When you buy price instead of service and product you asked for and I quoted you. You get what you pay for. Tech Support |
- When you buy price instead of service and product you asked for and I quoted you. You get what you pay for.
- "Doesn't Bill Gates know who I am"
- I'm gong to have to go to the optician
- Vacuum: 1, Server Rack: 0
- "I can't type and it's your fault!"
- Dealing with users that refuse your help
- Who doesn't know what "upper case" means?
- Does the wireless charger need to be plugged in?
- A Smartphone's Black Screen of Doom
- We totally swear we have approval!
- A little thanks goes a long way
- How dad learned to save more often and how to protect data with velcro
- Everything's different.
- Ask BEFORE Unplugging
- Being a contractor and finding problems that are risky to escalate. Hosed if I do and hosed if I don't
- It feels nice when I'm thanked for doing my job.
- Quantum, Sailor, and the Case of Dumb Luck
Posted: 26 Jul 2018 11:48 AM PDT 2 years ago I did some consulting and maintenance it job for a construction business. I couldn't get along with one of the managers there. The kind of I know it all Ive seen it all you are trying to overcharge and whatnot. Micromanagement squirrel. They planned to move into a new office and asked me for a quote. 25 offices. 2 employees per office and they will make a move in with voip phones too. Open walls. Easy job. 4x cat5e per office and 5 more for printers and plotters. Office was huge. So I quoted fairly because the office was huge. Well micro squirrel know it better and got a 1/4 of my quote deal with CAT6 wire. I honestly didn't want to lower my price because it was a fair one and going from cat 5e wire into cat6 one for the same price would be nuts. Everything went well and good till 2 weeks later I got called for consult and got asked some question about my old quote and why I quoted so many wires. I was like: "Whaa? What do you mean so many? one per station and 1 per phone. It was a bare minimum actually to make it work just right" Deal guy installed 1 cat6 wire in each office. They had to buy little netgear 5ports gigalan switches to plug everyone. So 25 offices = 25x about 50$ switch = 1250$. 2 stations and 2 voip phones on a switch on a single wire. Yeah. Great. Voip guy was also pissed like hell; he was supposed to install phones with poe switch (power over network wire) and couldn't do it because of the stupid switches everywhere so he had to supply adapters for every phone. it cost them about 30$ for every phone. Overall stupid mess. so 50x30=1500$ It was bad. Bad. BAD! Systems were losing printers. Printers were losing systems. People on the phones were working inside huge caves on the moon with huge delays and echos over the phones. They actually got an ultimatum from the voip guy: you fix your network bs or I take everything back and then sue me. What we could do to fix it? Easy: 3 more wires into each office and because walls and some parts of the ceiling couldn't be accessed it would be over 200% our original quote. Squirrel ass: "You mean minus the wires already installed." No. 200% of my original quote to add 3 wires into each office. Yeah we got the job 2 days later. We did it during construction vacation period so it was a very relaxing job. Empty walls so it wasn't so bad. we also used the previous wire to drop ours. We just replaced the face-plate from 1 into 4 connectors. Felt good. [link] [comments] |
"Doesn't Bill Gates know who I am" Posted: 26 Jul 2018 08:27 AM PDT This is a short story from many years ago when I was newbie in the late 90s. Pimple faced youth as I see it referred to on here once and a while. $me = me $vp = his holiness the vice president of sales He wouldn't let you call him VP, it was always spelled out even in his email and on his business cards I worked for a small company about 100 employees and I was the IT department. $vp calls $me up yelling about lost work. I go in $vp office and take a look. His laptop blue screened. I thought no big deal, lets reboot it and get it going again. When i got it booted and him logged in, he opened MS word and started yelling about his missing document. Now keep in mind this was probably Windows 95 running Office 95 I asked him where he saved it and he said he didn't. I explained to him that if he didn't save it it was gone. He instantly started screaming explaining that he had been working on that document for 4 hours and this was unacceptable. I explained to him that you have to hit save once in a while. He got even madder and yelled this is BS, Bill Gates should know who I am and he is going to hear about this. I setup his auto-save in Office to 5 minutes and left. When i was leaving his office the owner of the company walked by and asked what was going on. I explained it and he laughed and said "why didn't you hit save". [link] [comments] |
