"I refuse to work with you or do anything you say, but you're a terrible support team." Tech Support |
- "I refuse to work with you or do anything you say, but you're a terrible support team."
- All we want is quantum entanglement, with a dash of time travel
- "It's not everyday that I get customers as interesting as you."
- The CAPS lock problem has been solved!
- The Great DHCP Catastrophe of 2018
- That's not a character.
- On doing personal favors
- Oh, okay
- "Can you help me find those workstations?"
- Is there an ongoing protest against plugging a device into another USB port?
| "I refuse to work with you or do anything you say, but you're a terrible support team." Posted: 27 Aug 2018 12:52 PM PDT Brief context. I'm tech support for a POS software. We serve several clients in different parts of the US, and basic 8-5pm support is included in everybody's contract. You also get 24/7 support if you decide later if you want to be added to that, which means you'll get assistance from whoever's on call for after hours. One of the businesses we support ($TourGroup) is led by a rather strange, perpetually displeased young woman that we'll call $Cersei. $TourGroup used to be led by a slightly older lady who, while not the most tech savvy, was always polite and kind when dealing with us to fix her stuff. We never had very many problems with her personally - our only issue with $TourGroup was the fact that NONE of their employees seemed to be able to follow basic instructions or remember basic processes. Most of their calls were helping them with quick annoying stuff, but they were usually very appreciative. When the other lady stepped down and $Cersei became the head of the business....things changed. Here's a few things to keep in mind:
On to the story. This story in particular is what essentially brought my manager to the decision of looking a bit more critically at their contract. Last year, $TourGroup had been having a lot of issues with being able to perform refunds in the POS software. Which is a valid concern. $Cersei put in a ticket titled "Unable to swipe cards" Explaining that they were having issues swiping credit cards and to please call as it is a huge inconvenience. Actually, she never did put in an actual ticket. She emailed our manager directly a few days prior and our manager made a ticket for her. She has been told repeatedly that this is not the best way to get support. I took the ticket. Asked some follow up questions, mainly questions about how to reproduce the issue, if it was happening for all computers, if there was an error, what kind of swipers they were using, ect. I also reached out by phone, but only got her voicemail. $Cersei, of course, wasn't happy.
So, I try again to call, but it just went to voicemail. Noted this in the ticket and asked $Cersei if she possibly had a better number where I could reach her. She doesn't reply...for three or four days, even with repeated attempts to contact her. Along with the troubleshooting questions I needed to so much as guess at what might be going on. Ticket closed for inactivity after four days, per protocol. End of story, right? Nope. She emails back on the ticket - with her IT people suddenly CC'ed on the email chain.
(Just as a side note, we don't support, manufacture, or sell the swipers. But we DO tell people which swipers to order when they first sign on with us based on what payment processor they're using. The swipers they ordered didn't come from us - they would have been ordered by $TourGroup. In this case, we're trained to send them to the manufacturer first.) But it finally looks like we're getting somewhere. I cheerfully reply.
$TourGroupIT replies with the answers to my questions. So far so good. I email $Cersei again to see if she was able to confirm a date for a call the next day.
Long story short, the ticket is escalated, our manager basically tells $Cersei (gently) why we ask the troubleshooting questions that we do, why we're trying to schedule a call to resolve the issue, ect. Cersei is of course kind and polite to our manager, if whiny as she complains that we "take too long" to resolve her issues. Her entire reply to our manager is this screechy rant about she's had nothing but problems with our software and how our support is "terrible and slow" and she doesn't feel like her problems are getting handled quickly enough. The issue was resolved, though - someone had messed up the swiper configuration. Of course, even determining what exactly the issue was required us to spend over two hours on the phone with her IT because again, Queen $Cersei can't be arsed to be on a call to tell us what the software isn't doing that it should, or what it's doing that it shouldn't. $Cersei also still emails our manager directly for most things. She's also currently on our lowest, trashiest, break-iest version of the software because she refuses to upgrade because "our upgrades break everything". TL;DR: User thinks our support team is awful and that we're slow, even though she's unwilling to communicate or work with us and gets frustrated easily when encouraged to troubleshoot. [link] [comments]  |
| All we want is quantum entanglement, with a dash of time travel Posted: 28 Aug 2018 12:07 AM PDT So first off I apologize if my english ain't the best, but I'm not a native speaker. Now onto the story. I work as primarily as a developer, but often also as a tech support guy, since I am the newest dev here. I work for a company that is primary a web store, but we also have wood and brick stores, or what counts for them today inside shopping centers and we have a custom POS for them that is web based. It has connections to web front end, to apps and certain other things so it can do all kinds of things, but the problem as always are .... users ... So onto the story. We have a special feature for the web store where you can enable certain clients to purchase up to user defined amount of products for free every X days. The HQ has been using this for a while, but one of the newer stores just started using this feature. I being the dashing and helpful dev helped them set it up and explained how the feature worked. After confirming that they knew what they were doing I let them be and got back to my regular work, so yesteday I got an email from them going something like this. $me = Me, $manager = manager of the new store. Hello, $me the feature that you set up for us to give some items away for free is not working, when we tried to use it we got a bill and now we do not know what to