we did print and mail marketing work for other companies. We didn't have enough IT work for a full time Sysadmin, so there were three IT members who did any infrastructure and helpdesk work as needed, but mostly did data processing for the mail jobs. We were client-facing, and it wasn't unusual for me to talk to a couple of the clients every day if there were issues or just vagueness about some of the data they sent over. But all the IT work was strictly internal - support of other employees' workstations, the couple servers we had, etc. So one day, my phone rings. The HR/Accounting person had been hiring new assistants at a rate that had become almost comical... like, she'd been going through them almost as fast as Murphy Brown went through them on TV. HR/Accounting person is one of my best friends to this day so I don't think she was the problem, it was just this neverending parade of losers that we got from this staffing agency that we couldn't just get rid of for reasons that nobody could ever properly explain to me. The latest had arrived about 2 weeks earlier and was now answering the main phone line if it rang. Our players are:
There is a helpful beep to tell me that she hung up before I could even start my sentence, and that I am now on the line with this... uh... Customer, I suppose.
I'm flabbergasted. I stand up and look over my cubicle wall. I am responsible for supporting the technology for 16 people and I can see all of them with my eyeballs right now. This guy is not among them. Well, it seems pretty obvious that this is a wrong number but I didn't want to just say that and hang up, because I wanted to take the opportunity to find out where he got the number from. If it's a misdial, so be it, but if another company has accidentally printed our number somewhere, I wanted to be able to get out ahead of it.
I type the model number into Google real quick and discover what happened quickly enough. Apparently in addition to ABCDirect, there is also a company called ABCSolutions. ABCSolutions has been in business for a lot longer than ABCDirect, and is known for manufacturing Muzak solutions for retail stores, elevators, that sort of thing. I chuckled to myself, though, because that means that $CBNO did a Google search, found our page (which looked like a page that had been made 15 years ago in 1997, because it had), clicked through three layers of pages of stock photos with people happily standing next to large digital presses and showing off beautiful printed mail deliverables to get to the contact us page, and then called our number. No problem here, time to send him on his way.
I'm about to give him the number but then I had a thought. Not a complex thought, not a hard one, not one born of any expertise or knowledge about the product at all. Just one that I know, based on my career so far, is a good one to ask.
And with that I went off to find HR/Accounting and tell her it was probably time to start searching for yet another assistant. Preferably one who at least understood what ABCDirect actually did this time. [link] [comments]  |
| More from Aviation Maintenance: Altered Paths Posted: 17 Apr 2018 12:02 PM PDT This post was inspired by a post in Ask Reddit I saw this morning. A lot has happened, a lot has changed over the years… Many, many years ago, back when I was an optimistic young kid who thought he could be anything, do anything, I had zero desire to get into aircraft maintenance. I'd grown up subsisting on a steady diet of flight sims, Star Wars and Top Gun—Goose was a saint, Maverick was Dangerous, and Wedge was a better pilot than Luke. Unfortunately, I wore glasses which automatically nixed any hopes I had of being a combat pilot. However, it didn't block me from flying other aircraft in the civilian world. My uncle is a pilot for $AviationCompany (the very same who employs me currently) and had coached me on his own path: college flight school, followed by being an instructor, then flying small cargo, and eventually getting into the Big Leagues with one of the major air carriers, cargo or passenger. During my senior year in high school, I paid a visit to a few schools, to include one who claimed to have an aviation program in South Carolina (and I discovered had I gone there, I would likely have been expelled for being a bad influence…or fomenting revolution…not sure what sub to post THAT story in…) and the school I would eventually choose. In the fall of 2001, I arrived at the second best University in the U.S. for aviation training, far in the frozen northern plains, planning to pursue a degree in Commercial Aviation. Before I could start my core flight classes, however, I had to knock out my generals, electives and the Intro to Commercial Aviation course. Interested in following my journey, my uncle invited me to blog about becoming a commercial pilot on a popular flight-sim site. There were, however, two problems. The first was fairly simple: I did not come from a family with any semblance of wealth. Flight training is expensive, and I was looking at a very large number of loans once I started trying to get flight hours. The second issue? Well…. 0800 September 11th, 2001
The interruption to the Acting I elective course I'd chosen was short lived; the little single engine Cessnas that were so prevalent over campus were the first aircraft that leapt to mind, so naturally we all assumed it was merely a terrible accident and left it at that. Class was soon over and not having much to do for the rest of the morning, I headed back to my dorm room to get some CounterStrike in. As I was walking up the stairs, I ran into my roommate who was singing as he was heading down to class.