I'm gong to have to go to the optician Posted: 27 Jul 2018 03:09 AM PDT My first job out of college was level 1 service desk support in a large 3 building medical devices company. We had this know it all quality manager. A know it all but a bit of a dunse. She called the service desk one day roaring down the phone. "This company is going to have to pay for the damage this screen is doing to my eyes. this is unacceptable. Bleeping this, bleeping that. The mouse cursor is flying all over the screen and giving me headaches / eye strain" ok ok I said, ill be there in 10 minutes, off i trott in the rain across to the other building. Find her office, go in and she is a big furious stress ball. I see the cursor flying up and down the screen. Walk over to her desk. Lift the notepad she had left on top of the keyboard ( in particular on top of the arrow keys causing the cursor to fly all over the place) say nothing and walk out. She goes as red as a tomato. [link] [comments] |
Posted: 26 Jul 2018 05:30 PM PDT Hello again, TFTS! This story happened a few months ago, but I was just reminded of it and figured it'd be worth sharing with y'all. No disgruntled clients this time, just a tale of a spouse and a server rack. The cast:
I have a few small clients on the side with my small business, mostly maintenance and remote support when they have an issue. Unless it's an emergency, most of this work is at night or on the weekends when I'm not at my day job, and said day job is flexible enough that I have been able to leave early on the rare occasion that one of them has a crisis. For the most part, it's maybe 5-10 hours a week between all my clients, so not that much work really. I have a small server rack at home that hosts mine and $DW's websites, runs our home file/media server, and is a testing ground for various VM's and projects for myself and my clients. The rack itself has three small servers, a battery backup, modem/router/switch, and external backup drive with a label reading: "GRAB IN CASE OF APOCALYPSE" ($DW's idea, since she would have no clue otherwise what to grab in case of emergency). Also, there is a power strip running across the middle of the rack, with six outlets facing outward (important later), and more facing inward to power the various attached devices. The power strip is connected to the battery backup, as are all three servers (also important). This little server rack sits nicely between our desks, the twinkling of blue and green lights keeping us company during our gaming marathons and work sessions. The outlets on the front are usually for charging phones or cameras, and occasionally a computer or monitor when doing repairs. One lovely evening, it dawns on us that it's trash night. $DW and I collectively sigh, and pause our raiding for a moment of adult responsibilities. $DW offers to vacuum around the office and scoop the litter box if I take the trash bags down and empty the vacuum when she's finished. I agree, and we set to our tasks. Now, our condo has everything upstairs except for the garage, where the trash bins are stored during the week. I load up all the trash (because more than one trip is for sissies), and start walking down the stairs to the sound of the vacuum rolling across the carpet. I get the bins loaded, hauled out to the curb, and start to close the garage door when I hear the vacuum power down. A strange, high pitched whine can be heard, but it's hard to pinpoint what the source could be as the garage door is rumbling shut. I head back inside, and notice the whining is notably louder now, and coming from upstairs. As I take the last step up, I'm greeted by a mortified $DW, her eyes wide with fear.
I start to open my mouth to ask "what", but the shrill sound from the office has my attention. I walk past DW and into the room, and cover my ears. Damn, that thing is loud! In the middle of the room is the vacuum, it's cord trailing off towards... the server rack. The screeching sound is coming from the battery backup, the little light on the front that normally glows blue is flashing red at an alarming rate. All other lights on the server are unlit, no fans whirring, no disks humming softly. Pushing the vacuum aside, I click the buttons next to the battery LCD in an attempt to shut the damn thing up. A few clicks later, and my eardrums are relieved, though I can still hear the faint ringing of the alarm.
I sighed, and began trying to resurrect the rack. The battery had quieted down to an angry chirp every ten seconds, constantly reminding us that it was dead. The fuse in the power strip hadn't blown, but the battery wasn't giving out any power until it cooled down. From what I could tell, the vacuum pulled about triple the maximum listed amperage the battery was designed to output, and rather than tripping immediately, the battery simply gave its best for about 90 seconds until the charge was too weak, or it overheated and tripped a safeguard. That safeguard switching off took our whole little home network with it, from WiFi to our websites. I took a moment to explain to $DW what happened, and her already wide eyes bulged out further. Her business is makeup related, so while she knows that everything shutting down at once is bad, she didn't really know how much most of the stuff costs (other than my keyboard, and apparently $150 for a nice mechanical keyboard is insane, but a similarly priced Gucci mascara or whatnot is okay).
