Being lazy gets you the most work Tech Support |
- Being lazy gets you the most work
- User Expects Me to do Their Job; I Skewer Them in an Email to Their Boss.
- Lazy users love waiting until major outages to report things!
- One more thing...
- The Tales of Ted: You Tried
- Database Support 13: Embarrassingly Parallel Operations
- I Got Disconnected!
- Reported Lines Down at Location.
| Being lazy gets you the most work Posted: 02 May 2018 09:43 AM PDT There was a time when I was working phone support when my boss mouthed off to a customer and somehow managed to not get fired. His punishment was that he could no longer speak to customers. This meant that I became the defacto boss for my group. One of the techs that worked "for me" in this defacto role had the same name as 3 of the other guys in the office.
Hilarious nickname was a pretty good tech, he had previously worked for big cable provider and as people were much less likely to yell at him working with us he was pretty chill. After a couple months I noticed that Hilarious nickname was taking a lot more calls than the other 2 members of his team. This didn't make sense as I could recognize the laziness in Hilarious nickname as similar to the lazy streak in myself and the other 2 guys on his team were both type A personalities and very hard workers. As I set to digging I realized Hilarious nickname's mistake, after every call he'd set himself to "unavailable" in the phone system. Normally "unavailable" was what you'd use if you needed a bathroom or lunch break, "followup" was the appropriate setting if you had finished a call and needed to tidy up your notes. It turns out that Hilarious nickname thought by going "unavailable" after every call he wouldn't get penalized for taking a little break after every call but what really happened was that when he set himself "available" again he would be put at the top of the phone tree and automatically take the next call and so was unwittingly sniping calls from the other two techs. Years later I was talking to a woman I worked with at a different company and she mentioned "oh my friend from college says he knows you." she told me the name but it wasn't anybody I recognized. Later that day I got an email from Hilarious nickname
Turns out I had forgotten Hilarious nickname's actual name, in the year or so we worked together I only ever referred to him as Hilarious nickname... [link] [comments]  |
| User Expects Me to do Their Job; I Skewer Them in an Email to Their Boss. Posted: 02 May 2018 04:05 PM PDT Super Users are a very interesting sub group of people. They're smart enough, and have access to affect change on systems they're in charge of, but still rely on IT to describe the techno-babble. This user, however, just doesn't know how to call the $20k / year software support we pay for. They'll do all the work if a verified user calls in with an issue, type of support package... Anyways, I get an email that some 2FA system is down from User A. I explain to User A that it is SU (super user) job to setup the 2FA. He sends that to SU, who promptly sends back an email saying "IT needs to have this fixed before any new deployments go out". I calmly explain to SU that it's a setting on her backend, and that IT doesn't deal in 2FA for this system (it's housed outside of our network). She then CC's my boss, her boss, and User A explaining how she doesn't have the option to do this, and that IT better figure it out soon because it's a security risk. This is where I lost it. I pick up the phone dial the software support agents. They explain to me exactly what I told SU. I ask for an email with the support ticket information. I attach it to the previous chain with my boss, her boss, and User A with the line "I called support. They can fix the issue. I can't access the area that needs change, but you can. Please call them back and have this corrected". Two hours later we all received an email that it's "working". [link] [comments]  |
| Lazy users love waiting until major outages to report things! Posted: 03 May 2018 01:23 AM PDT I'm manager on a service desk/information desk we deal with light user support and info management so as one or only two technical guys on my team of 5 I often get pulled into doing the technical support. We can fix most things at first/second line level but a lot of stuff gets passed onto an external company who do most of our IT. It's a weird system but that's how the organisation works. Anyway we have a major system outage due to a network change over night, lots of printers stop working. At least 30 printers lost IP settings and naming conventions. So anyway our external company fix most of these remotely no problems no changes needed on users laptops or computers. So I get in and get an urgent call from my boss I need to floor walk as NONE of the printers are working, bear in mind the outage was a week before. To our knowledge