Arriving in my room, I tossed my bag on my bed and grabbed the remote, flipping the TV on just in time to see video of a 757 slamming into the south tower. Within moments I was on the phone, calling my parents to find out if they'd heard from my uncle. 1430, September 11th, 2001 Because of the size of the class, Introduction to Commercial Aviation was held in a large auditorium. Despite the number of students, the room was silent enough to hear a pin drop. We were all still in shock, taking in the events of the day and just barely beginning to scratch the surface of the implications they had on our futures.
I stopped paying attention to class at that point…and to most of my other classes as well. Realizing how deep a hole I was starting to dig, I made the attempt to shift over to air traffic control, since I figured that wouldn't be as affected by the attack…but I didn't have any pre-requisites completed to get into that, so I floundered for the second semester. I was depressed and let myself get sucked into the social scene. I actually ended up dropping out at the end of the school year, going back home and getting a job at a barbeque joint, getting fired from said job, and then getting a job at a dying department store chain. I had no idea what to do with myself, all I knew is that I was done for college for the foreseeable future. Then my brother mentioned an idea of how I could get back to school and maybe even get it paid for… Military Entrance Processing Station, May, 2003 It had taken a year to get a wavier for a knee injury I'd had when in High School, but after being persistent and bugging the recruiters to keep pushing for it, I finally was told I'd be allowed to join the Army. I don't think the majority of the recruiters at the station wanted to bother with me; I was a pudgy fellow with crazy, bushy hair and glasses, your typical nerd. The recruiter I'd gotten in contact with, however, didn't give up and was rather surprised at my drive to continue pushing, even when the rest had written me off. My Recruiter was a Blackhawk Crewchief, and he'd mentioned the possibility of going flight warrant officer and flying helicopters, as my eyes could be corrected to 20/20 vision. I spent the day at the processing station getting examined, poked, prodded, coughing and duck-walking in my underwear, but finally (after getting dressed) I got to sit down with the civilian career counselor.
Computers were a hobby, but I didn't want to give up on the dream of aviation.
He sent me back out to the waiting area and left me to wait for a good half an hour before calling me back in.
I spent another half hour, or maybe even whole hour, waiting and watching TV before the obviously irritated counselor called me back in.
He smiled as he had finally figured out how to rope me into something.
I'll admit, I got excited.
