Dueling Dual Monitors Tech Support |
- Dueling Dual Monitors
- But who will pay me for my time
- Back from holiday, have you seen my laptop?
- The day the music stopped.
- The 'Thing'
- I Can't Edit This Word Document
- Your laptop won't turn on again and you don't know why ? Right...
| Posted: 30 May 2018 11:58 AM PDT The following tale is set in a small, East Coast office environment wherein I am often called to provide on-site tech support when our corporate tech support (West Coast) is unavailable or needs a pair of eyeballs on the problem. Lately, I've had issues where our new hires feel they need not just two, but even three or four monitors. All requests for additional monitors have been denied. The cast is as follows: $Me: Yours truly. $CSL: Our delightfully competent Customer Service Leader. $NewGirl: A recent hire who defies explanation. The office pool is currently giving her till Friday before she gets the boot. Incompetence given human form. Our tale begins in the early hours of the morning as I'm leaving my house for the office. $CSL calls me because $NewGirl's computer isn't working, and wants to know when I'll be there to fix it. Since it will be at least 30 minutes before I get there, and $NewGirl can't work without a functional computer, I try to begin diagnosing the problem over the phone. $CSL tells me $NewGirl's monitors aren't working, both were only giving a blank screen, so I began running through general troubleshooting; are the monitors on, cables connected, yada yada, but nothing's working. I'm at a loss for what the problem could be, but we've had bad weather lately and consider a power surge may have knocked a monitor out. I start walking $CSL through getting a replacement monitor out of the storage room, when she helpfully volunteers they can only see the cursor on the screen.
Okaaaaay.... so we're not dealing with dead monitors.
So I have them reboot into safe mode, which works, then into normal mode, which also works, so problem solved. Great. Later in the day I'm in the office when $NewGirl pops in to say she's having the same issue again. I walk over and find two black screens with only the cursor visible. No amount of clicking, Ctrl+Alt+Del'ing or Ctrl+Shift+Esc'ing produces any result, so I reboot a few times, each time it works, but then suddenly cuts out again. Well, darn. Maybe there is an intermittent hardware fault here. I go to check the cables again, when to my surprise I find 2 VGA cables and 1 DVI cable plugged into the back of the PC. That can't be right, there's only 2 monitors. Also, one of the VGA ports goes to the onboard card, and one goes to the external card. You can't use both simultaneously.
No one answers. I disconnect the VGA attached to the onboard card and voila! it works! Happy to have it working, but still confused where the extra cable came from I begin tugging on it to pull it out from behind the desk since its certainly not needed. Strangely, it seems to be attached to something?! Tracing the cable I find it plugged into one of the two monitors, right alongside the DVI cable.
I glared back at $NewGirl as if to say, "It does not work that way. Why are you messing with your PC? Why aren't you focusing on the tasks you've been assigned which you cannot handle? Why are you here? How do you function as an adult human being?". Of course, all of that is left unsaid. A long silence follows.
Oh how I can't wait for $NewGirl's boss to come back from her vacation. [link] [comments]  |
| But who will pay me for my time Posted: 30 May 2018 09:01 AM PDT Hello TFTS. Short time lurker, First time poster. Please do excuse any grammatical errors, English is not my native tongue The background: Once a month these lovely machines have to connect to our servers to provide usage stats, and while most connect using DSL/Fiber/whatever-internet quite a few machines still connect using analogue phonelines and a modem. people involved: The story: I get this call early in the morning on monday, and the conversation goes something like this.
So i get her information and start checking on my end. We go through the usual steps of powering off the machine, unplugging the phone line. etc...
At this point in time she just hung up.. [link] [comments]  |
| Back from holiday, have you seen my laptop? Posted: 30 May 2018 06:20 AM PDT So this occurred this morning. My colleague, who we'll call Steve as that's his name, just got back from holiday.
Steve then doesn't bother to actually check anything and just sat down at his desk. So I have a quick look in the cupboards behind me as that's where our team usually store things. Didn't find his laptop there so went down to the cupboards behind Steve where I happen to glance at his desk.
I think it's time for Steve to go on holiday again. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 May 2018 08:24 AM PDT Actors:
doom doom doom doom A subtle thrumming sounded throughout the helpdesk room that afternoon. Not really audible but noticeable, even over the clatter of phones, talking, and whatever dubiously stupid, non-work related topic is being discussed (Why anyone would go to Africa, it being a 3rd world country; being the choice topic of the afternoon. Don't ask. Never ask. Rule 1 of HelpDesk. Rule 2 is, Always Bring Donuts.) As was typical, $WhaIdo was listening to the Spooty music service.... No one was really sure how he managed to get a $150 Logitech speaker system for his workstation, but have one he did. With MAXBASS. doom doom doom doom $WhaIdo liked dance music. doom doom doo--- For a few moments the conversation where we were trying to get $Silly to understand that Africa was a continent, not a country, continued. Then the lack of MAXBASS started to sink in.