only one printer had not successfully been fixed and was awaiting external company to come and sort it. Annoyingly our printers only have a 2 year support period we clear jams, change toner and soft trouble shoot. To save money out of warranty we do some jobs ourself without telling external company. After 2 years they are replaced if anything other than rollers are faulty. So we need to know about printing issues asap! Here's my findings on my floor walk 4x printers not even turned on... working fine once turned on 3 x printers out of toner new toners sat next to printer (Most people in the company know how to change toner) 1 x printers has too much paper loaded tray is jammed shut 7 x printers have been faulty/out of action for over 6 months not reported no idea what is wrong most likely rollers or paper jams 1 x printer has been offline/not used for 3 years (This is a big expensive colour laser worth over £1000) People just couldn't be bothered to report to us or the external company by the looks of it. The external company run excellent support no queue times on the phone and you can report via live webchat or email. SLA is normally 1 day or a max of 3 on a printer! I would estimate half the printers in the three buildings we cover were out of action and users had just added another printer. Madness! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 May 2018 05:30 PM PDT I am a doorman for a high end condo building and I make a little extra cash doing minor tech support for the mostly elderly residents. Getting tipped $20 for changing the input on someone's TV is a weekly occurrence. Today, a lady calls down proclaiming the internet is down in the building. Nobody else has complained, so no it isn't. I tell her I will come up and check. I get up there and she has the computer of choice for the elderly, wealthy, and technically inept, a MacBook Pro. She can't get it to connect to wireless. She keeps saying "I can't find Milo". Apparently she renamed her router Milo. I ask her where the router is and she takes me to the opposite end of the large apartment from where she was trying to get it to work. I bring the laptop right next to the router since every unit has their own wifi and interference is sometimes a problem. I check the router, all is green, so that's not the problem. I do the old turn it off and on again with the laptop's wireless. The router name pops right up and it connects. Problem solved. On my way out, her husband says "One more thing...I found this plugged in. Do we need it?" and holds out a wireless extender. I resist the urge to facepalm and tell him to plug it back in where he found it and leave it be. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 May 2018 12:20 PM PDT I'm back with the tales of everyone's favourite tech. This happened while I was in a meeting and was relayed to me by Andy (which, for the ones who don't know, is the senior tech guy that worked with me and Ted). A few minutes after I left Ted started to complain that Windows Update was causing trouble with his computer, as it was very slow, often lagging and getting stuck on simple tasks. He then decided that the best course of action was to lock his workstation and disconnect his tech phone line so that he could get no calls. Andy suggested a few solutions, but basically was too busy to handhold Ted through the troubleshooting, and he was also rightfully annoyed. After 15 minutes or so, another phone rings. It was a special temporary line that we had set up to do a sort of trial of our tech support for a new, very small, consulting firm. Ted had no choice but to pick up the phone, as Andy was already on a call, as he could not just let it ring without answering. Sweet justice! It was the elderly and very tecnologically impaired owner of the consulting firm, that had trouble with his email. While Ted was babbling on the phone with him, I came back, not knowing what was going on. Ted signaled to me that I had to take the call, I asked why, and he babbled some more. I told him I could not, as I had to go to my boss' office to brief him on a project. So Ted had to unlock his workstation, which was magically working. Andy was desperately trying not to laugh, and he sent me a IM through our corporate chat software to explain why. It was hard not to laugh in Ted's face, very hard. When I came back 30 minutes later he was still on the phone with the old man, because he had failed to understand that the problem was a simple Outlook configuration issue. The rest of the afternoon was very slow, so me and Andy got to relax a bit and do some "housekeeping" tasks, while Ted looked like he was about to cry. Nice try Ted. [link] [comments]  |