After a few minutes of back and forth of $DW saying I'm pulling numbers our of my ass, and me showing $DW similar models online for FAR more than that (and enjoying the look of her eyes popping out further, seriously it's adorable when she's like that), the battery stopped beeping, and the blue light of life returned. The fans started spinning up in unison, followed by the vacuum roaring back to life. Scared the hell out of us, $DW yelped and jumped back, and I about fell over from the sudden sound right next to me, before yanking the plug out of the socket. A few minutes of checking everything on the servers, and I happily informed $DW that the only thing she broke was the nightly backup, which was in the process of running when my little computer kingdom came crashing down. That was about six months ago. We joke about it now, almost anytime one of us decides to vacuum the office, and sometimes when she plugs in anything other than her phone. $DW even put a little label on the power strip "NO VACUUM skull-and-crossbones". Seriously, I don't know how she even got an emoji from a label maker, but it's a cute little reminder of the near-death experience our servers had that night. [link] [comments] |
"I can't type and it's your fault!" Posted: 26 Jul 2018 01:55 PM PDT Just a warning up ahead, this will be paraphrased and translated so it won't be 100% accurate! The lucky people involved in this tale are $Me and $MisterWhyDoWeNeedPasswordGuidelines (referred to as $CW from here on out because I don't wanna type that much). Our tale starts on a quiet Monday morning. I had just grabbed my coffee and wanted to a take sip when suddenly I receive a call from my all time favorite user $CW. Reluctantly I answer the call - after a few sips from my then hot coffee - and am greeted with the following:
At this point it's important to note that our Users passwords expire after a set amount of time, which we stated several times but as you can guess no one reads our e-mails... Anyways $CW's password has expired on Friday, and he had to change it accordingly. I know this because he called me on Friday to complain about the password expiration.
At this point the day was already ruined... I checked his Account on the Server and - surprise surprise - it was locked down due to too many failed login attempts. I wonder how that happened.
It was at this moment when he hung up on me. I guess his ego wasn't able to take two hits in one call. [link] [comments] |
Dealing with users that refuse your help Posted: 26 Jul 2018 07:36 PM PDT TL;DR: User calls with comp troubs, refuses to cooperate out of sheer stubbornness , nothing is solved. Posted this on /r/sysadmin on a weekly thread, I was told you guys might enjoy it. This happened today morning. We receive a call from a small, 2 person satellite office of ours. One of those persons never calls us directly, she just asks the other girl to call us because she's "too busy". They're technically partners and equals in their department but there's always a "boss/assistant" relationship. Anyways, co-worker takes the call and it's a desktop that won't turn on ("The CPU won't turn on". Anyone else have users that call the desktop case "The CPU"?). He's going through the normal debugging steps; check for loose cables, if cleaning lady didn't accidentally turn off the PSU's switch on the back, plug in another thing to check the outlet is working, etc. Nothing seems to work. For context, we're a small team of 2 which are hired specifically to attend to our location's problems which are all sales/accounting/payroll issues. We're not technically supposed to be solving other office's problems but we do since we're "the IT guys". That means we can't physically go to the office since it's a 2 hour drive on peak-hours then another 2 hour drive back. And anyways, the user's job requires her to work on that office on the morning and then come to our office since theirs requires to close at 1:00 PM. So co-worker asks a sensible and understandable "We'll then just disconnect the computer and bring it here, we'll check it out" to which she immediately and without any sense of irony or respect replies: "No, I won't do it". Partner is dumbfolded. "Why? It's easy I can walk you through and it'll take you 1 min and you can't work anyways..." "No, it's just too much work. I won't do it. Thanks for nothing." And then proceeds to tell him of another problem with the other lady's scanner that isn't working, but she's currently dealing with a client so she can't answer the phone or do tests. "Ok then" co-worker replies "then call me back when she's done or bring us the scanner later when you come here anyway..." He immediately gets put on hold, and then the same reply "She says we can't do it. She doesn't want the scanner disconnected". Co-worker "Ok, then we can't help you if that's the status of things. We'll put it on a to-do list and deal with it when we can go there. Is there anything else we can help you with?" "No, nothing" click And then he looks to me with his best face of I can't believe this just happened [link] [comments] |
Who doesn't know what "upper case" means? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 09:49 AM PDT Literally this person, did not know. And she didn't sound like she was exceptionally old or anything. Even still... upper case is a thing that's existed for how long now? So basically... she can't get her password to reset. She keeps insisting it meets the requirements. I keep verifying, "Is it over 6 characters? and has at least 1 number and 1 upper case character?" and she vehemently insists it does. Finally I give up and ask her to just FWD me the link she's using and to type out the password she is trying to use, so that I can just do it for her. When I get the email... her password has no upper case. It had a - symbol! So that's something! lol When i tell her "uh... your password does not have any upper case" she then finally admits "oh... um, whats upper case? It's not the thing by the 0?" So I had to explain, "well its like when the letter is bigger than the rest" and then she got it. I'm shook. [link] [comments] |
Does the wireless charger need to be plugged in? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 07:31 PM PDT I work in escalations for a company that provides basic-to-intermediate customer facing technical support for appliances, phones, etc. I've dealt with my fair share of crazy and rude, but this just takes the cake. Please keep in mind this is live chat, not phone.
