I'd like to buy a used computer. Lightly used. Top of the line. You have those to sell for $100, right? Tech Support |
- I'd like to buy a used computer. Lightly used. Top of the line. You have those to sell for $100, right?
- The "Stolen" Junction Box
- "I know exactly who you are"
- A rock and a hard place...
- “\” is not the same as “/“
- "Hang on a mo..." (or, "please don't do that again")
- Can you create an iPad app for me that does this for tomorrow? 30 Min left until work is done for today. "The Impossible Quest, that I rejected!" "Owner and security gets involved"
| Posted: 29 Jul 2018 04:22 PM PDT I do desktop support for a K-12 independent school. We buy desktops and laptops on a four-year rotation, for about $800 a pop (yeah, I know, we're cheap). For the past several years, we've been offering "retired" computers (i.e. they are 4+ years old and have been replaced) to employees for $100 each. They have a clean install of Windows 10 and nothing else, and we make clear that they are offered with no warranty or support whatsoever and could last 5 years or could die in 30 days. Nevertheless, we get a few takers because they're a lot better than what you can normally pick up for that price. I'm sure it helps that I take the ones with the lightest use off the pile to recondition and sell. Apparently one of our faculty members heard about this offer through the grapevine, because yesterday afternoon, she sent me this email:
I saw it this afternoon, and after I got my guffaws under control, I replied with this email:
I bcc'ed my boss and texted him:
He responded a few minutes ago:
Seems accurate. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2018 10:26 AM PDT I work as a tier 2 tech support agent for an ISP. This happened yesterday. I was browsing tickets in our queue when I came across a priority 1 ticket which read in all caps:
No details. Here we go.I have to call the customer for more information. I'll be Me, customer will be C. Me: Intro So, I'm calling in regards to your ticket about someone using your service? C: Oh, no one's using my service. I HAVE no service. Me: ... C: Someone stole the box that my wires are coming from! Me: Oh... We'll have someone out right away. I lowered the ticket priority from priority 1 (extreme) to priority 3 (medium) and sent it on its way. Someone went out today and it was closed with the best comment I've ever seen.
[link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2018 03:33 AM PDT This lady (AL) walked in to our PC repair shop and said she needed something fixed same day. M: "Sure thing, that'll just be a 45$ rush fee to skip our 12+ laptop/desktop queue" AL: "That's ridiculous, I know Vice President and I want to talk to him." M: "yeah i'll let him know to call when he gets in" Angry lady storms out and I see her get into her car to leave (or so I think), so I go back to doing my thing. Phone rings. It's angry lady. I can see her in her car. Complains about 'that lazy tech' (im ast mgr of this shop) who said VP wasnt in and was trying to charge her extra, wants to talk to VP who she knows is there. M: "yeah he's not here but I'll have him call when he gets in" AL: "don't you want to take my name and number?" M: "nope, we just spoke inside. I know exactly who you are" Hangs up instantly. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2018 09:39 PM PDT I love this sub and have been getting a kick out of some amazing/fun/shocking/brain numbing dumb stories haha. So thank you all for sharing your experiences! I've even learned a thing or 2 from a couple. This next one of mine comes from my days of my IT Traineeship. I was 20 and the $company that hired me was a small training outfit for tradesman. I was hired by the $HIT as his sidekick to support the students and staff. He trained me up over a few years but truthfully I have self taught myself more with the ancient style of Google-Fu. Like most companies of that size with a heavy "tradesman culture" the IT guys are only seen as 2 things. Dark Wizards... or useless nerds getting away with doing nothing because "nothing ever breaks" and we are only do basic "on/off support". Obviously untrue as they never see or understood the setup behind the scenes. Anyway, the Owner of this place known as $CreepoOwner was a piece of work. Slimy, yet friendly. Happy yet screaming in your face. It was unsettling trying to figure out his mood any given day so you could navigate yourself out of the firing line. The relationship between $HIT and $CreepoOwner was always strained. $CreepoOwner didn't like $HIT or $Me but he knew he needed us. He would always pull us up on stupid things that i wont go into but it caused $HIT to be very secretive with the infrastructure. Its understandable why, due to the HUGE turnover rate. He protected our knowledge so we were un-fireable. That only lasted so long but that's another story. One of the main things $HIT hid was the Admin passwords to the VMs/servers/firewalls etc etc. As the underling I would always be put in the middle between both the $CreepoOwner's and $HIT's authority. I was not allowed under any circumstances to share the Admin passwords with $CreepoOwner on pain of unemployment. Also not complying with $CreepoOwner ' requests had a similar