| Database Support 13: Embarrassingly Parallel Operations Posted: 02 May 2018 03:16 AM PDT Last time on Database Support: Stop the ride, I wanna get off! A few months after my last tale, everything was looking up for my team. We'd been assigned several new hires and trained them up quickly but hadn't had them yanked away from us as per usual, everyone on the team was contributing well to all of our projects (even good ol' Superfluous was relatively competent by this point and no longer deserved that nickname), and we were finally making progress with our massive backlog of work. Naturally, this wasn't to last. The department had a big release coming up, the biggest one in years, and management decided that having eight people on our team was simply too many. I don't remember the exact reasons they gave as to why having exactly four pairs of people to deal with more than four different tracks of works was so objectionable, but I do recall that said reasons sounded pretty stupid and flimsy at the time and basically boiled down to "Big teams are bad, mmkay?". One morning we were called into a meeting with a few of the higher-ups and given the bad news:
If this all looks to you, dear readers, as though we were still effectively going to be a single team, but with two task trackers to check, two daily standups that cut half the team out of the loop, two sets of planning meetings that would take up double the time, and a pointless shuffling of desks, and management couldn't see the obvious staring them right in the face...you'd be right! That's exactly what ended up happening. But that's not the fun part. The fun part was one particular coworker mentioned above, Gilderoy, the most recent new hire and whose addition to the team precipitated this split. According to management and other team members, Gilderoy checked all the right boxes: Gilderoy had hit a home run during his interview and charmed most of his interviewers! Gilderoy was a rock star coder with years of industry experience! Gilderoy had worked at a different database company for a long time and was a masterful DBA and SQL guru! Gilderoy had worked on low-level operating system code before, both at work and in his free time, making him a great fit for the Infrastructure team! Gilderoy had several amazing ideas to revolutionize our testing and packaging automation! Gilderoy was going to be worth two "normal" developers while we prepared for the big release! Gilderoy...was a fucking fraud. I'd caught the tail end of one of his interviews and expressed my hesitation about his waffling and handwave-y answers to certain questions, but the other interviewers couldn't get enough of him and their handful of "Fuck yeah!"s outweighed my one "I've got a bad feeling about this." It started innocently enough. The first day after the team split, he was paired with RelEng, so named because RelEng was the former team lead for Release Engineering who'd jumped ship to the development side back when excrement hit the rotating air displacement device, and who was thus by far the most experienced person on the team when it came to infrastructure-y sorts of things. RelEng started showing Gilderoy the ropes and ran into a problem within minutes: pretty much everything my company does is Linux-based, and Gilderoy only had Windows experience, a fact that had failed to come up in his interview, so he was unfamiliar with the Bash environment, text editors, and so forth. No big deal, if you know the Windows command prompt you can pick up Bash pretty easily, right? I overheard their conversation about this, but largely ignored it; I was, after all, on the Utilities team, not the Infrastructure team, so this supposedly wasn't my problem. But I did think the situation seemed awfully familiar, so I kept an ear out. RelEng is a very patient and understanding guy, so he was happy to walk Gilderoy through everything in as much detail as he needed. It wasn't surprising, then, that it took a day or so before Gilderoy declared he was sufficiently accustomed to a Linux environment. It was surprising that he was still struggling with it at the end of the week, with no signs of improvement at all. Well, it turned out that Gilderoy hadn't really coded much in the past few years; at his old company he'd most recently worked on a database-centric team, not a systems development team, so he was a bit rusty with all the virtualization and low-level stuff. Fine, no biggie, we could have him work on certain parts of our testing infrastructure that mostly involved GUI-based work and that only required very basic Linux knowledge to set up new suites or debug broken tests. To tweak and tune existing suites would only require a good working knowledge of networking and databases and the ability to use a browser, so surely Gilderoy would have no problems with that. RelEng still spent a lot of time patiently teaching Gilderoy, but on top of that I was tapped to "rotate to Infrastructure" for a few days to give him the New Hire 101 talk on how our database worked and so forth. This entire time, we were dealing with double meeting loads and lots of