I is for Apple; is good enough for me. Tech Support |
- I is for Apple; is good enough for me.
- MY COMPUTER IS POSSESSED!
- Please install programs that are already installed
- "laptop dock issue"
- First call with my real client
- But you didn't do the thing you couldn't do!
- The mystery security-alarm trigger
- One of the many times that some people I know didn't know how to put files on a USB thumbdrive
- That time the network was broken, I fixed it twice, then broke it some more.
| I is for Apple; is good enough for me. Posted: 03 Jul 2018 07:36 PM PDT This one is from over 5 years back; was working at a L1/2 internal IT for a company ~800 seats, have plenty of tales about that hole but one stuck with me.
By ths point I should probably note that he has a very heavy accent; I think Bangladeshi?
Nope.jpg
It was like 30 letters long, and every second letter was a vowel... Dodged a fucking bullet.
A few weeks later, he calls again; I recognise him instantly. He's trying to email a bunch of pictures to someone else (internally) for something, I guess he's trying to send them all in one email?
Took me a good 5 seconds of awkward silence to figure out he meant thirty-four. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Jul 2018 11:56 AM PDT Call from sales rep(SR), SR: omg omg my computer is possessed! The mouse is moving around randomly and clicking! Solo: hold on, I'll remote in and check it out. <everything looks fine, run virus scan> Solo: go ahead and do what you were doing to cause this to happen. <SR opens Chrome and starts logging into a website then mouse starts moving randomly and clicking> SR: SEE! SEE!! It's doing it! Solo: uhhh, this is.. something.. SR: Look Solo! I believe in ghosts, and this looks like a ghost has possessed my machine! Solo: Um, yeah.. anyway, go ahead and turn the radio off on the laptop by pressing fn. F12. It'll disconnect me but if someone else has remote control it will disconnect them also. SR: Ok, found it, done. <I get disconnected> Solo: Did it stop? SR: Yes... wait.. it's still doing it! Here, I'll leave the room and look in, it's a ghost and it'll follow me. Solo: ... SR: STILL DOING IT! Solo: Hey, SR, Are you using the mouse? SR: No, It's in my desk drawer, I was using the touchpad. Solo: Is the touchpad clean? No soda? SR: No, it's clean. Solo: Huh, weird, please look for the mouse. SR: Np, it's right here...It's gone! Wait... SR: <talking to her kid> Are you playing with my mouse? <mumbles yes>. OMG OMG I AM SO EMBARRASSED IT WAS MY DAMN KID THE WHOLE TIME. I gotta go, I'm embarrassed.. Solo: No worries, have a great 4th SR. [link] [comments]  |
| Please install programs that are already installed Posted: 04 Jul 2018 01:47 AM PDT
I don't care if someone is dumb, but I hate angry dumb people. I am a very nice and friendly guy, and I don't deserve to be treated like crap even if it was my fault. How do you guys deal with people like that? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Jul 2018 10:36 PM PDT This is from a few years ago but there was a rollout of new hp laptops and slimdocks and monitors to users who had desktops. A user calls stating his new laptop won't display anything on his new monitor. Me: can you check to make sure all the cables are plugged I to the back of the dock? User: sure, I think I plugged them all back in the way they were plugged in before I took it home last night. Me:. You unplugged all the cables last night? User: yes, so I could take my laptop home Me: the laptop has a dock, you shouldnt have to unplug anything if you need to take it home just undock it from the dock User: I did when I unplugged everything it was undocked. Me; look to the right of the computer, see the glowing button? It's like a lever, just slide it to the right and lift the computer up. User: ohhhh the computer comes off? Oh yeah I just did what you said and the computer came off. I didn't know this came apart To:Dr:. User was taking the computer and dock home with him every night because he didn't know how a dock works. I don't know how he didn't break that dock carrying it attached to the laptop every night for like at least a week. [link] [comments]  |
| First call with my real client Posted: 03 Jul 2018 06:19 PM PDT About 2 months ago I was hired for my first IT support job. I had 3 weeks of training and 2 weeks on an easier client to support before I migrated to my permanent role supporting a major law firm. I had training in the morning and when it was finally time to jump in the queues I felt like I was ready for anything. My manager was standing over my shoulder watching as I clicked "ready" and began my short wait for my first call. About 2 mins later my phone starts to ring. "Thanks for calling the help desk....Phisch27 speaking, how can I help you?" My boss looks at the name that appears on the ticket and covers his mouth and turns around. She is a bitch. She has a major issue with a program and it takes me a couple seconds to remote on and figure out what's going on. She is verrrryyyy impatient with me. Asking how long this will take and why it isn't done yet. I needed to uninstall and reinstall a program so it took me a few minutes, but I actually did it! I solved her problem. "It looks like you should be all set. Feel free to call back if you experience any other issues" Click I turn around and my boss is laughing his head off. "You just handled the toughest person on this client. And you did fine. You'll be fine here." First is the worst. And I was initiated the hard way and I'm still doing fine. [link] [comments]  |
| But you didn't do the thing you couldn't do! Posted: 03 Jul 2018 05:39 PM PDT This just happened to a good friend of mine who works at an apartment complex. He has a lot of stories but most are not tech support.
