I've received my first free request from a stranger. Tech Support |
- I've received my first free request from a stranger.
- Users password is not correct, please help!
- Trial by Fire, in which a new tech deals with server failure
- When a quick job doesn't end up being quick...
- "I think that I can change the batteries"
- IT Support and gold coins
- The Pulsing External Monitor
- Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot
| I've received my first free request from a stranger. Posted: 29 Jun 2018 06:43 AM PDT It has begun. This is a minor case compared to many, but it's significant to me as my first unsolicited tech support request. I'm halfway done with my computer science degree and while I help immediate family out with tech stuff from time to time, this one's a first. About an hour ago, I got a call from someone who I don't know at all. I didn't hear the phone ring, so she left a message:
Along with a text message from FamilyMember who almost never texts me:
They're seven hours away. I'm going to have to talk this woman through installing Word on what is apparently a vague nonstandard device over the phone with no visual, for free. Since my father refused to help I'm pretty sure it's macOS, which I have no experience with (so wish me luck with describing how to navigate the UI to where she needs to be, as I don't even know what the UI looks like...). Clock's ticking; I'm gonna have to call back soon or else I'll look rude. Edit: Another family member, FamilyMember2, has now called me about it and I couldn't ignore this call - she doesn't want to install Word from Microsoft, she wants Word for free, oh no. His words:
This is getting much too aggressive for me. Update: I told FamilyMember2 how to create a Google account and how to upload files to drive so that they can be edited/read. I assume he's passing that information on to her, as he 'had to go' immediately after and didn't instruct me to call her. Hopefully that resolves the issue. I still am pretty indignant about the fact that they volunteered my services to a stranger for free, and then framed it as me doing them a favor after calling me multiple times (FamilyMember2 called me to ask me only 1.5 hours after the first call from JaneDoe). I understand I completely ignored the advice to just say no, advice that I wholly support and agree with. I am weak and susceptible to guilt trips and "Oh come on, just do it for me. I'd do the same for you." If she still has issues/needs something better, I think I'll just send her the installation page for LibreOffice/OpenOffice and be done with it. Now I need to figure out how best to tell my family what just happened is Not Okay. Update: The Google Drive instructions are "not working". Final Update: Oh god I'm so glad I never called her back, it was a pdf file so I don't even know if Word would be able to even open it, and now FamilyMember2 is lecturing me on how if my friends had car questions I'd ask him, so why can't the reverse be true. [link] [comments]  |
| Users password is not correct, please help! Posted: 29 Jun 2018 04:52 PM PDT Hello all, obligatory long time lurker first time posted, also on mobile so forgive formatting. Brief background I work for a small IT company providing 1st and 2nd line support for a range of companies/small businesses in our area. It's a great place to learn and there are some really good people to work with, also the end users are generally really nice and accept we know what we are on about...mostly. This story takes place earlier this year and does not have a happy ending. Cast Me : Young enthusiastic tech support guy BO : Business owner who logged the call
Now this is the point where my brain has completed its reboot cycle and is catching up. Not only do they all have the same password, it's literally in the top 10 of password not to use.
Now i've dealt with BO before and of he says it's urgent it is, I still had to try though.
Cue 20 minutes of back and forth for why this is a bad idea, including me getting my manager involved Now I'd like to say the logic and passion of my argument won over BO and a new era of security swept through other company, unfortunately this is real life.
As mentioned my manager was involved, he said Customer has ultimate say and will have to pay if their system is hacked/encrypted if they insist on that password, so I did what I had to do to keep feeding my family.