do. Please do fix it, I thought you said this works already... $manager So since I was busy with other work yesterday I didn't manage to look at the issue till today. First I tried the feature on localhost, then on dev server and it worked everywhere, I checked version control system and everything was up to date ... Hmmm, what could it be? So I went to check the logs ... Aaaand there it was. They created the bill at 12:15 while they set up the feature at 12:30 ... So I responded back kindly. Hello $manager, I have seen that you have set up the feature, but the feature needs to be set up before you start using it. Unfortunately since you already created the bill and sent it to your tax ministry you will need to send cancellation to your tax ministry for this bill and then use the feature. Regards $me Hopefully that will be enough. Sometimes I wonder about the state of humanity.. Edit: I found out why they were not using the module the way it was supposed to be used. They were trying to do something that is not exactly legal ... My hope in humanity is diminishing... [link] [comments]  |
| "It's not everyday that I get customers as interesting as you." Posted: 27 Aug 2018 08:04 PM PDT LTL;FTP Today I'll be telling you a small story. I must preface it by assuring everyone that it takes place in Mexico, and thus there's no such thing as HIPAA. There's a small cast, as follows: My friend, nameless here. Her dad, happens to be a medical doctor. Her brother, services medical machines. A random attendant, she operates a small internet near the hospital. Me, a decidedly non-IT guy known for figuring out ways to make everything work out alright. A couple weeks ago, my friend crashed sometime near midnight and was admitted, unconscious and by ambulance, to the states primary hospital. She did not have insurance, and, in fact, getting anyone to know required the cop who responded to the crash to post her ID all over Facebook with hopes that someone would recognize her. I did and was the first to arrive on scene, just after informing her parents. So, scene set, it's the next day and she seems stable, but given the lack of insurance, her tests, specifically a tomography, could not be released to her parents, and it being a state operated hospital, visitation rights were scarce. However, her brother happens to work maintenance on medical machines, so he managed to get a CD with her tests to show their dad and decide on their course of action. Of course, the dad won't be leaving the hospital, so I volunteer to go to the internet a block over and try to convert the proprietary software images into something that can be shared by whatsapp and/or viewed on a phone. So I enter the place and am met with three very basic desktops, I ask the attendant which one has a CD drive and she tells me it's the first one, but that it's "broken". I try to ask around, figure out what's wrong with it, but she can only say it won't stay on. So I figure I need that one to work, and she can use it better if it does, so I offer that if I fix it she can let me use it for free, and she happily accepts. Turn it on, it seems alright at first, but when I start typing on the old, clunky keyboard, weird things happen. It then hits me, and I press an arrow while on the desktop, and the screen freezes and turns. I try the ages old method of pressing every single modifier key a couple times, then start typing again. Lo and behold, problem's fixed. So I call her over, show her which keys to press and get loose whenever the problem starts again, and I'm on my way to get those images. I do the needfull and finally have the pictures as I need them. Then comes the big problem. I can't connect my phone to the PC cause there is no cable, no bluetooth, and the attendant sadly doesn't know the WiFi password, as the WPS is supposed to work (it doesn't). So I try to upload it to my dropbox and the rate is abyssmal: nearly an hour to upload about 1 minute of content (I converted each set to a small 20 fps video, total 6 sets). I'm looking at the screen, wondering what to do, when the light bulb turns on. I ask her: "Do you want the WiFi password?" She says the owner doesn't know it, so I tell her, that I'll exchange it to her for a bag of chips (sold there). She says to go for it. Now, some of you may know of the wonderful tool known as wirelesskeyview, and as I'd noticed the computers happened to be connected over WiFi and not cable, well, I quickly ran it and jotted down the password, connected my phone, shared the files over FTP, and promptly gave her the paper and told her to try it. She connected her phone, looked at me and said "it's not everyday that I get customers as interesting as you." And this, my dear readers, is the tale of how I got myself a free bag of Ruffles and an awesome ego boost while fixing a random estabilishment's PC. [link] [comments]  |
| The CAPS lock problem has been solved! Posted: 27 Aug 2018 01:27 PM PDT A while ago I posted a story that involved many emails with CAPS LOCK stuck on. As it turns out...there was a reason for this. Someone on the exchange team was recently let go. As a going away present he left some script on the servers to automatically change all emails coming into team boxes to be all uppercase. The helpdesk sent out a notice this morning:
In other news the exchange team modified the script and kept it. Now all emails that are more than 50% uppercase are all swapped to lowercase automatically. No more yelling emails hurray! [link] [comments]  |
| The Great DHCP Catastrophe of 2018 Posted: 27 Aug 2018 10:29 AM PDT I'm an IT in the military and this particular issue takes place while out to sea. We had been having some issues tracking down assets that people had been moving around the ship. So someone would walk into a room, see a computer and decide that it would look better in their work space. This is obviously a hassle, because we have to keep very strict documentation of where things are installed throughout the ship. While out to sea we work 12 hour shifts of basically Help Desk. Answer a phone and ask "Have you tired turning it off and on again?". Repeat. I get up one morning and feel incredibly not ready for the day. Once in my shop, one of my fellow IT's comes up to me and begins explaining that he found a better way of finding these moved computers. Most of what he says kind of goes in one ear and out the other. I sit my desk and get start going through my emails. The phone rings suddenly and I mentally prepare myself for whatever it could be.