(Interupted)
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| The mystery security-alarm trigger Posted: 03 Jul 2018 02:10 PM PDT This isn't my story, it's one I read in a magazine maybe 30 years ago, so please forgive any slips of memory. A security alarm technician was assigned to fix a customer's home system that would trigger without warning. This alarm system would start screeching and doing it's thing even if people were home and it was disabled. The technician attended, couldn't find anything wrong with the sensors or control unit, and went away. This happened again-and-again. The tech started replacing each component. Eventually, he'd replaced every sensor and control unit but the issue remained. The home-owner was not too happy, but was willing to stick with this system until it worked properly (clearly, customers were a lot more understanding 30 years ago). Over time, the tech noticed a pattern. This seemed to occur mostly on Friday and Saturday evenings. Finally, the technician decides to perform some RFI scans - just on the possibility a neighbor is using something that is causing the alarm to trigger. He stakes-out the house on a Friday night and runs his scans. He discovers a take-away food shop about 400 metres down the road. The tech walks into the shop and his scanner is showing levels like you wouldn't believe. This take-away shop has a microwave oven. The tech can see staff are putting things in and taking them out while the door to the microwave stays open. The oven ran continously. The owner of the shop had disabled the door interlock on their microwave oven so they wouldn't have to keep opening and shutting the door, as this was slowing down food preparation. To finish up: all staff have to be checked for cancers. :( [link] [comments]  |
| One of the many times that some people I know didn't know how to put files on a USB thumbdrive Posted: 03 Jul 2018 09:14 PM PDT First, let me define who is who in the story. %Me%: Yours truly, general tech genius %PersonOfMany%: One of the many people who don't know how compoot work in my class It all begins... %PersonOfMany%: %Me%! I have a question. %Me% walks over to them, and asks "What is it?" %PersonOfMany%: "How do I put my Word document on my USB?" %Me%: **f a c e p a l m** "This is the 5th time I've shown you how." %PersonOfMany%: "I forgot..." %Me%: **internal rage while showing them how, and they don't even watch** %PersonOfMany%: "Thanks, %Me%." %Me%: "No problem." This is my first submission, and it definitely won't be my last, given on how illiterate with computers %PersonOfMany% is. [link] [comments]  |
| That time the network was broken, I fixed it twice, then broke it some more. Posted: 03 Jul 2018 08:10 AM PDT This story is quite lengthy and is mainly networking focussed. Anybody who has read my previous TFTS posts knows although I work 2nd line support I also did Dev work, as well as this, being the only hardware tech in the office and our infrastructure being based 300 miles away meant I was also the most qualified to set up PC's and manage the local network. We operate in a managed office, so we share a building with other businesses, although we run our own network. We have our own network here which is connected to our HQ in London, however the building handles our phone lines. All our PCs and desks run to the local comms room, where they are patched into 2 x 28 port switches. Our phonelines require 1 direct connection to the switch, while the PCs can daisy chain or hook into a smaller switch which we keep under the desks. We have some local kit like fileserver, dns and firewall but we ultimately tunnel our connection, while the rest of the building operates on a different setup altogether, most importantly however, we all operate on the same physical lines. I know a few of you are already starting to itch at how bad this all sounds, trust me I've tried to get our infra to improve this - however since I am not part of the team my advice is often ignored. This story is probably a strong example of why they thought this, having rewrote the tale from my youth I realise I took a lot of unnecessary risks, came to a lot of incorrect conclusions, and while ultimately the blame didn't rest with me; I made a lot of actions which made things both better and worse. I guess the main point of my tale is that everybody who did know better than me was eager to place the blame at my feet and tell me they weren't getting involved - even when that was exactly their job, but I digress. Here is the tale of the time I broke the buildings network. Friday So one fine Friday afternoon we are setting up for some new employees starting on Monday. Our new desks arrive and the entire office joins forces to shut down, shift the new