After the call I found out from a colleague this company was hacked last year, their response was to change their password to 'businessname1', it used to be 'businessname'. I still shudder when we get a new user request from them. That's my tale of woe, let me know what you guys think, I have other more rewarding stories that have a happy ending if you want to hear them. Edit : correcting auto correct. Edit 2 : Yes we do have call recording and this call was recorded and specifically downloaded and saved because as has been mentioned we do need confirmation in case of any future incidents. This particular company is looking to get cyber security certification so they can put on their website they are secure, top of our list for discussion is you all have the same password, this needs to change. We will see how that goes in a few weeks when the ball starts rolling. [link] [comments]  |
| Trial by Fire, in which a new tech deals with server failure Posted: 29 Jun 2018 11:21 PM PDT I've been in the IT business for nearly 10 years now, doing everything from helpdesk support, sys admin, some light programming and now database development. But my first job as an IT professional was an entry level support tech position for a small consulting firm. And my first couple of days on the job were exciting, to say the least. It's also the only time I've been grateful for cached Exchange mode. Cast of characters: $hyacinth : Me, fresh out of college. $boss: My boss. A good guy who knows his stuff. $firm: Independent IT consulting firm I worked for. $exVendor: Our (then) hosted Exchange vendor. They who control the servers control the emails. $largeClient: One of the firms larger, Windows-using, clients. About 50 users. I had just graduated from college and got hired at a small consulting firm. I was mainly hired due to my knowledge of Macs, as $firm had just taken on clients that used them. However, most of their clients used Windows which I had very little experience with and thus $firm was going to train me on. (This will be important later). The first two days on the job (a Thursday and Friday) were taken up touring the various client's facilities and getting a look at their infrastructure, etc. Early Monday morning rolls around and I'm pretty excited. My first full day as a support tech! And then my phone rang....
So I hauled ass to $largeClient. I nervously walked in the door, introduced myself to the folks I hadn't met on Friday, and did my best to pretend like I knew what I was doing. Luckily they were cool people and were anxious but not panicking. Some of our other clients weren't as understanding. Anyway, I called $boss and he walked me through what to do, which involved going through a series of Outlook hoops. This was maybe the third time I'd ever used Outlook, so I had very little idea what the hell I was doing. But I muddled through with only a few terrified phone calls to $boss and more than a few stupid questions. About 3/4 of $firm's clients who used hosted Exchange happened to have their datastores on the $exVendor server that died. So we all spent the next two days dealing with our frustrated, panicky clients and trying to get everyone's mail back. But, you ask, why didn't $exVendor just restore the server from a backup? Ah, gentle reader, how I wish that had been possible. You see, as it turns out, $exVendor didn't have a viable, recent backup of the server that croaked. And in fact hadn't had a viable backup of that server for SIX MONTHS. Which we only found out when $boss kept pestering them and one of the $exVendor's support techs let that little tidbit slip out. Needless to say $firm switched our clients to a new hosted Exchange provider not long after. All in all we managed to get most of the mail back. Only a few users ended up with missing emails, mostly due to using webmail so the message wasn't cached. It was a hell of a way to start a new job, though. TL;DR: My third day as a support tech was spent recovering about 50 user's emails due to our Exchange vendor losing a server and not having a backup of it. [link] [comments]  |
| When a quick job doesn't end up being quick... Posted: 29 Jun 2018 07:03 AM PDT Long time reader but first time poster, I finally have a story good enough to share. This all happened yesterday. Bit of a background, I work in IT for a company that supports various restaurants with their POS systems and other IT related stuff. All of these are owned by the same $Owner who loves to make last minute demands leaving us to figure out how to make it work. Most of the time it's repairing kitchen printers, but today's tale was something different. $Me: Lowly IT guy $Manager: Manager of the branch. Actually a cool guy who has decent basic IT skills and can troubleshoot the basic stuff himself. Very easy to work with. It all starts with me relaxing in the office, having gotten most of the major jobs out of the way, so was hoping to take it easy. That is until I got the phone call from $Manager...
I looked at the date and realised our country was playing this evening for the football/soccer world cup.
Looking at the time it only gave me 5 hours. 4 hours if I exclude the travel time.
