Do Servers Need Electricity? Tech Support |
- Do Servers Need Electricity?
- Hoarders horde
- The Missing Intern
- Can you help me? Can I help me?
- "My keyboard is not working."
- The Fiber Cut
- Printer Logic
- Internet woes, soggy screens and
- Here's my law breaker story from my old Hell Desk
- Tales from the Scottish-Sounding Antivirus Company No. 3: Another tale of the Dark Avenger (or Correlation ≠ Causation)
- Then why does it have warranty?
- "I have a year to live and I'm not leaving until you get my contacts back!"
- The magic of the magic system request key
- The name's Potter, Harry Potter, and other ludicrous lies
- Vidcon is not working help!
| Posted: 27 Sep 2018 03:16 AM PDT A few weekends ago, there was an electrical fire in our office building, which caused a building-wide power outage from Saturday morning until Monday mid-day. No real harm to us - our servers all shut down as planned so no big deal. We all had to play solitaire the old fashioned-way. As many of our users are remote and tend to work over weekends, I sent an email out on Saturday morning, letting all users know that the servers were offline and would be back up on Monday. So, on Monday morning, just before 9am, I get a 'reply all' email from a remote user. I quote directly: 'For some reason I can't be able to connect to our server as of Sunday. Could it be to do with the power cut?' I did not answer that email. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Sep 2018 01:57 AM PDT Had some people come in with some computers they got from a relative passing away and the house being emptied they wanted all important files to be transferred to another drive and the subsequent computers wiped. They had all the documents and the passwords which apparently the former owner wrote down themselves. My boss gives me the go ahead and ask them if they need help bringing the multiple computers in. They say no so I sit at the front desk waiting for them to bring them in. The first alarm should have been that they were wrapped in big contractor trash bags and taped closed. I get one up to the counter and cut the bag open and I'm immediately greeted with a moldy stench of water damage and cigarettes. It was foul, like a smoker had an empty bottle of water they stored the cigarette butts in had spilled into the computer and they didn't bother cleaning it up. This is where they inform me the relative was a bit of a hoarder. I grit my teeth and open the other bag but instead of water and cancer smoke it's absolutely filthy and every crevice has a fine orange line of old garbage food waste in it. The bag has the most disgusting keyboard inside which I refused to touch and excuse myself while I get a fume mask and some thick gloves and begin getting to work. The man from the couple verbally disagrees with me donning protective gear and says I'm insulting them by saying it's so filthy I need a full mask to deal with it but I ignore them and get to work seeing if they even turn on witch surprises me because they both do. I had plastic sheets covering the work surface and they remained as much in their plastic bags as possible and I spent the rest of the day transferring everything to a drive and then removing all critical pieces to be destroyed. Everything else is tossed into 3 garbage bags layered together and the drive is given to the customers with the offer for the remainder of the parts which they declined. Dealing with gross equipment is a normal thing in the computer repair business but sometimes something comes through which honestly makes you consider quitting. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Sep 2018 03:09 PM PDT Do you like to read in Chronological order? Here is the Index
$Selben: Me! "Technical Team Lead" previously Tier II $Snickers: My cubicle mate, also a "Technical Team Lead." $BadIntern: Intern2, still in college - got in due to a mistake. Previously called $Baddi, but name changed for clarification.
Some of you may recognize parts of this tale, and that would be because it is an unplanned continuation of "The Goodi the Baddi and the Nauti." Additional information was recently provided while reminiscing with
$Snickers was checking his email and going through the normal office memos (meeting tomorrow, the ketchup needs to be refilled in the breakroom, a reminder to not take lunch meeting food with someone else's name on it, set up a conference room next week for a video conference, etc), when $BadIntern returned to their shared cubicle. Having been missing at least an hour, $BadIntern tried to creep in, but $Snickers could see his reflection on his monitor. As $Snickers turned in his chair towards him, $BadIntern quickly put his hands in his unprofessionally baggy pants pockets, acting like he'd been there the entire time. $Snickers patience had begun to severely wear thin several days ago, when $BadIntern was re-assigned to his cubicle after repeatedly telling a female co-worker how nice she smelled (and other uncomfortable things).