Now I could walk them through describing the problem to me, but because I'm such a small ship I could just walk over there in that time. I arrive on the scene and immediately I realize the issue. The log on server could not be reached Cool. I crawl under the desk and see that the Ethernet cable is still plugged in. Hmm, alright lets check out some other stuff. I boot into the BIOS and check to see if the computer sees a connection. And it does... Great. I log on to the machine with my admin rights and see that the computer has no IP. Weird. The adaptor settings are for DHCP. Maybe there is an issue there? I try to explain to the user that the next steps for me fixing it have to be done in my shop and that I would be right back. Once back in my shop, all hell has broken loose. Everyone is running around and scrambling to get our computers fixed. Turns out while I was troubleshooting that one machine, a large majority of computers on the network started showing the same symptoms. I suggest assigning a static IP on a test computer to see if that fixes the issue. Sure enough the computer jumps back on the domain no problem... I immediately use the computer to remote into my DHCP server and start digging through event viewer and logs. There is nothing to suggest that there is an issue here. I start going through updates and looking up KB to see if one of these updates broke my server. I spent the next 6 hours trying everything. In the meantime we have to go to each computer that is having an issue and assigning a static IP. The next day, we release an email to everyone saying that computers are dropping off the network likes flies, and if you have an issue call the IT's so can document and fix the issue. We pass an announcement over the 1MC (Like a PA system for the ship) describing the symptoms and to call us if you have issues. I'm researching like crazy, googling everything I can think of to find an answer. Around Hour 5 of Day 2 I call the Navy's Tech Support for Tech Support. The guy I'm talking to is trying to walk me through the basic troubleshooting steps I've already taken, I don't blame him. While we talk on the phone, I'm still digging through DHCP. And then I find it. There, in the filters I see MAC Address Whitelist and Blacklist... Someone had blacklisted two of the computers we had been trying to find... But they had also enabled whitelisting... And not put a single address in the list. I was shocked. Who did this? I inform the Tech Supports Tech Support that we can close the ticket and I had fixed the issue. I hang up and sit there for a second. What had that guy told me yesterday? I wait until the evening shift gets up to relieve us, and I ask him.
I explain what he did wrong and we fixed the issue. However, we now had to go back to every computer and set them back to pull IP's automatically... At least we found those two computers... TLDR; A fellow IT created a whitelist filter on DHCP without listing any MAC address. Killed whole network. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Aug 2018 04:49 AM PDT Hello there .o/ LTL FTP I suppose, unless comments count as posting (?) ... anyway this post might have a few formatting issues, and English isn't my native language: please forgive any weird grammatical thingies or let me know so I can try to fix them. I just saw this other tale by /u/Morgene and his title reminded me of one of the calls I had a few months ago. I'll be $Me, user will be $U. A bit of background info: We work on computers joined in a domain, and domain accounts are also used for various custom programs, both executables and web apps. The following is a paraphrase of the phone interaction we had. <insert standard greeting>
So I remote in and see the $random_app's login screen opened in $U's browser. $U starts typing her password and sure enough, at some point the password field on the log in form suddenly gets empty. I do notice however that the whole page has flickered once when that happened. Thus, I ask:
Cue me explaining to $U that F5 isn't a character but a function key, and while it does absolutely nothing on most program windows, it triggers a page refresh when in a web browser, which will usually empty all fields :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Aug 2018 01:23 PM PDT Inspired by this discussion over at /r/sysadmin, I thought I'd share my one and only experience doing private tech support at work. So, here comes. A member of the board of a company I worked at had a little whoopsie involving a personal USB drive with familiy photos on it. Basically, he accidentally formatted it - don't ask me how. So, his secretary called me one day, and asked whether I would take a request for a personal favor from her boss - which is not something you don't at least listen to, coming from a board member of a rather large company. Long story short, it was an easy thing - Recuva brought back all 800GB of his familiy photos. Stuff like photos from their son's first communion, old scanned documents from their ancestors, lots of family photos - basically, scans of their whole family history spanning over 100 years. How do I know what that data was? After the recovery, the (quite teary-eyed, I have to say) senior executive invited me for coffee in his office. He gave me a box of very, very good and also very, very