After a few moments, every phone in the room started ringing. Quite rapidly, the status board for the call queue began racking up the number of users on hold. $Silly's lesson on Eastern continent geography put on hold, we began answering the phones as rapidly as possible; as HelpDesks in crisis mode are wont to do. The first few all said the same thing; $MainApp is not working. The third call I get is not from one of our local buildings, but an offsite location, and the fourth is a VMWare Horizon user... Quickly making some tests, one thing becomes immediately apparent... the entire company has no WAN access. Not just here, but all remote sites as well. W. T. F. Around the fifth call... doom doom doom doom
Doom doom doo--- Once again, the music stops. Doom Doo--- Doo----- om…. Doo--- Every few minutes, it would play about 5 seconds of music. At this point, we have no idea what the Networking Team is up to; but it is obviously in their area. I decide to do a ping to Google, and all packets drop. But, how? If all packets are dropping, then why are we still hearing Yolanda Be Cool tell us that We No Speak Americano? On a whim, I decide to run ping continuously. And thus, after 30 seconds I find, 98% packet loss, and average response times of over 4000ms! A quick IM to my Cult of ShadowIT (the only way anything actually gets done in IT) contact in the Networking team, to find out if they noticed this yet turns out to be a good idea as they were still working their way through the layers to find where the problem was and hadn't yet noticed the high latency, as their initial test wasn't getting through either. I don't know what magic powers they have, but though their use, Networking quickly found that something was completely saturating our outbound WAN. We're talking 2x 10Gb fiber for our primary load balanced access, plus whatever else we have for backups. OVER 20Gb SATURATED?!? We continue to handle the absurd amount of calls from all over the US. Sporadically backed with snippets of MAXBASS. After about 30 minutes we hear it: doom doom doom doom doom It keeps going… 10 seconds… 20 seconds… 30 seconds! A WHOLE MINUTE! WE HAVE INTERNET BACK!!! I verify I can reach google, apple, reddit, dslreports.... my usual web access test. All of them work! All of them to the backing track of doom doom doom doom The music keeps playing. doom doom--- My heart begins to flutter. Not again! .... untiss untiss untiss Oh. It was just another song starting.
He... fixed the WAN issue? How? He's not networking. He doesn't have access to anything close to that level. Despite his name, he actually doesn't have the power a large smuggling ring and a retinue of bikini clad slave Carrie Fishers. He does, however, have the equal amount of undeserved ego. I find out about an hour later. In a way $EngineerHutt did fix the problem. Mostly because he WAS the problem. Turns out that the WAN was saturated because $EngineerHutt decided 1pm would be an ideal time to update all of the SCCM distribution servers across the entire company. Really, I'm not sure who to fault here. Him for doing an update like this with no planning or notification; or Networking for never hearing of a thing called QoS? This did not end up being the only time his Huttness managed to kill the WAN. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 May 2018 04:04 AM PDT This happened a few hours ago and left me with this soothing calmness inside me that I'm sure most of you have felt at some point or another. It's not terribly exciting or perhaps interesting. Maybe it might be relateble... Humility and victory. Background: One of our clients decided to 'deallocate' their offices here in Sweden last year. We took down most of their equipment, sent back what needed to be sent back, ran killdisk on what needed to be killed. What remained however was 'The Thing'. The Thing is a IBM iseries 740. I have built vast virtualized clusters, deployed seemingly magical solutions to esoteric problems but none of that pride I feel in work compares to the primal uncertainty and dread I feel when I'm close to 'The Thing'. The client in question wanted us to host this monstrosity for a ten year period, us supplying the means for them to connect to it when needed. The same was to made of a specific finance software. The players: $me - Exhausted cat lady and caffeine enthusiast. $pcat - Networking Wizard and Office Dad. $biblicalname - My cloud-partner in crime. Also Mr. Meseeks. $IBMdude - Soft spoken thaumaturge of everything Big Blue. Does not work for there. My boss told me to mount it up and connect it when we got it and that was the last I heard of it until Sunday. I had been to an MS course for the better part of a week and was exhausted, having not had any real down time in nearly two weeks and was relaxing when the email showed up.
Thinking that I could keep ahead of the coming weeks onslaught I provisioned a VM with our cloud partner, setup and installed $financesoftware and then started fiddling with Routing and Remote Access. Which refused to work at all. Having struggled with it well into the night, having gone so far as to provision and new VM and test my configuration on that one, I came to the office on Monday with a total of zero results and 4 hours of sleep. After a few cups of liquid life (coffee) I decided to screw the rules and do it another way I knew worked. I rang my expert.
An hour later I had a working VPN solution for $financesoftware. Which meant I now needed to face The Thing. Having had it rigged up but not powered up, it sat, silent and foreboding in our server room.