$BadIntern thunked down into his chair.
$Snickers returned to his work. Within a few seconds, $BadIntern was playing with a wireless mouse. With a crack and a pop, a piece of plastic mouse shrapnel hit $Snickers in the back of his head. He spun around.
$BadIntern had a look of confusion and shrugged. $Snickers rolled his eyes and glared.
This is where $Selben, temporarily in a cubicle nearby, observed $BadIntern choosing to do what any rational person would do in that situation, and threw the broken mouse over the cubicle wall. Fortunately, no other victims were hit. A few days later, $Snickers was working and heard $BadIntern plop down in the chair behind him several hours later than normal. His heightened sense of smell insisted he inspect the situation as opposed to ignoring $BadIntern as much as possible. He slowly turned to see $BadIntern attempting to secretly eat a hoagie—the hoagie was half hiding in his sleeve—he froze upon being spotted. $Snicker's stomach rumbled in response, but he ignored it and turned back to continue working. After a few minutes his senses were again hit with a similar, yet different overwhelming smell, and turned to see $BadIntern eating another hoagie, from his other shirt sleeve. $Snickers noted this one had bell peppers and onions and was definitely a different sandwich. Before he could begin his questioning, he was distracted by a call. By the time the call was over (a branch lost email access…their internet was down), $BadIntern had disappeared yet again, leaving $Snickers slightly confused and a bit suspicious.
The next day $Snickers was on a break and chatting with $Selben while $BadIntern had been shuffled off to "work" with $Selben. He was playing with some
$Snickers paused and looked around. $Selben clearly had work on his machine. He had a website minimized with information about a game, but not an actual game. $Selben explained you can browse the web during your breaks if it is in moderation and work safe. $BadIntern seemed a bit perplexed by this but slowly nodded after pondering it over for several moments.
Soon after, $Snickers was nominated to train the interns on a new process he had created. He was only able to locate two of them, with $BadIntern missing again. After a brief search he gave up. Rather than crowd everyone into his two-man cubicle, he opted to take the interns into a conference room. They entered the darkened room and flipped on the lights. With a loud bang, $BadIntern jerked up and hit his head on the table he had been, apparently, asleep under.
$BadIntern ran out of the room. $Snickers looked under the table and found a blanket, a cell phone and a small pile of crumbled sandwich wrappers. After a more careful inspection he saw different names on the wrappers and recognized many of them as people from different parts of the office. It was explained to $BadIntern that the "free sandwiches" that he had "found" were not, in fact, for him. He was reprimanded, and food for staff meetings seemed to go missing less often. $BadIntern was caught napping in the conference rooms several more times and was warned he would lose his internship if he kept it up. He seemed to stop but would still randomly disappear at times. A few weeks after his internship ended (which he did complete), a janitor made the discovery of "the nest" in a broom closet. He found the exact same blanket from the conference room and a large collection of snack wrappers. Fortunately, it didn't look like it had been used recently. $Selben looked over at $Snickers, who was starting to turn red with anger, when they heard the news.