expensive Spanish red wine, together with a nice thank-you-card signed by him and his wife, and told me that the disk was the only copy of those photos that still existed in their family after their house burned down a few months earlier. He also told me, that I probably saved his marriage by bringing back those pictures - I still don't know to this day whether he was joking or not :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Aug 2018 04:15 PM PDT LTL; FTP etc (Forgive formatting I'm on mobile) I work as a tier 1 phone monkey at an MSP that services numerous different types of businesses. This encounter cracked me up, so I wanted to share. Let's go with $me for me and $user for, uh, I'll let you puzzle that one out. $me: Thanks for calling <MSP> this is <myname>, how can I help you? $user: My outlook is being very frustrating. Quick internal sigh $me: What seems to be the issue? $user: I've got a bunch of folders in Outlook with roughly a hundred sub folders to categorize them. Internal thinking oh shit she handles the accounting, please no $me: How about I remote in, and you give me more info while we're waiting for that? $user: Sure! (Sounding excited) When I pin the "big" folder to my favorites, nothing shows up in the folder. $me: In the favorites and the normal view? $user: Yeah, it's like it's all gone $me internally : please no oh no Remote session loads $me: Can you recreate the issue? $user does her thing, and I notice that when she pins the top level folder, it just collapses the sub folders into it. Outlook won't show the top level + subfolder, and the top folders didn't actually contain any emails, just hundreds of sub folders. $me: These are very organized, I like your style. $user: Thanks, I made the sorting rules myself! $me internally : oh god $me reopens the top level once it's been collapsed, "Are these the folders you're looking for?" $user: Oh, yeah! Come to think of it, I can just pin the sub folders as I need them! Thanks! click $me: Oh, okay then [link] [comments]  |
| "Can you help me find those workstations?" Posted: 27 Aug 2018 01:50 PM PDT So my dad works at a big international engineering project with hundreds of employees. Naturally, working with CAD, they need powerful workstations. So one day, $IT comes in to the office and asks:
Note that my dad is an engineer, not from IT. Now you may say, what's the problem, just check the inventory. Except the PC's don't have inventory numbers. Yes you heard that right, a multi billion euro project with hundreds of employees, hundreds of computers, doesn't give each device a unique identifier. Instead, they give each machine's network number a simple code (desktop or laptop)-username. So you guessed where this is going, when people quit, get a new machine etc. It's a giant mess. I may also note that those aren't some shitty high school laptops, but Dell T7000 series workstations with Intel Xeons and Nvidia Quadros. The number of "missing machines" has thus risen; from 17 last year, to 56 this year already. So a number of machines are probably stolen, others may just be laying around under some desk waiting to be found... TL;DR: multi billion euro project's tech support doesn't give Dell 7000 workstations inventory number, more and more computers missing. [link] [comments]  |
| Is there an ongoing protest against plugging a device into another USB port? Posted: 27 Aug 2018 05:50 PM PDT I assisted another customer who I thought would get a kick out of having the same name as me . I called him up and said, "Hello, this is ______ from **** support. I'm calling in regards to case ####." He tells me that his scanner isn't working and not taking the paper when he puts it in the tray. I also asked if he tried plugging the device into another system and he told me that plugging the device into another usb port won't work because he already tried it. I asked him again if he's using our software and even questioned whether or not he's using the WIA drivers because how else is he scanning? Our software works with the simplex and duplex button so...? He replies back that nothing works and it's faulty. I was a bit puzzled by his response because I ran through the process of "giving him the answer to his issue and hanging up" method of call center. So I remoted into the computer and he had Windows 10, right clicked on the windows icon and went to apps and features. I wanted to see if the software was there and it was, but when he would scan, it tells him that scanner isn't connected. I did notice that the scanner was there in both apps and device manager. I ran the removal tools for our software and it still didn't work. I finally went to modify his scanner download in apps and features, only to be greeted with a quick poof of the driver as soon as I clicked on it. He never had the driver downloaded after all. Whew ! This is the first job I got in the call center after being laid off as network administrator in May. The reason I'm in this call center is because I feel if I don't get this experience, I won't get the full IT career bojangles of the job. I'm also pursuing a degree still at a ripe age of 28. I'm almost there ! ** If you're wondering what scanner it is, it's a Xerox 3115 scanner without the docking station. ** [link] [comments]  |
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