The Tale of the Helicopter Parent. Tech Support |
- The Tale of the Helicopter Parent.
- "You have broken Facebook"
- Nepotism runs wild, breeds stupidity
- Sure! I can help you with your very basic computer related problem!
- Users with OCD
- The Desk Lamp Case
- Tales of Admin-Bunny
| The Tale of the Helicopter Parent. Posted: 30 Jul 2018 12:58 PM PDT Long Time Reader, First time poster. Some Background information: I work for a College in Place, Place. We have this magical thing called FERPA Regulations that prevent identity theft and so forth. My working title is "Computer Support Technician" but I manage Workflow/Formsbuilder Development, Website APIs, and etc. Title never matches, ever. Enough about me though: I will be P(Pompf), and User will be U(ser). "Ring Ring, Ring Ring"
At this point i'm a bit concerned. So, I decide to ask the question.
The User is now UPSET and starts throwing obscenities at me.
He then screams the following:
I honestly didn't know how to respond other than a mixture of awe, despair, and laughter. How people think it's okay to bypass such simple FERPA laws and Regulations is beyond me. I think i'll pick up a drink on the way home. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Jul 2018 02:43 AM PDT For a bit of background on this: I work for an IT Outsourcing company who provide all areas of support for other non-IT focused companies. Now one of these areas is a Service Desk and the following ticket was submitted to ourselves a few weeks ago. Note - The following excerpt is an unedited copy of what was in the ticket (minus any personal info obviously) "User name: $User Contact Number: Hours of work/availability: 8am-3pm Location: Computer name/asset tag: Name of application/service affected: My social life (as limited as that is) and my daughters anxiety levels at having to use something other than facebook to contact me in case of an emergency Error Message/Screen shot:yes Number of users affected: if you have properly broken it then millions I would imagine *Full description of fault: Facebook is broken... Noticed this yesterday but rebooted to see if this was just an issue from where I hibernate my laptop when I go home... nope... still present... * *Then throughout the day parts of Facebook returned but I couldn't click on images or videos nor could I post anything... * *I double checked that it wasn't an issue with my laptop by tethering it to my mobile phone... nope... all present and correct (for the brief amount of time I managed to get a signal here in the basement!!) so I assume this has to be a firewall issue... * *Not checked it on the VPN as yet but will do tomorrow.. * *Thankfully I managed to get a decent enough phone signal that my daughter managed to get hold of me yesterday... she was having a mild panic as the cat had brought in a rather large bird and it was flying around the kitchen... * *I did mention she could have rung me but kids that age generally live off social media so was quite affronted by the suggestion!!... * *Obviously I won't hold you responsible for the stress you caused her by breaking her (seemingly) only means of contacting me... * *Anyway... I don't fancy having to reboot my laptop everyday as that kinda defeats the object of my hibernating it... its also rather inconvenient due to the work I do and the way I work... I have re-educated my daughter now to try ringing my mobile (I can just about get a non data signal here) or my work number if she is desperate to get hold of me so no need to panic about rushing to fix it... although she is struggling to understand why you would want to break Facebook in the first place... kids of today huh :)* *This has only happened since Monday... everything was fine last week so can only assume someone has been playing silly buggers with configuration over the weekend... seems a bit silly trying to disable 'parts' of Facebook... surely you either block it or you don't... especially if you don't trust anyone to use it appropriately... * *Anyhoo... hope its fixed soon... :)" * Unsurprisingly this ticket was swiftly closed off after we spoke to the user and explained that we did not support Facebook and had no control over Facebook. The guy was pretty understanding about once we explained but this is definitely up there with the classics in the office TLDR: $User logs ticket accusing of taking down Facebook and causing his child to have a mild panic attack due to a incident with a cat and a bird [link] [comments]  |
| Nepotism runs wild, breeds stupidity Posted: 30 Jul 2018 10:16 PM PDT Preamble: Not technically a tech support job but I am the informal tech support for the night cable team at a datacenter. I was put on a project with someone who is very technologically inept and just generally not all that bright. He fairly routinely needed help with his laptop. Honestly the only reason he still has a job is nepotism. Copypasta: There are several ways to copy and paste. If you use computers you generally find one you like and keep using it. The person I got stuck with apparently knew none, despite him being about 35-45. If somehow you make it through many years of life with computers without having to learn something like that I would simply teach you. I showed him two ways actually. Then a day or two later I showed him again... then again... then someone else had to teach him a few times, and then a few more people tried.... After I think about a dozen attempts across 5 different people he *may* have finally remembered how to copy and paste. Server or local copy: Part of our job includes editing a spreadsheet stored on a sharepoint site. Not terribly difficult. The excel web app has most of the features needed and is required for multiple people to edit the same spreadsheet at the same time. Unless you cache a copy and open it in excel. The problem with doing that is when you tell it to save back to the server, if someone else has made a change it doesn't know how to merge them. Usually not a big deal, the easiest way to avoid it without having to use the web app is to make sure nobody else is working on it and save your changes before you leave. Well my coworker failed to save, left for the night with the spreadsheet still open. As would happen someone during the day changed the spreadsheet. Coworker comes in the next day and is unable to save (to his credit he actually read the error message, though was unable to comprehend it). The computer is prompting him to keep server copy or keep local copy, To me the obvious solution is keep server and just reenter the small amount of data from the day before. I tell him this and explain that it will erase the progress he made so he will have to enter it again. A few minutes later he is once again complaining... because he cant find any of the information he entered the day before. I reiterate that what I told him to do erased it and he will have to re enter it. His reasoning? 'well i didn't believe you, I thought you were just kidding around'. Note: Yes I may have been able to recover it from excel's autosaves, but I don't really like him and wasn't about to volunteer to do extra work for him. [link] [comments]  |