[link] [comments]  |
| Can you help me? Can I help me? Posted: 27 Sep 2018 03:47 AM PDT User: Hello. I'm wondering if you can help me. My colleague is trying to run a report but it's not working. Me: Ok, did he say how the report isn't working? Is there an error message popping up? User: Oh he didn't actually, just said it's not working. Me: Have you tried running the report yourself? User: No actually. Me: Ok, I think that would be a good place to start, that way we should be able to see if it's a problem with his machine or perhaps something to do with the report itself. User: Oh well I haven't run it before. Me: That's ok, I can probably walk you through it. Do you know which report it is he's trying to run? User: No, I have no idea. Me: ...Ok, is your colleague there? Maybe what I can do is speak directly to him and see if I can work out what's going on with the report. User: Oh, well he's in a different branch. Me: Ok, do you know which branch it is? I can call directly if you give me his name. User: I didn't catch his name, sorry. I think it was the London branch but I'm not sure. So to recap, we've got an unknown person in an unknown location with an unknown problem, better phone support! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Sep 2018 06:24 AM PDT We have MANY computers at one of the facilities where I work. So I got this call, broken keyboard, it happens. I ask for the computer number as we have that many and I start walking towards the computer where the lady is seated. Let's say it is number 314 for geeky purposes. Something in the back of my mind knew there was something wrong with that computer, I had a feeling that I got an earlier call for it, but I couldnt recall it fully. Anyway, I pick up a new keyboard from storage just so I dont have to walk back and forth constantly and I head towards this lady, confident that I will fix this problem and be called "smart" for changing a keyboard. I arrive and suddenly I remember. Computer 314 had a broken ethernet cable which needed to be replaced, but we for some reason had none laying around (often times people "fix" stuff themselves, unaware that we like to keep track of our storage). So to clarify that it was broken it had a note on the keyboard saying "broken". This lady sat down there and thought only the keyboard was broken. Fine, not sure why you don't just pick another computer then, but okay. She actually grabbed the keyboard from computer 313 and moved it over to her computer. No unplugging the keyboard from 313 and plugging it into 314, no, she just moved the thing over. She just moved the thing over and expected it to work. Needless to say, this made my day. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Sep 2018 09:21 PM PDT I used to be a sysadmin and once worked at a web hosting company that operated two "datacenters" about 10 miles apart. We'll call them US1 and US2. I worked out of US2 which was an actual data center with raised floors, server racks, climate control, redundant power, the whole nine yards. The other "datacenter" US1 was actually just a room in an office building that happened to have servers in it. No special cooling, power, or anything else you'd expect. The hosting company website advertised that all of its datacenters were like US2 - modern state of the art facilities with multiple redundant systems in place in the event of failure. I walked into work one morning and noticed a lot of commotion. I didn't think much of it since it tended to be a hectic work environment. I sat down at an open workstation and entered my login credentials. I kept getting login errors. Me: Hey, I can't login to AD, is anything going on? Coworker: Oh, you didn't hear? A construction crew using a backhoe severed all of our fiber lines at US1. The entire datacenter is offline. Me: Holy shit! Coworker: Yeah, we are trying to figure out what to do. Looking around, it quickly became evident to me that management had no idea what to do. They simply had no contingency plan for this type of event. Meanwhile, calls from angry customers with services hosted at US1 were flooding the support center. "Our company email is down." "Our corporate site is down." "We were in the midst of a demo for a big prospect and our site is no longer accessible." "Your claims about redundant links are full of shit and we're going to sue you." Internally, a bunch of ideas were being tossed around since no one knew how long it would take for the connection to be restored. Due to the severity of the cut, the repair crews determined they couldn't repair the lines and had to run new ones. It was decided to move all the servers from US1 to US2. This was no small feat because in addition to physically moving them we also had to reassign IP addresses because the subnets were different. We were working through these migrations well into the evening when the connectivity was restored. Last I heard they were able to recoup some money from the company that was responsible for the fiber cut. It was a total shitshow, and I genuinely felt sorry for the affected customers that day. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Sep 2018 05:54 PM PDT So we had an end user call me with a printer problem:
So I add that printer to my computer and throw out a test page just to see if its working for me. I can ping that printer and reach the web interface just fine. The printer is one of those big copiers in a small room between offices over in our admin building. I get to the printer and tada my test page has printed successfully. I walk into her office and she says "i'm doing everything correctly" and hits print and immediately walks to the printer next door. As she walks out the printer on her desk spits out a document ontop of a stack of about 10 others. I checked her settings and she indeed was sending the document to her desk printer but then getting up before seeing where it actually went. I stopped her and told her its been printing out on her desk the entire time. She kind of laughed a bit and then got this look on her face:
sigh [link] [comments]  |