At that same moment, in Washington State, a female who would become my best friend in Germany was signing up for a four-year enlistment, received a $10k bonus and guaranteed Blackhawk crewchief. I, of course, bit hard on that offered hook. And the rest, as they say, was history. TL:DR; I fix aircraft because terrorists. Enjoy what you've read? Read all the rest of the tales! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2018 07:23 PM PDT (Note: I originally posted this to another website under the name "Fat Monkey" back in 1999) Back in my Desktop Support days: It seems that a new employee (Mr X) was complaining about his screen looking "fuzzy" and being hard to read. His new PC had been formatted and reinstalled with Win2k to machine to remove all the junk that the manufacturer had placed there, tested it, but now the end user believed there was an issue. The next day I wandered over, and the new guy was in a meeting. I hopped in his chair, and yes, there was a bit of "fuzzyness"to the picture. I corrected the problem and wrote back to the help-desk (who had not seen the machine and was relying on Mr X's descriptions of the problem) the following solution: "This ticket can be closed. I performed a maintanance operation on the viewing area of the Cathiode Ray Tube, consisting of merging said CRT with a standard chemical solution for removing airborne and tactile residue. (IE - I cleaned the monitor screen with Windex)" [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2018 08:50 AM PDT It started simply enough - a ticket from a small downtown client asking for a wireless adapter. Or so I heard. The adapter was procured easily enough, but getting the client available to install wasn't. This went on for a couple days till the tech was reassigned to Antarctica, and another took over. He came very close to closing the ticket; "hey will you be available today?" "sure, 2:30" then at 1pm "sorry, can we reschedule?" This happened multiple times, and the one time he was able to pin the client down was the day after he'd taken the company car, and had forgotten one tiny thing in it. And unfortunately for him that was the day another person had the car and was taking it to the other side of the state. The first sign of things going awry was parking. Between the protesters and the food trucks there weren't any spots for blocks. Eventually I snagged one, and met the client! He told me he'd take me to the kiosk that needed the adapter. From the ticket notes I had thought this was a desktop in an odd location, but when he led me to the storage closet I started getting concerned... [link] [comments]  |
| Young Wrath and the Eldritch Machine! Posted: 17 Apr 2018 12:28 PM PDT Last time I posted I gave you all a tale of malicious compliance to the companys new rules. This time ill give you all a sillier story of a time when I was more innocent, before the helpdesk and before rage overwhelmed the last bastions of my soul. My very first computer related job, I was hired through college to work over the summer deploying ~500 new windows XP computers to replace the old machines at a local hospital (and its assorted branches), normally windows 95 and windows 98. Yes. This job was exactly as easy as it sounds. One particular tale from this time stands out from the others. Players: $Wrath: Me from 10 years ago! $Anime: A 'not quite' tech friend who happens to be the boss's daughter. $Nurse: A nurse working at the hospital. $Anime and I were tasked to do some reconnaissance and start replacing every computer we find as quickly as we can in some back corner of (at the time) a less used wing of the hospital. We loaded up a cart with a dozen machines, monitors and other supplies before heading out. I got to pull the cart, $Anime 'helped.' The area we are working in today is low traffic, most of the lights are off to save power, or maybe just because the nurses didn't like the angry florescent glow and buzzing that permeated the air. A few hours pass without incident, a few nurses occasionally pass us by and stare longingly at the remaining new flat screen monitors on our cart before wandering back to their desks or offices with temperamental (and heavy!) CRT monitors that could probably crush someone who wasn't paying enough attention.
I take the opportunity to stop hauling around over a half dozen CRT's and towers and check the list. Nothing. The office number is faded on the old wooden, but still readable. Unfortunately it doesn't look like its even on the hospitals room map much less our list.
$Anime and I share a look that belongs to those with the survival instincts of characters in Scooby Doo.
We tried the door. Locked. Curses! Foiled again!
There were still a few new monitors and machines on the cart loaded up in front of approximately a million pounds of CRTs so one of us needed to have line of sight on them at all times less they wander off under the watchful gazes of the nurses. And I wasn't going to drag it back and forth down the hall any more than was necessary. Neither $Wrath nor $Anime were eaten and replaced by any eldritch abomination after they split the party.
We were going to be replacing $Nurses computer soon anyway I guess.. no harm in bumping her up in priority.
$Nurse helpfully digs through her keys to find one that will open the door, $Anime and I both hold our breath in anticipation. The lock clicks and the door slowly creaks open.
$Nurse leaves and $Anime tentatively approaches the door.
The room was tiny, a small cot with delusions of grandeur was acting like a full bed, a light yellowed with age shining down the hall a hall closet, and a bathroom that can only be defined as such by the presence of a claustrophobic shower.
And there it was. The creature from beyond time. A testament to ages long since past! It was an old monster of a computer. An Apple machine from back in 1983 found its way back to the world from the time before either $Anime or I were born. We spend a minute staring at it our expressions a blend of fear and awe.
We stare in reverent silence for a minute. Then we start poking it.