| Sure! I can help you with your very basic computer related problem! Posted: 30 Jul 2018 08:43 AM PDT I figured I'll share an experience of mine from earlier this week as it's very comparable to a few experiences I've had in the past, I'm sure some of you have experienced similar things as well. I run into a person who doesn't actually know me, but has heard I'm, "good," with computers. Them: "My computer is broke, can you fix it please?" Me: "Well sure, what's the problem?" Them: vaguely "it won't let me on anything." Me: "Ohh, umm, I'm not sure, I'd have to see it to see what's going on." Them: "Okay, can you come over here, take time out of your life to help me figure out this problem?" Me: "Sure, I can take a look." arrive at house to be led to a computer that isn't even turned on yet so I'm forced to wait for the Dell from 1998 to boot up into Windows Vista Me: "Okay, well your Internet Explorer opened up just fine and brought me to your amazing MSN homepage, what's the problem?" Them: "Well, here, try going to my Yahoo." Me: "...okay." goes to Yahoo. "It loaded just fine, what's the problem?" Them: "Oh, well, click on the mail icon." click Them: "No, no, wait, go back," goes back Them: "Click account." click Them: "ohh, no this isn't right either, go back to mail." Me: "ughhh" click (This brings us back to the same page we were at before) Them: "Ohh, there you go, now this looks right, go to sign in." click Them: "Now see, it shows me my email, but every time I type in my password it says it's wrong." Me: "Ohh, well we can just do a forgot your password thing, what's the email you used to make your yahoo account?" Them: "I don't remember, that was forever ago!" Me: "Well I can't recover your password unless you know the recovery email and the password for that." Them: "Well what kind of computer genius are you if you can't even fix my computer?" This is usually the point where I want to tell them it's not a computer problem, it's their problem and freak out. I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2018 09:59 AM PDT I'm an IT manager at a company that's acquired 6 other companies in the past year, and I support about 50 remote users, most of which I know well from when they worked at the physical office I'm still at. A couple of the users have OCD as it relates to work - their inbox needs to be completely empty at the end of the day, their desktop cannot have any icons that are absolutely necessary, their windows settings must be tweaked exactly to their liking, etc. Since I'm friendly with them I don't mind helping, even if it's just doing crap they could do by googling. One of these OCD users had been having issues with Citrix Reciever that we could not solve, so we decided to nuke Windows over the weekend and start over. So of course today after the weekend there was a ton of personalized settings to fix. I spent 90 minutes and helped fix most of it (Outlook sending notifications to the Action Center, for instance). Then the user asks if we can make the default font (Calibri Bold 11) bigger in Outlook. I said "Sure, is it too small?" She replies back "No, I just can't stand having it be an odd number so I want to be 12". Could not help letting out a laugh :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Jul 2018 03:44 AM PDT Hello TFTS, A little story today, not really an amazing one, but I thought it could still be worth sharing. So to give a little bit of context, we are in an open space environment here, with electric desks (you know, those desks with an adjustable height), and we have two electric plugs on the upper left corner of the desk, and on each electric plug, there is also two USB ports. So basically, users have more than enough space to plug their laptops, and eventually their mobile phone charger. Now, for the story in itself, anything related to electric equipments or furniture in general are not handled by IT but by a building manager, who is also in charge of assigning lockers, creating access cards, etc... Since she recently arrived here, she isn't too familiar with some equipments and after hearing complaints about an electric plug that wasn't working on a desk in the second floor, she asked us if we could take a look at it. Our manager agreed and I went to check on the desk, I plugged my phone and its charger on the first plug, and it worked. Then on the second plug... it didn't. I raised the desk, and opened up the case below the desk, where all the wires are passing through to, then, reach the ground. And one of the electric plug was indeed disconnected. Since I also found a little desk lamp beside of the desk, I suppose that a user wanted to plug it but not on his desk, or maybe was he already using the two plugs, so he raised the desk, opened the case, randomly disconnected a wire and plugged his desk lamp. He then disconnected it too... without reconnecting the previous plug. And as we're in flexwork, there is no way to know who did that, unfortunately. I don't even know why they would need a desk lamp, as we're currently in summer here, so we have long days with sunlight, the desk isn't located in some dark corner of the building, it's actually right next to a window, and all the lights on the ceiling are working... Users will remain users, I guess. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2018 01:34 AM PDT Disclaimer: I'm one of those people that you people describe with "Knows just enough to be dangerous" so I'm sorry for any confusion. Actors: Tale One:A young friend of mine had trouble with her PC. $Po is currently not in the room, so knows neither of the call, nor the remote access. $PO "Uhhh, what is it doing?" To her credit, she didn't sound overly concerned. About this time $AB the PC-Demon opens up a youtube tab I had left open and types "Does it work now?" thoroughly ruining my mediocre acting, so I had to explain the remote access. I try and type "Nope, give me a moment" and slide under the desk to try and fiddle with the audio ports. $PO "You did turn up the volume, right?" $AB saves the day and gets a thank-you note. Tale 2: AB-Origins $AB at the time is a design student who also doubles as tech support for the department at his University. He calls me and is rather annoyed about his fellow students. So he went through the whole process of wiping all drives and setting up this mac again. The image was of a fluffy white rabbit, covering his face with his little paws and the text:"If you save to the desktop, you make Admin-Bunny cry!" I'm proud to report that this not only solved the issue, the image became the standart background for the macs of the department and the logo for the department-Facebook-group. Lesson learned: "When dealing with users, consider some social engineering" Edit: Why did it have this hellish formatting? [link] [comments]  |
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