$me = me $customer = person overpaying for tech support
$me Thanks for choosing our company, how can I help? $customer hi yes I just bought wireless charger from store does phone case need to be off for it to work $me Not necessarily, but if it's not working you should try taking it off. $customer ok it's not working I already tried it twice why did you tell me to do it again $me You didn't let me know that you had already attempted that. Before we try anything else, is there anything else you have already attempted? $customer everything $me Okay, is the the LED on the charging brick on? $customer i don't have that here right now can you just look at my account before you ask questions like that I'm in a hurry i told you i tried everything $me I can't see on your account if you have the wall brick plugged in. Just to confirm, is the charger plugged in? $customer why would i plug in a wireless charger? are you in india? $me We're all based in the US, and I'm sure we can get this solved. The wireless charging base needs to be plugged in. The phone can lay on the charger, thus being 'wireless'. $customer you don't need to explain to me what a wireless charger is $me If it is not plugged in the charger will not work. The electricity has to come from a source, and it is not possible to take it out of the air right now. Please let me know if there is anything else I can help with. $customer i went back to the store yesterday and they fixed it immediately, goodbye.
I'm in escalations so customer surveys don't affect me, but I did get told later on that they had left a 1 star rating after they started arguing with the automatically generated email asking about their experience. A human had to manually input the rating; they would not complete the survey themselves. We do receive responses sent to automated emails, and I can only imagine what the conversation went like. [link] [comments] |
A Smartphone's Black Screen of Doom Posted: 26 Jul 2018 10:08 AM PDT Obligatory LTL/FTP $me: an Android dev, so I don't do tech support except for family and friend $mom: pretty explicit :) I'm planning some holidays with my family on the phone, and, at the end of the call, the issue crops up.
The camera API on Android has many quirks with OEMs modifications, but at least the default camera app should work. The issue seems to be a hardware problem, which I don't like to troubleshoot.
Two weeks later, the holidays come and I had forgotten about the issue. But strangely my mom didn't remind me of it. Finally, one day, the black screen of doom comes back.
Suddenly reminded of the issue, I look at the phone while my mom is still trying to take the photo and ... it's working. The screen properly displays the camera, no black screen.
I look at my mom still frustrated and suddenly it hits me...