| Internet woes, soggy screens and Posted: 26 Sep 2018 10:06 PM PDT TLDR: User threw router out, then plugged the new router we sent into the wrong sockets, then reset the new router. Go grab a fresh coffee cause this is a long one. 1st line helldesk tech, 40 sites, 250 users, 40 servers and 2 IT, both 1st line, one with 2 years experience (me), the other 1 year. Did somebody say blind leading the blind. We recently started to bring an acquired company in line with our IT standards, many, many things went wrong with this process but I shall start with one of my favourites. We have owned this company for maybe 4 months and in that time we have slowly set about getting them on track with our software and practices. One of the last things we did was supply them with a new modem/router, this was a big deal for us as we would finally be able to get them linked back to our HQ through our VPNs the same way that every other branch in the company worked, file shares, get remote access for support, print servers, all the good stuff. This particular site was 350-400 miles away, so everything was being done remotely, i.e. Take pictures of the router and do a 20 page step by step on how to connect it up, on the phone telling them to unplug this cable from the old router and plug in the new one. We already had a picture of their old router, so it was even easier, unplug the cable from the red port on the old router and plug it into the yellow port on the new one. The kind of thing that if these people were in their own home would manage without breaking a mental sweat. We sent the router down to the site and asked them to give us a call if anything didn't make sense, anything didn't work properly, or even if they just wanted IT to 'hold their hand' through the process. We waited a week before we wondered if everything had gone smoothly or not, so we called them up and were promptly told that 'The Internet' wasn't working and hadn't been working for 2 days. I about fell off my chair when I heard this, my morning coffee now adorning my monitors, desk and most of my internal organs after the coughing fit died down. Turns out this site had 2 internet connections, one for PCs and the other for the IP phones. Shortly after getting pictures for our how-to guide, someone on site thought it was weird and untidy that they had 2 modems. So they unplugged one and threw it out, this shall be FU No.1. This was 'fine' as they moved the network cables to the other router, and everything worked, but they did say that it had been a bit slow. Turns out that they had tossed the 'PC' router and plugged everything into the 'phone' one. The 'PC' internet was 80mbps FTTC whilst the 'phone' one was only 4mbps ADSL. I sit back as the problem is now apparent, we provisioned the router for the 80mb connection, so the logins and other details were all wrong. My heart rate is now falling back down from 'dangerous' to 'fast'. I ask if they can move the cable over to the other ISP's port on the wall as this will get them onto the right connection and get them back up and running. And here everything starts working and Plutian goes and gets a fresh cup of coffee... The connection never came up, fantastic! We go through the basics: Is it turned on, is the power cable actually plugged in, do you see flashing lights on the front, is the internet cable plugged in properly? Ticks across the board, at this point I can add a line fault cherry to the top of my internet misery cake. Here is where FU No.3 happens. I'll get back to No.2 After what felt like a week but was only the next morning, we manage to get an engineer to go out to site to test the line. He confirms that the line is fine, and the site is back up and running. Great! Fantastic! Wait... the router isn't phoning home, the VPN isn't linked. I ping the site, Nothing. I get on the phone to the site and the conversation goes a little like this. Me: Hi, the engineer just called saying that you're up and running. User: Yeah the internet is working, but the phones aren't and we don't have access to the shared drives or anything, and the printer isn't working. Me: What did the engineer do? User: He put in the login stuff, and it worked straight away. Me: He put in the login stuff? What stuff? User: The internet ones. Me: What on the router? User: Yeah, the internet credential things My spidey sense are tingling now. Me: How did he get on to the router? I have an almighty sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. User: He reset it. This is where my second cup of coffee in as many days is nearly lost, and my spidey senses are going mental. All the little pieces fall into place. I ping the IP of the 'phone' connection:... success. Me: Let me call you back. This goes back to FU No.2. When the site was asked to swap the cable to the other socket, they got confused. For some unknown reason they moved the RJ11 from the new router back to the old router, which had no power and nothing else plugged into it. After that didn't work they unplugged the cable again and plugged it back into the new router, just in case. The engineer has then gone in, factory reset the router, and entered the 'correct' login details, which are for the 'phone' internet connection. The site specific internal IP's are gone, the printer and phones are on a site specific IP so they don't work, the VPN credentials had been wiped so it wasn't working, and the site were running on a 4mbps connection. It took 4 days of remote work to try and get them back up and running on the 80mb fibre line, which didn't work, followed by a site visit which involved an overnight stay and approximately 10 minutes to swap the cable to the correct port and restore the router from the backup we took just before sending it. It really goes to prove the saying " I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you." [link] [comments]  |
| Here's my law breaker story from my old Hell Desk Posted: 26 Sep 2018 07:46 AM PDT On a particularly slow news day at the previous Hybrid Hell Desk, my phone rang. It was Legal. That department was a nightmare. Their typical calls went like this...