desks and set up the new computers. I have some tasks to set up some new hubs under the desks and hook in the new phone-lines, I take the opportunity to catalogue which floor ports are in use so that I can try and clear some space on the switch, with over 30 employees requiring phones and desktops, as well as printers and other devices we were starting to run short on space. After each desk is moved I mark each floor port in use, whether it's a phone or a desktop, then in the sever room I change the cable to the switch, blue for phone and grey for data. Afterwards I marvel at the cleanliness of it, each connection is clearly catalogued so we can trace from PC to floor port to switch port - and vice versa. Everybody is online, everybody logs into their phones, the office is ready for new staff - everybody pats themselves on the back and heads home for the weekend. Monday I come into work to more or less complete chaos. Nobody has access to the internet, those who do have access to the internet can't access our servers. I log into my PC and do some diagnosis. My machine connects to the internet and I ping our servers with no response. I try to ping the server by direct IP and this works for some reason. I check my IP and notice I'm not on our network, but one belonging to the building. I go to a few of those who can't connect to the internet and check their DNS settings, the DNS is unreachable and I try changing it over to a google DNS - which works. Okay so maybe our DNS is down - I go to see the building manager and ask if there were any power issues over the weekend. He tells me that there was a powercut in the area on Sunday night, but that we were supposedly unaffected. With my limited knowledge of networking I start to form a theory in my head - there was a small powercut or a surge, our DHCP has gone offline and come back up but has been reset - so it's not allocating IP's - some of us are therefore finding a route to the next DHCP it can find, which is the buildings. I go back to my desk and try to access our DHCP server, I'm asked for a password and decide to try some basics like "changeme" or "admin". Remarkably one of those work and I'm met with the client listing. I can see a number of devices from our office, the ones which can connect - the IP range, subnet and gateway are all wrong - I call up our Infra team and let them know our findings, as well as make sure I'm on the right thinking. They agree that resetting the DHCP back to it's settings is probably good, agreeing that a power surge or power cut probably reset it. I set the DHCP settings - connection comes back for everybody in the office, servers visible. Everybody pats me on the back and we all get back to work. Tuesday I arrive at the office and am greeted by the Building Manager at his desk on the phone, as I walk through the door and smile at him I hear him say "2 moments he's just walked through the door". Well that can't be good. He tells me that nobody in the building can see their servers and are having intermittent connections, and that when he rang up our office to tell us about the outage they had told him that not only was their network fine; it was thanks to me messing around with the network yesterday. He calls me over to his desk and asks me to speak to the buildings network engineers, who are a remote company and reluctant to send out an engineer to come take a look. I explain the situation; that our offices connection went down and we believe it was due to a power cut. The remote engineer agrees that I may be on the right lines, but changing settings on our own equipment shouldn't impact the rest of the building; although they might have had similar issues with power and he would check the rest of the equipment remotely to ensure it was configured. I go to our office and everybody is sat working happily - our network is running smoothly. I let everybody know whats going on in the building, then get on with my job. At around lunch the Building Manager comes to the office and asks me to look at his PC. We go down and he's trying to remote to a server, the server is unreachable. I run a quick ipconfig and notice something awful. He has one of our IPs. Then it clicks into place. I hadn't modified our DHCP to have the correct settings; I had changed the entire building's DHCP server to force everybody onto our network. I imagine my face probably turned a lovely shade of green. I quickly (and I meant really f**king quickly) reverted the settings on the DHCP server I was on yesterday. People in the rest of the building started to reconnect to their services, which some of our offices machines started disconnecting at random. This was bizarre. We weren't automatically being put onto our network and were in fact connecting