outcome with more yelling. It was a recipe for disaster that was incredibly unfair on me but whatever. Sorry for the massive setup, but I like to give context and a setting. One summer evening after work... Me = $Me Head of IT (my boss) = $HIT CreepoOwner = $Owner $Owner [Calls my Personal Mobile Afterhours]: $Me, whats the Admin password to my F***ing laptop. $Me: uhhhh hi $Owner, whats the problem with your normal login? $Owner: One of you idiots locked me out! Now get me back in right now! $Me: Sorry, we wouldnt have done that but i'll see if i can get your account working again. $Owner: No give me the Admin login now! (all company devices have an Admin login for us to access to change things. We gave limited acces to everyone due to many issues in the past) $Me: ummm sorry, but I'm not allowed to give you that password. (all hell breaks loose) $Owner: ARE YOU F***** **** *** SERIOUS???!?!? I AM THE F**** OWNER OF THIS F***** BUSINESS. GIVE ME THAT F**** PASSWORD RIGHT F****** NOW OR YOU ARE DONE. YOU HEAR ME?!! (he is completely right but 1. yelling 2. I hate that $HIT put me in this situation) $Me: *Internally* oh f***... what do I do I really need to finish the traineeship for the qualifications. Shit shit shit....... BRAINWAVE! $Me: Ok, sorry sir. The Admin password for that laptop should be *PASSword123* (it was actually *passWORD123*) $Owner: That didnt work! $Me: Aw damn, looks like its fully locked down. Would you like me to come round and take a look? $Owner: Get it done. *Hangs up* Now I would never do that these days unless there was OT involved but I was young and desperate to keep the higher-ups happy. I drove over to his house and jumped on the laptop to be a tech wizard and "unlock" the laptop. I then created a new "admin" account which gave him no additional access. $Owner was happy that he got the password out of us and my $HIT was happy that I didn't give him the real one... man that was stressful. I grew some balls and let $HIT know what i thought about the situation and how unfair it was. Rock and a hard-place and all that. The whole situation made me grow up quickly and solidify my IT backbone a bit. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2018 03:35 PM PDT This didn't happen recently but probably more than 10 years ago. I work for one of Canada's major banks and was supporting an application that provides corporate clients an official report on their holding with the bank on any given date. The app at that time was written in VB and connected to various databases which were MS Access. A database was getting quite full so i had archived it and created a new one over the weekend. The way the app worked is that the users would have to edit a configuration and provide the full path to the database for the given date range. Easy stuff, right? Monday morning rolls around and everything is smooth until one user calls up and tells me the app is throwing an error saying database does not exist. I asked if she followed my instructions on how to edit the config and she assured me that she followed it step by step and that she still can't get it work. She's getting frustrated and deep down so am I. I walk through the same steps and get her to read me out the database path that she entered and it seemed fine. I again get her to repeat it, again she's telling me the right thing. I hunt around and am 100% convinced that it is a problem with the path, and that she's likely confusing a back slash with a forward slash. I tell her this and she snaps back "NO. I entered everything fine". I get getting beyond pissed at this point cause I know she has it wrong. She's going on and on that I don't know what I'm doing and that I am wasting her valuable time and that my problem should be escalated. I calmly say, hey do you have a piece of paper? She says yeah, of course. I tell her grab a blank piece and a pencil or pen. Got that yet? She says yes. Ok, now take your pen or pencil and draw a diagonal line from the top left to the bottom right. I wait. Are you done yet? Yes, she says. Ok good.. what you're looking at on the sheet is a back slash. CLICK... I didn't hear another world from her the rest of the day so I guess I fixed her issue!!! [link] [comments]  |
| "Hang on a mo..." (or, "please don't do that again") Posted: 29 Jul 2018 11:58 AM PDT Just remembered this one. Pretty minor, all things considered, but amusing. Over the last couple of months, I've been upgrading our desktops from spinning-disks to SSDs. I've gradually refined my process and can get a machine reliably copied in an evening (it's not a simple case of just DD'ing the partition since the SSDs are smaller (512GB vs 1TB), consistent with the machines we've bought with SSDs as standard, since we don't store masses of data locally). A colleague messages me saying his machine (with a spinning disk) is giving him a warning about the boot partition being full - Ubuntu has the annoying habit of creating very small So I SSH into the machine and begin clearing sufficient space on
I blink. He drops off Slack. I switch back to my terminal. My SSH session has died. I look at the last thing it got to.
Oh. I wander over to him, and sure enough, he's rebooted his machine. And it's dropped to an initramfs shell.