So we start trying to turn it on. After a few (read: more than a few) unsuccessful minutes of troubleshooting we give up.
$Anime giggles, to this day im not sure if it was in joy or madness. We waved the nurse over to let her know what was up, she was as surprised as we were to see something quite that old. $Anime and I reverently packed up the old machine (in handling it I found some manufacturer imprints, along with the date of its creation. Which is the only reason we knew how old it was) and replaced it with a new shiny computer that may or may not have seen the light of day (or any light at all..) since. That computer became $Anime's free time project for the next month as she, and the rest of the IT staff tried to breath life back into the eldritch abomination. We never did get it working again, but we had fun trying! Edit: Apparently the automatic moderation didnt like my original formatting. Sorry! Hopefully this try works! [link] [comments]  |
| The day when we helped tech support... Posted: 17 Apr 2018 01:16 PM PDT I returned to my office after a meeting this afternoon. My colleague is looking flustered and she says;
Well. It didn't. While they wrapped up, I used two minutes in my own outlook looking for the setting I just couldn't remember the location of. Five minutes later...
It did. She took a screen shot and sent it back to the poor (and very new) tech support. I feel for them. We've contracted a new company a few months ago, so I assume most of them are pretty new. I fully understand her goto solution as it resolves almost all issues with outlook. But apparently, the visualisation setting within a meeting booking is kept even when the profile is deleted and readded. So that apparently follows the software installation and not the account (which does not explain why it also replicates itself on the webmail... but that's an issue for someone who knows a lot more than me - like you guys!) TLDR; profile reinstall solves everything! - or how you learn that some settings follow the software and not the account. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2018 06:20 PM PDT Quick tale from work that amused me this week. A new residential customer set up an appointment for a corrupt windows user profile and I headed out at the appointment time. Nice older gentlemen, no red flags, very polite. Fix the profile issue but we are still having some strange problems with his old user account, new user accounts work great so we go about setting up a new user account and transferring all his data from the old one. During the fix he starts complaining about the password system that his grandson had set up for him after he fell victim to an e-mail scam on his @rocketmail.com (blast from the past) account. He claimed he hadn't been able to get into any of his accounts besides email for over a month and wanted to know why he had to have a new password every time he wanted to use his websites. This is when he opens his file cabinet and pulls out a massive stack of papers. I start to flip through them and notice that its a huge pile of two-factor authentication email codes for his various accounts. Turns out his grandson had set him up with a LastPass account and turned on two-factor email authentication, but didn't explain how it worked. He would get to the point where it was asking for his emailed codes, print out the e-mail and then click the bookmark for the website he was trying to logon to and use that authentication code as his password. When it inevitably failed he would repeat the process. There had to be at least a hundred pages printed out, he was overjoyed when I showed him how to use the password management software properly and explained to him what two-factor authentication was. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Apr 2018 03:48 AM PDT I went over to a client and one of the users mentioned that sometimes her mouse "freezes" and therefore her computer is slow. I asked her to try to recreate the problem. She took a window and started to try to grab it with a mouse and move it to another location in the screen, the mouse cursor didn't move. I immediately saw the problem and cursed windows 10 in my mind. She was grabbing the tool bar area and not the top title bar. It was really not her fault because both title bar and tool bar were the same exact color.... and appeared as one big title bar. I showed her that she needs to click a little higher to be able to drag windows. Microsoft..... I became an instant hero by showing the user where to click to hold to move windows in windows 10. Speed issues resolved. LOL. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2018 05:33 PM PDT Everyone in our organization has duel monitors. I got a call this morning from a user. User: "My screens are flipped." Me: "Oh, so your right screen is on your left and your left screen is on your right?" User: "Yes, and I can't get to my right screen." Me: "That's odd. If you move your mouse all the way to your left, does it show up on your right screen?" User: "No." Me: "So what's on your right screen?" User: "It's black." Me: "... So is it off?" User: "Oh I guess it is." [link] [comments]  |
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