The sunglasses' polarization made it so that the phone screen appeared black in landscape, and the combination of sunglasses and landscape phone only happened while taking photos outside on a sunny day. Surely, it was the first sunny day of the holidays, and before that everything was fine. I explained to her the polarization issue, and that she would need to remove her glasses before taking landscape photos. I'm happy I didn't try to troubleshoot this one on the phone. [link] [comments] |
We totally swear we have approval! Posted: 26 Jul 2018 09:17 PM PDT So I run an IAM platform for a large organization. Part of that is moving all access requests to our platform so that a centralized access admin team can administer all requests. There was a big compliance issue opened because one of our business units was doing their own access administration, so we have to move everything into our platform, but in a nonstandard way. The technology group swears they have permission from all the application owners to use their application as a launch pad for their access requests. I go through the pain of setting up several assets and an SFTP route for them to send in their profiles/roles. Today I get a call from the app owner who says he never gave permission for this and he wants it removed - problem is, since our app is a controls tool, we can't remove an instance once it's been created. He yells at me for 20 minutes while I try to explain I was lied to by tech. He finally accepts that and apologizes for yelling at me for Tech's mistake. Then I get an email from the project manager saying the project is shut down indefinitely until they figure out how they want to handle the nonstandard stuff. So glad I'm on vacation tomorrow and next week. [link] [comments] |
A little thanks goes a long way Posted: 26 Jul 2018 09:07 AM PDT Earlier this week, one of my co-workers if I had a moment to help with something. Shortly after, I was talking with her daughter about a busted MacBook. She'd closed it on a pencil, and the damage to the screen was pretty obvious. I looked up how much replacement screens are going for, and they're not cheap. (It was the A1502 model, lowest I could find on eBay was ~$265.) I gave her a rough estimate on how much she could expect to pay. She wasn't happy, but she thanked me nonetheless. Today, I came into work and saw a letter on my desk. I opened it, and this is what it said.
Attached was a Hershey's bar. [link] [comments] |
How dad learned to save more often and how to protect data with velcro Posted: 26 Jul 2018 12:36 PM PDT The "Doesn't Bill Gates Know Who I Am? post reminded me of this story. It was roughly 1996. We had Windows 95 on our old PC, probably a Packard Bell but I could be mistaken. It was one of those horizontal form factor desktops with a hardware power button on the front. One fine saturday he was "in the zone" and was furiously typing away, entering the inventory or payroll or whatever. Hours went by. He had a lot to catch up on and just kept pounding away through lunch and dinner, eyes focused to a trancelike state on the 15" 256 color CRT monitor. Remember this was a hardware power button. Electricity ceased to flow through the computer, resetting every bit of its RAM back to zero, including all 6 hours worth of unsaved flow-state data entry. A trip to home depot later, the hole in the wall was patched and he was ready to start again with an ice pack on his right hand. The next day, we used hot glue and velcro to create a makeshift removable plastic shield to cover the power button from that point on... [link] [comments] |
Posted: 26 Jul 2018 03:13 PM PDT My 93 year old neighbor just called me up in the middle of the day saying "It's all changed. Everything is different, and I don't know what to do. Can you help me?" So I head over and take a look. It turns out AOL updated their terms and logged him out so he would have to click the I Agree button on their new terms. I logged him in, clicked OK, and now he's happy again. He was very grateful, offered me a beer, and said he wished he understood computers better. I told him don't feel bad, these things change fast. [link] [comments] |
Posted: 26 Jul 2018 12:00 PM PDT Background: I'm the IT Manager at a large medical center (read: Only IT Guy). I deal with everything, and generally do so with a good sense of humor, and without being condescending to any $Lusers. Today was one of the only times in my memory that I've ever been so pissed off at a $Luser that I actually yelled at them, and did it in public. Worse, the $Luser is a manager, and I did it in front of their team. Characters $Me: Yours truly $OM: The office manager. Main person in charge of the non-clinical staff. Been here longer than I have. Story We have a printer in one of our departments that always gives us a lot of trouble. It tends to disconnect itself from the network, break down at inopportune moments, etc. This printer is plugged into a wall outlet. Also plugged into this wall outlet is a WAP since wi-fi was a late addition to this floor, per $OM's request, who saw me install it, saw where I plugged it in, and saw me hide the wire behind some desktop objects. WAP takes up the only port in the general vicinity of the printer, so for the time being (when the budget has it in it to replace the WAP with one mounted on the ceiling), the printer is plugged into a port on the WAP. I think y'all see where this story is going. I get a call from the a doctor. Calls are reserved here for the most urgent of IT issues. He's unable to print, and a patient needs a report immediately so they can leave. I