I then remembered the VIP room was actually the opposite end away from the router, and that the access point serving the main area is in the floor below, so it makes sense that the room will have almost no signal. Due to the lack of time though, running a cable from the main switch to the room won't be possible, as it will need to go through another private room which is also booked for the evening, and there won't be enough time to tidy the cable away. I searched the office and find a powerline Wi-Fi kit and a Wi-Fi repeater, decommissioned from other sites. Did a quick test with them and they still worked, so factory reset them, configured them with the correct Wi-Fi settings and off I went. Arrived at the site, loaded up the Wi-Fi analyser app on my phone, and confirmed the room was getting a very weak signal, so $Manager was right. I installed the powerlines first, hoping not to resort to the repeater as I knew from experience how unreliable they can be, and $Owner would explode if the stream randomly stopped. One of the powerline modules acts as an access point as well which I know $Owner will want to use. And... it worked. Straight away with no issues. Connected my phone and did a quick speed test, and it was more than fast enough for the stream. Latency was also good too. Thinking I could wrap this up quickly I then proceed to connect the laptop up... only to find while it was connecting, it was not getting a valid IP at all. Restarted the adapter and it still wasn't getting the right network settings. So I restarted the laptop only to find it took a while to boot up. During that, $Manager walks in.
$Manager connects his phone to the powerline AP, does a speed test too and he's happy with it.
Oh. Guess this job will take a little longer.
$Manager then goes off back to his job. By then the laptop has finally finished booting up and is happily receiving a valid IP and is able to connect to the internet with no issues. Loaded up the stream and it's running very smoothly. Checked time and had 3 hours left. No need to worry right? The laptop connected to the TV is happily streaming so let's see why there's no sound. I hook up the sound system to the laptop's audio jack and yup, no sound. Looked at the laptop's sound settings and... yeah, the default sound device was the TV. Switched it over to the correct one and and boom, sound is now going through the sound system. Except... only half the speakers in the room had sound. The other half didn't. I checked the amplifier and all seemed fine over there, however it was reporting it was only receiving the right sound channel with the left channel receiving nothing. I managed to nail the problem down to the 3.5mm to RCA cable, wiggling the 3.5mm side brings the left channel back but only for a fraction of a second. I went to find $Manager to see if he had any spares, and luckily from the store room there was one. Plugged it in and all was good. Sound is now happily filling the room evenly. Except... the stream is for some reason now stuttering. I checked the internet speed again and it was still strong. I then noticed the laptop was a lot warmer than usual. Loaded up task manager and the CPU was on 100%. Why. Loaded up the processes, sorted it by CPU usage and there it was. To confirm what I'm seeing I load up the settings and yup. Windows Update has kicked in. This laptop has not been turned on for over a year, and it's eagerly downloading/preparing the Windows 10 Fall Creators update. 2 hours left until $Owner arrives. Seeing there's not much I can do about this, I close the stream so all the laptop's resources can focus on the updates. I also decided to might as well remove the extra stuff installed on the laptop that could also be slowing it down. An hour later with the laptop now having less programs running in the background and a lot less running at startup, it was now prompting to restart so it could begin the Fall Creators update. Seeing as how long that will take... not going to happen. I changed the restart option to happen well after the match has finished and changed the active hours to be after closing time. After all, there's also the Spring Creators update it will want to do as well. No time for that. I loaded up the stream, and everything was running smoothly, with just under an hour before $Owner arrives. I let $Manager know it's all up and running, he has a look and is happy with it. I mention the laptop also wants to update as well and $Manager said he can handle it afterwards. I then make my way home as it's also the end of my shift, expecting a call about $Owner complaining about the laptop randomly restarting. Luckily the laptop didn't restart. Unluckily $Owner was still angry. Mostly because our country lost the match. [link] [comments]  |
| "I think that I can change the batteries" Posted: 29 Jun 2018 08:10 AM PDT The new receptionist yelled, "TECHIE!" as I walked past the door, so I'm already annoyed. She then proceeded to tell me that her mouse batteries were low. I immediately switched direction and walked past her to where the batteries are stored. As I'm doing so she says to the other receptionist, "I think that I can change the batteries." So I said, "Great" handed her the batteries and return to my office. Moments later she's calling for my help because she has somehow managed to jam the battery cover onto the mouse rendering it completely inoperable. With some effort involving a slotted screwdriver I fixed the mouse and returned it to her saying, "Please don't do that again." Her response, "Why? Was that hard?" [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Jun 2018 05:52 AM PDT Hello TFTS, I just remembered this story and I thought it could be worth to share it here. So, to give a little bit of context, it happened in 2015 when I was working as T1 Support in HelpDesk, for a very big bank. It was my first real job in the IT world and I received this call after three or four months in the job. $Me => Guess $CB => Clueless Banker
At this point, I stayed silent for a few seconds. That was the first time I ever heard about something like that, and I was still trying to figure out the link between gold coins and IT Support.