directly to the buildings wider network. But our network was still there, and we could ping our servers but only when we forced our clients to use our direct IP details, furthermore the rest of the building could suddenly do the same, and we were on the verge (probably far over the verge) of a data breach. Thankfully there was a team of engineers on site who ran their own networking business (but didn't do networking for the buildings). $BM asked if they'd take a look and they'd asked me to come along. After a lengthy wander around the whole building, they asked me if we'd recently changed our floor ports. I told them about the work I'd done on cleaning up on unused space. They told me the building uses a spanning tree protocol and that there can't be any loops in the network. I was tasked with once again ripping up our floor ports, remapping the whole lot and ensuring that nothing plugged in was plugged in anywhere else. I went through all of our floor ports, all of our switch ports, til I was happy there were no loops - it was 9pm and I checked my desktop. The network was offline completely. There was nothing more I could do that day, I was exhausted and figured I'd go to sleep early, be in before everybody else the next day and figure it out. Wednesday (Final Day of outage) I come in at 7am (that was early for me) as we established the day before, the building's network was fine, ours was not. I try a few solutions I thought of over the last few hours but to no avail. My colleagues started to filter in at 8:30, some being understanding of the outage and others asking me when I'd fix it. Tired of pointing out I didn't actually cause the outage I just started trying to get in touch with anybody who knew more about the network than I did. Our Infrastructure denied all knowledge of anything being wrong, as one point asserting they never even set up the physical network and only handled configuration. Our Building Manager put me in touch with the remote network engineers who were singing the same tune, that we set up the physical network and they just handled configuration. Completely lost for solutions I started trying to set up contingency, we had some small WiFi hotspots, since they couldn't hold more than a few clients, I decided we would connect 1 PC to the hotspot, and bridge the rest of the connection through the hubs. It wasn't pretty but it'd get us online and we could use our VPN as if we were "working from home". I disconnected each hub from the floor ports as I didn't want the building network to interfere and set up the first bank of desks. The plan worked, everybody connected to the internet and started to connect to the VPN. I got to the second bank of desks and disconnected the hub from the floor port. No sooner had that been done than people started to shout about the networking being back. In my head I started to curse. That wasn't a coincidence. I asked somebody to connect to a random website to ensure it wasn't cached data. Not just people on this bank, the entire office was back online. I plugged the cable I had just unplugged back in. The network fell once more. I remembered the local Network guy from yesterday saying to me "Make sure there are no loops". I checked the floor port, 3 phone lines and 1 data connection, the data connection went to the hub, and 7 more cables came out. Wait? 7? There are 6 computers and 1 connection to the switch, so why are there 8 cables plugged in? I asked each person to tell me when windows said their network cable was unplugged, each one called out until 1 cable did nothing. I followed it, it went around the entire bank of desks, back around a desk leg, into another separate floor port. What's more is that the floor port it was plugged into mapped to the other switch in our cabinet. Making a perfect little loop in our Spanning Tree. The fault wasn't with anybody really. When everybody pitched in moving the desks on Friday somebody had spotted a spare data cable and thought they were being helpful plugging it back into the floor. So there you have it, a 3 day outage brought to and end, by unplugging a single 5m cat 5e cable. A cable that managed to bring down an entire buildings network. I reported my findings to everybody concerned, our local infra blamed the buildings topology. The building engineers blamed our local infra, the engineers who helped out were happy it was resolved and everybody in our office continued to blame me for touching it in the first place. I was quite happy to put on some music, and start dealing with some regular user issues. Much needed TL;DR: entire buildings network goes down because we accidentally plugged 2 switches into eachother [link] [comments]  |
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