remote in, and see that the printer is offline. Great. This printer has a tendency to do this. Check the print server. It also says that the printer is offline. Even more GREAT. So I make my way down to their floor and begin to check the printer. Is it plugged in? Yes. Are there any errors on the printer? No. Is it plugged into the AP? Yes. Is the WAP on? NO. I check the power supply, and it's plugged into the WAP, so that's fine, but then I check the wall. And what do you think I find? The WAP is unplugged. And a $fruitphone power brick is in its place, connected to none other than $OM's cell phone. I plug in the WAP, and put the charger on $OM's desk. I may have slammed it down. The following conversation happened in loud tones $me: You did not seriously unplug that to plug in your phone. $OM: It looked like a phone charger (note: no phone charger has an actually attached wire to it anymore, unlike this) $me: HOW?! $OM: It's not labeled. How am I supposed to know it's supposed to be plugged in? $me: maybe you ASK before you unplug something. Something you asked me to put there in the first place. Now you've wasted my time, the patient's time and the doctors. $OM went back to work angry. Meanwhile, I grabbed a label out of a label printer and attached it to the WAP power supply with the words "DO NOT UNPLUG. $ME WILL KILL YOU." in red sharpie and all caps. Tl;dr: $luser disconnects printer to charge cellphone [link] [comments] |
Posted: 26 Jul 2018 07:22 AM PDT I do training and some support for software used in manufacturing plants. One of our applications has the ability to insert records into one of our systems. I got a call yesterday that someone is doing inserts that are messing up their data. [link] [comments] |
It feels nice when I'm thanked for doing my job. Posted: 26 Jul 2018 02:44 PM PDT Hello everyone just want to share a quick story that happened today. For some background, I am the only IT person in a multi-office non-profit. Finance is currently using a cloud-hosted version of "FastNovel Corporation", but we are moving to a cloud-hosted version of Tortilla Key players are: $me = Me. $cont = Finance Controller I was at my cube talking to the Finance Director about the cloud hosted financial software we were moving to. $cont sneaks up to my cube and puts a post it note on my desk, so as to not interrupt mine and FD's convo. FD leaves, and I look at the post it note. "HELP PLEASE!! Remote desktop is freezing on [spreadsheet software]" I walk to her office to see what's happening.
Im standing here thinking, "This is literally not my job. We paid for the hosted version so that LeftNetworks would handle everything on their servers.
So, we do that, she logs back in, and everything is working for her again.
It doesn't happen all that often, but it feels great when I am actually thanked for helping. [link] [comments] |
Quantum, Sailor, and the Case of Dumb Luck Posted: 26 Jul 2018 12:47 PM PDT Back when I was but an IT tech noob, I was working in a corporate hospital ($themed), and I'd gotten a call to run a ticket to install a user's (a nurse director, mind you) desktop printer she wanted added to her device that she'd brought from home. Back in those days, we allowed that kind of thing. When I left that job, things like that were not permitted anymore. Anyway, I go in to this XP machine and start setting up drivers and such from disk, as was needed back in those days, and plug in the printer, and fire off a test print. Works great. As a general rule, I like to reboot and confirm everything is still working properly. It proceeded to shit the bed. And I, being the tech noob I was at the time, absolutely terrified. I'd trashed this nurse director's office machine. I don't even know what I did. So I did what any good tech noob would do. I called in reinforcements. First was the Sailor, who was significantly smarter than I was, and I thought for sure could figure out how I broke this poor innocent machine. After 30 minutes of trying all kinds of stuff, we decide to call in the big gun, Quantum. Now, Quantum was the guy you'd call when no one else could figure out what was wrong. He was the number one, top person in the entirety of IT that, if he didn't know it, it wasn't beyond him to figure it out. So Quantum joins the Sailor and myself, and, for another 30 minutes, this device is just trashed. No one can figure out what happened. So Quantum starts pulling data for recovery purposes to take to build another device for this director, and we proceed to prepare to talk to the nurse director, letting her know her device was dead. It was right before we walked out of the room that the Sailor had one more idea. He reached behind the printer I'd installed, pulled the USB cable from it, and rebooted device. And hark, it sprang back to life like the last hour and a half had never happened. We both praised the Sailor for his It was not until years later I would understand the power of corrupt drivers and how much damage they could cause. You never know what is going to break a machine these days, but my recommendation is to always check the easiest thing first, it has saved me so much time and effort over the years. This is not even close to the only story with Quantum and the Sailor (among a whole cast of characters at $themed), if anyone else is interested in hearing about my adventures as an IT noob, and eventually a competent tech, to an IT dragon with them. [link] [comments] |
You are subscribed to email updates from Tales From Tech Support. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States |
No comments:
Post a Comment