Exactly what I did - pulled my spare freshly imaged SSD-powered desktop out of the cupboard, set it up on his desk, get him logged in, PXE-boot his machine and I don't hold it against him, after all he did have extremely good timing for triggering the reboot - a few seconds either side and the initramfs would be fine. Despite me clearly telling him I was logged in and working on his machine, he decided spur-of-the-moment to reboot with a quite ambiguous warning. And yes, I know I could have rebooted him into a previous kernel, but I decided to etch in the need to be more careful about doing stuff with Linux - that it will do exactly what you tell it to do, so please be extremely careful what the instruction is! I also learned that it's extremely difficult to disable the ability to restart an Ubuntu machine... [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2018 03:09 AM PDT Good evening fellow disciples of IT A little backstory. I work at this company and it attracts lots of "unique" individials in my experience. There are high demands and lots of weird situations happening every week. The amount of times weird things happen has made it feel like I am in the Tech Support Comedy Shows. This is one my more extreme stories, I apologize if it's a bit long. It's still a very weird and a bit of a shocking experience when I think back on it. So children gather around, The Viper shall tell you the tale of "The Impossible Quest, that I rejected!" My day of work goes as it normally does, I fix computers and save helpless victims and I am having a small break to get some time to breath. Then suddenly a random encounter happens! A worker appears in front of me to challenge me. With the most impossible request you can think of. $Bob = The man that asks for the impossible $Me = I don't think I have to explain this one He walks in with this goofy smile that makes me apprehensive. I just know this is going to be an insane and impossible request. $Bob: Hi! I need help with this problem that I have $Me: Ok, what is this problem that you have? $Bob: I need an app for this thing I want to do. We are selling this item in a cafè the company has started, we are using Izettle and we need an app on the iPad we use that counts the amount we have sold of a particular item and shows it on a red digital counter when a purchase happens. I also need that is compatible with Android, Windows and Macs and that you can have a login service on this app so that you can just log in on another device and see the count. I also need this app to do this in real-time and automatically. I just stand there with eyes the size of the dinner plates at what he is asking for, but at the same time I am wondering when is the time he needs this for. Then I start to look if there exists anything that does and to my not surprise at all it does not exist for this and Izettle does not have an app or service like this, so it has to be created. Suddenly the problem got so much bigger. So I while opening my calender and take my pen out to write for when he needs this done for I take a glance at the clock and it's 15.00 and it's half an hour until my work day is done. While getting ready to note down i turn to him. $Me: Sir, this can take some time to finish this project. I will have to create the app, submit it to Apple and Google. Talk with the bank about this and Izettle to see what kind of requirements they would have of this app I am making. I also have to set up the servers and login system for this. Do you understand this? $Bob: Yes ofcourse, I understand what I am asking for. It's just that I need this to be ready quite soon. $Me: I will see how long it will take. When did you say that need this ready for? It suddenly dawns on him that he did not tell me when he needed this app be ready for use. He opens his mouth and I feel like the world goes into a slow motion cut scene around me. $Bob: Oh, sorry I forgot to say when. I need to be ready for tomorrow when work starts at 08:00 My brain freezes up, my grip on the pen goes slack and clatters to the ground I start blinking fast and my head encounters an error and needs to restart. "BRAIN OS has crashed, restart needed" "Restart initiated" "VIPER_MODE ACTIVATED" I snap my head towards him and slither up to him slowly and lean forward $Me: Repeat that, please. Because I think I just heard you say tomorrow? $Bob: Yes, I have heard it's easy to make an app like this. $Me: Do you understand that you are quite literally asking for the impossible? Because I don't think you understand what you are asking for and the time you would need to create this. My work day ends in, *Turn to look at the clock* would you look at that 20 minutes! I could see that he was ready to fire back so I straightened myself to tower over him ( Thank you tall genes makes it possible for me to look down on people, literally). $Bob: My friend that is a IT consultant said that any half decent IT worker could make this and have it ready in 15 minutes. I do not know about you, but he has worked with computers for 10 years. So he wanted to put my skills into question, eh? $Me: I do not know what kind of 2-bit IT consultant your friend is and where this muttonhead of a friend of yours learned his skills, but what you are asking for is impossible and I can not help you with this anyway, so have a good day. Now please show yourself out of my office He is shocked that I deny to help with his problem and tell him to show himself out of the office. He puffs up and is starting to shout $Bob: YOU CU**- $Me: SILENCE! Now, please show yourself out He starts to turn a nice shade of red and fires back $Bob: IT'S YOUR JOB TO -! $Me: OUT SIR! $Bob: BU-! $Me: ENOUGH! NOW GET OUT AND HAVE A NICE TODAY, SIR! $Bob: **** YOU! USELES PIECE OF SHIT! I AM REPORTING TO THE HR ABOUT THIS! He storms out the door and I take a deep breath to let out all the frustration I had with this encounter when suddenly the $OWNER walks in the door 1 minute after $Bob left. $Owner is a former Captain in the army in the infantry division so he is a straight forward guy. Quite practical. $Me: Hello Sir, I am just packing to leave for today. What can I help you with? $Owner: I heard everything that happened. I have called the security to escort him out in 5 minutes. I think they are needed for this. $Me: Sir, I don't think that is quite necessary. He shakes his head gives me smile $Owner: Well it's necessary now that I have informed HR and security that he is fired effective immediately. I do not want the guy to be fired, I know I should not ask, but have to at least give the guy a chance to straighten up. $Me: Is it really necessary to fire him, Sir? Could you not give him a warning $Owner: Yes. it is. Now that is all I wanted to say $Me: Ok Sir, I understand and have a nice day He just nods and turns around opens the door the and pauses before leaving $Owner: By the way I see that you have cut down the costs with more than 100 grand in this department this last year. As a thank you for your hard work, your wage has been increased 20% from now on. I just stare at him shock as he leaves. This company is really not that good for my heart. At least the owner likes my work. [link] [comments]  |
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