That's when we just sent the ticket over to the Legal Dept's desk side support and went on with our day. Anyway, back to this corrupt lawyer. It was after hours and there were only me and my buddy there, and buddy was running a ticket on another floor somewhere, so it was only me on the phones and working the queue.
So, $Corruption sends over this email with a picture attached asking if I can remove those annoying words. I open it up and in huge letters, right across the middle of the picture are COPYRIGHT 2013 CONTACT PERSON FOR USAGE RIGHTSI reply to the email and the following is exchanged through email.
He then has the (Nerve? Stupidity?) to call back. He sounds surprised that he got me. I think he was hoping to talk someone else into it. We had the following conversation. Skipping the introductions
Click. EDIT: Grammar, b/c typing is hard. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Sep 2018 05:49 PM PDT [NOTE: TftS-SAVC #1 is located here, #2 is located here. AG] Dramatis Personae
PreludeThis is another call I took on the Dark Avenger virus which originated in Bulgaria, much like in the previous post. The The CallThis is another call I took back in 1989, when I was doing technical support for the Scottish-Sounding Antivirus Company out of The call from a customer who was also some place in the United States. The customer's computer was infected with a virus which we called the Dark Avenger virus (also called the Eddie virus by some other anti-virus programs). Like many computer viruses of that era, it was a parasitic file infector and it increased the size of infected files by 1,800 bytes, because that was how large its code was. One thing that was notable about this particular computer virus is that the author mentioned inside the virus code that it had been written in Sofia, Bulgaria. In those days, Internet access was uncommon and expensive, so that meant that viruses spread themselves slowly through methods such as file downloads from BBSes and mailed floppy disks. Getting a virus-infected program from half-way around the world was about as notable as getting a physical letter in the mail from there; it simply did not happen that often for most people. I told the customer what we knew about the virus, gave them instructions on how to download our software to clean things up from our BBS, and then call me back if there were any further questions or they needed help running the cleaner. About an hour later I got a call back from the customer. They had looked up Sofia, Bulgaria in an encyclopedia (no Wikipedia back then, and web sites were still a few years out) and found out that the city was 1,800 feet (550m) above sea level. They wanted to know if this was related to the increase in file size from the Dark Avenger virus code. I had to explain that, no, it was just a coincidence. And odd one, to be certain, but that's all it was. Moral of the storyCustomers may not always be technical, but they often have an internal consistency that is logical to them. In this case, the customer's desire to achieve some kind of understanding of a computer was strong enough that they did some research and found a pattern that matched a value. Unfortunately it was not a particularly useful piece of data, and it was just happenstance that the size of a computer virus and the altitude of the city in which it was written had the same numeric value. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky [link] [comments]  |
| Then why does it have warranty? Posted: 26 Sep 2018 07:59 AM PDT Client comes into my office with a Dell Lattitude in 2015. *awkward pause as I look down at the laptop and bag and start assessing of how to dispose of it* Me (looking up): "yes?" *slight pause* *recognising she's serious* Me: "ahhh, right so the way warranty works..." [link] [comments]  |
| "I have a year to live and I'm not leaving until you get my contacts back!" Posted: 26 Sep 2018 09:35 AM PDT Some background, I do tech support for a major cellphone company. We offer free troubleshooting so as you can imagine, we get some characters that come in. One day in particular, I start to help a gentleman who had gotten locked out of his phone that he had purchased the day before and needed help getting back into it. Our process for this to erase the phone and set it back up, since we have no way of overriding the password. I explain how the process works to him, and he asks me, "Will I get my contacts back?" And I respond, "Well sir, there's no guarantee but [cloud based server] typically syncs contacts automatically once you log into the phone. If it's not in the cloud, then they might be tied to an email account and if so, will come back once we log back in." This answer seems to satisfy him, and he makes a joke about starting fresh and not worrying about people calling him. While the