Switching back to $CB
Today, in 2018, I'm still trying to understand why you would call the IT Support if, as a banker, you don't know what to do with three bags of gold coins. TL;DR => A banker called the IT Support because their banking agency received three bags of gold coins, and they didn't know what to do with it. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Jun 2018 10:25 AM PDT Not IT, but I know about 5% of what a seasoned tech does which seemingly puts my knowledge above 85% of the population. A couple months ago, my company started rolling out new computers for everybody. I was fortunate enough to snag a brand new laptop and docking station (on ancient desktop previously). This required a bit of desk reorganization so I could dual-screen with my external monitor. The problem occurred the first time I had to unlock the system after it went idle. The external monitor would receive the signal to wake and display my desktop for about 3 seconds, then go black for 3, and continue this cycle until I pulled the cable for the dock for about 15 seconds before plugging it in again. Laptop display would be behaving normally during this time. Once I was back to working the problem would not return until the system would automatically lock for inactivity. It would only be a mild annoyance if the timeout wasn't so short. In the time it took to go to the restroom or get some coffee I would return to a locked system and the pulsing monitor. Add to that multiple meetings per day I could have this issue up to 10 times in a shift. Not wanting to bug IT with something that I may be able to fix on my own, I began Googling. There were a few support articles regarding updating display drivers and BIOS--things I am prevented from doing without admin rights. Damn. Time to get IT involved. So, I call my boy, Red, and he explains that all drivers and BIOS are up to date and at versions equal to the articles that were to fix the issue. He says we'd probably just have to replace the laptop as nobody else was having this issue. I asked him to hold off on that while I try to dig more to prevent replacing a $1,500 laptop unnecessarily. Defeated, I sat down for lunch and pulled up /r/talesfromtechsupport to pass the time. Reading along, I get to a post (which you'll recognize in a moment) where a problem that had been stumping the tech for weeks actually had a very simple solution. I shook my head thinking there is no way my bluetooth speaker could be the culprit. I mean, the laptop itself has a magnet on that side to hold the stylus! And the speaker is far enough away that it can't be the cause, right? But for the sake of science, I moved the little box 10 inches further away from the laptop. Well, here I am, over a week later, and I have not had the problem again. Earlier this week I saw Red walking through the office and I knew I had to tell him. "In over 30 years of doing this job, I've even thought of a fix like that!" Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks. [link] [comments]  |
| Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot Posted: 29 Jun 2018 06:22 AM PDT So this is a tale of me observing "tech support" in a retail setting. I actually have a degree in IT and have become an excellent at being turned down for every job I apply to. In the mean time I continue working for big box mart. So one morning im waiting to get a drawer for my register and the courtesy desk cashier calls the manager over. I should tell u that any major problems with the register gets logged and once a month and outside company comes in and resolves them which usually means they replace a non working pin pad. On this particular morning the register has frozen as the cashier was cashing a customer payroll check. Apparently the drawer popped and the customer got their $ but no receipt printed and the screen is froze. So we gave 2 cashiers and the manager huddled over this screen touching various spots with no response. As the manager goes to check transaction logs all I can think of is Moss from the IT Crowd saying "Hallo? Uh-huh. Well have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?" [link] [comments]  |
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