For those who never have encountered these pieces of hardware, they run on what I decided to call 'IWODT' - IBM Way of Doing Things. For example, you can't just click the power button. You need to go through a tiny display to specify boot options etc. And then it runs through, the gods know, how many SRC codes that tells you were in the boot process it is. To be fair and honest - this might not even be true! Maybe the power button can just be pressed! I knew nothing about this and had to learn it quickly if I were to meet the deadline. Plowing through Googled articles, IBM specs and references at caffeine and nicotine addled pace I managed after a while to determine that I indeed knew absolutely nothing. The Thing was built to outlast human life. An inscrutable black box to a Non-IBM simpleton as myself. I pride myself in being able to learn knew things quickly and putting them into practice but this felt so inscrutable, unknowable, that my own doubt was putting the whole venture into jeopardy. I need expert advice. Thankfully I knew a guy who I had worked with when the Thing needed some TLC a few years back.
Now began the hunt for which NIC the machine used to do whatever it did. Thankfully I had help. $Pcat is a network wizard. However, the Thing had eight different NIC's, marked HMC, T1 and so on which to the uninitiated meant nothing. I asked him to set up a VPN and reserve a network for me while I hunted down the specifics. In my naiveté I thought I might be able gleam some information from IBM's manuals in regards to this but was met with terminology that in context of how nearly everything else is done in IT today, is alien. I plowed through a functions reference while I sat with wireshark to try and gather something, anything, from the NIC's on the machine and discovered function 30. Function 30 displays some Ethernet information. Not being able to ping anything on the ports I had tested so far I click myself into it and found an IP. Excited I wrote it down, connected a cable and configured things appropriately. I got a ping response. I nearly wept.
30 minutes later I was pinging the machine via VPN.
Today was the day. A meeting was scheduled so I packed up VPN packages, logon information and everything and sent it over - while dreading the response.
I squeaked in joy and felt the stress from the last two days burn away into nothing. TL;DR: IBM. TL;DR 2: The heroes are my colleagues. [link] [comments]  |
| I Can't Edit This Word Document Posted: 30 May 2018 07:42 AM PDT Happened the other day before quitting time. Here I am planning my well-executed escape out of the office with detailed plans to dodge people and get to my scheduled commute home. Then, blammo, a tech support call comes in. Obvious swearing and damnation instantly rummage across my brain and suddenly end as soon as I answered this call. $NYFranc: Good afternoon, this is Help Desk, how can I help you? $Retail: I can't edit this Word document, can you help me? $NYFranc: What error(s) are you getting? $Retail: No errors, just that I type and nothing happens. I'm confused. Please remote in and help me. $NYFranc: No worries, will remote in ASAP. I thought it was a simple issue with a Word document, well, it was, but common sense was lacking with this person from the Retail Department. After a few seconds of remote PC surfing, I entered the PC of $Retail and did a few obvious checks. While $Retail claims she did nothing wrong, I assured her that it's ok and disturbing the Help Desk team 20 minutes before closing time was tolerate (really in my mind, IT WASN'T!)
After doing the obvious guesswork and the lack of coffee in my system (I should be a coffee ambassador - read my past stories on why!), I was in "bleep it" mode and decided to type to mess with the contents of the document itself. The $Retail user gasped very loudly and passionately as I attempted to cause chaos. Then, I stumbled upon it, the contents of the Word documents was all PICTURES! Bleeping PICTURES! $Retail actually tried to type on graphics itself like it was Photoshop. $NYFranc: Um, yea, your Word document's contents is all pictures. $Retail: Really?! $NYFranc: Yes, really! It never occurred to you for one brief moment that all of it was pictures. Most likely, whoever gave you this document did a poor job in exporting it as a Word document. $Retail: (total silence for 15 seconds) $Retail: Ah yes, it makes sense. Thankfully, a colleague just noticed this and e-mailed me the same version just now and with words, not pictures. Thank you very much for the help. You're very sweet. Bye! I figured since my supervisor will review the ticket, either I get reprimanded for being blunt or praised for being professional and the caller will give a negative rating for me. I reported in this morning. E-mail from supervisor: $NYFranc, job well done on that last ticket. Also, her supervisor called me after hours to praise your commitment to the Retail Team. P.S. Don't forget your coffee! No negative rating from user, positive praise from my boss, and still manage to catch my commute home. I'll take it. [link] [comments]  |
| Your laptop won't turn on again and you don't know why ? Right... Posted: 31 May 2018 04:07 AM PDT LTL, FTP, English is not my native tongue, sorry if there are some mistakes. Yesterday morning, 9 am, I got a call from a co-worker based at several hundred kilometers from my office. Here what happened : $me will be me, $her will be her, to keep it simple. I appreciate her and she's not completely clueless... Usually.
From there, I'm reminding myself that tuesday, there was some really bad weather, a lot of rain, which flooded the street, to give you an idea of the intensity. And I fear of what her answer might be when I ask her if she took it under the rain...
I had to really hold my sigh on the phone, and told her that since the computer was rained on, it was probably dead. She didn't seem to make any connection between the fact that her computer died and the fact that she put it under the rain... But, well, my manager agreed to give her a brand new laptop, under the condition that it will not, never, ever, leave the office. [link] [comments]  |
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