interruptions to bring people "rotating in" up to speed and help out the "other team," so, as expected, we were much less efficient as two separate "parallel" and "independent" teams (have I exceeded my sarcasting air quotes limit for this tale yet?) than we would have been if management had left well enough alone. But they wanted me to rotate and teach him, so that's what I did; damn the team's velocity, full speed ahead! Well, it turned out the next week that when Gilderoy said he'd done some database development, what he actually meant was that he'd been a product manager for a team that had done database development. And it turned out that when Gilderoy said he'd been a PM for a team doing database development, what he actually meant was that he worked with a bunch of DBAs. And it turned out that when Gilderoy said he'd been a PM for a team of DBAs, what he actually meant was that his team had done a bit of work a few years ago involving Visual Basic and SQL Server. So he was a "database expert" only in the sense that he had occasionally been in the general vicinity of people who were several training courses away from starting to be vaguely competent with databases. Yay. By the end of his third week, Gilderoy was still struggling to make heads or tails of Bash. RelEng's saintly patience was beginning to fray, and the original 4-and-4 Infrastructure/Utilities split was now a lopsided 5-and-3 split (and an effective 3-and-3 split) since neither RelEng nor Gilderoy were doing real work so we had to move a Utilities person over to Infrastructure to compensate. And both teams, as I'm sure I don't need to remind you, dear readers, were barely making due with a combined seven people before Gilderoy showed up and caused us to be burdened with all that extra overhead, and things weren't looking good for us or for our department with that major deadline looming ever closer. Almost a month after Gilderoy appeared, he didn't show up to work one day.
A few weeks later, management quietly merged the two teams together again. The task tracker for the Infrastructure team was locked, meetings were deleted from calendars, and it was never brought up again. Gilderoy was the first person I'd ever known to actually get fired from my department, rather than get laid off or leave voluntarily, and to my knowledge remains the only one to this day. Hiring standards were tightened considerably after that and we've had very few false positives since, and the new interview practices are much less game-able by buzzword-spewing individuals with whiteboard markers and brilliant ideas who claim to be an entire team unto themselves. Stallman save us from "rock star" developers. Coming up next: Dealing with a "rock star" developer. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 May 2018 11:32 AM PDT It's been a good while since I posted on TFTS and it's good to be back. New job, same tech problems. Let's begin. A couple of hours ago, I get a call for immediate tech support by a tech vendor. Little on specifics (nothing new) but the usual "urgent" request for help. Grabbed a couple sips of coffee and rushed over to the tech client. The client just like almost all tech clients you deal with in the world of tech support. Acting like they know what they talking about and demanding you fix it their way. Ok, I'll play along. Ten years at my former job taught me how to play it cool and let the vendor play "Guess Who" about the issue until they finally get to the point. After five minutes of rambling about how it'll affect the business, finally, they said, "I Got Disconnected!". Disconnected from what, WiFi?, I calmly replied. Heavens no, thank god, I need my YouTube fix and I love the free WiFi, the client retorted. I wanted call her a bum at the bare minimum for that statement alone, but got to be professional and stuff. Then, she bellowed "No, no, my phone. I broke my phone without even knowing it." I took look at the phone while she rambled on about missing phone conferences and not being able to pester her family. I told her she can use her cell phone. She adamantly insisted it was out of the question because she doesn't mix business with pleasure. O.....k. Her cheap IP phone was connected to a POE switch that had the power adapter unplugged. No power, no phone. Re-plug the switch and a few minutes later, the phone is working again. Like most lusers, she thank me for my IT smarts and got the hell out of there. [link] [comments]  |
| Reported Lines Down at Location. Posted: 02 May 2018 12:44 PM PDT Ticket comes across to our team for a locations phone lines being down. Typical POTS lines troubleshooting needs to take place and find out whats going on. Panic Manager - $PM So, I give the location a call and ask for the MOD.
At this point, I let her go and added another crazy issue that happens to one of our remote locations.
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