erase runs, we chat about luxury brands and how he wishes he had bought stock before Coach acquired Kate Spade. He tells me about his business, what he does. We have good rapport going, or so I thought. The erase finishes, and we start to setup the phone. Immediately he has issues remembering his account password to see if he has a backup or anything saved to the cloud. After a fair bit of bitching, he remembers it and we get in. There is no backup. I explain that we need to setup the phone as new, and reiterate that his contacts might be still be recoverable. We proceed with setup, and when the phone gets to the home screen, I check for his contacts. They are not saved in the cloud. I make a reference to his previous joke about starting fresh, and his attitude does a 180. Immediately he starts cursing and talking about how it's our fault he lost his contacts and how we had BETTER get them back. I take that as a cue to step into the back hallway and let my manager know what's up in case it gets any more escalated. When we both came back out, he storms up to us and angrily says, "I have a year to live! I am not leaving here until you get my contacts back!" On that note, my manager sends me to my lunch break, which I was 30 minutes late to at this point. When I get back, she pulls me into the hallway and fills me in on what he did after I left. She had agreed to try accounts with him but informed him that if he doesn't know the passwords, there's nothing we could do. He calmed down a bit and tried some passwords with her but ultimately didn't know any, and eventually left, agreeing to try passwords at home. After walking away, he walked back up to my manager and said to her, "You know, you should be nicer to someone who's dying. It doesn't even seem like you care." About an hour later, he left a survey comment under the salesperson from the day prior in which he claimed that I was incompetent but trying, and my manager was cold but knowledgeable. Despite this, he called us both cancer to [company]. Later I find out that the salesperson actually personally knew this man and he was not, in fact, dying or sick at all. What an absolute loon. [link] [comments]  |
| The magic of the magic system request key Posted: 26 Sep 2018 08:12 PM PDT Preface. I recently introduced my friend to the Linux Operating system. Semantics ensued as he was new to the penguin. He embraced it with wide open arms. But there were some cases where a little more research could've been done. This is one of those stories. Not really a funny story but i felt like i should share. $Me = 'Yes i am me' It's about 4AM, i tend to stay up really late. and i get a text. >$friend: hey man, i was using WINE and my KB/M is locked up I later linked him to a wikipedia article showing the entire list of the sysreq keys. Edit: I forgot to include the article! here it is Super useful imo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key [link] [comments]  |
| The name's Potter, Harry Potter, and other ludicrous lies Posted: 27 Sep 2018 05:12 AM PDT Another tale from my days working for $GiantSupermarketChain on their helpdesk. Your cast of characters: $Miscreancy: A dashing ne'er-do-well, now in $sysadmin team for the company after a year or so on the helpdesk. Still had to answer the phones though... $Hagrid: My boss on this team - friendly, approachable and very much had my back at any given point, as you'll see later on. $Dumbledore: My whole department's boss. Widely respected. Slightly feared. Extremely fierce in defence of his employees. $GodricGryffindor: Director for the area of the business I worked for. Didn't know the guy but he turned out to be pretty solid on this occasion. $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: Worked for $Contractor who helped service a particular type of machine over in another city. Dealt with users directly, but had 0 ability to access any of the admin infrastructure, which meant me getting involved for account issues. Author's note: $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed will, in fact, be named later, but the name he provided I have switched out for a different one, just to ensure anonymity as best as possible. I promise this note will make more sense later - and the name he provided was every bit as ridiculous as the one below! The tale begins! So this was while I was manning the help desk for $GiantSupermarketChain - now moved into more of a 1st line Sysadmin role, provisioning accounts, fulfilling access requests, groups and suchlike. It was a great job but my gosh the workload was hectic, and I could find myself smashing out 2-300 requests in an 8 hour shift. Requests ranged from the simple, 30 second script run type to the full-on, it takes half an hour type. And those were just the ones coming in via email, the phone calls were, invariably, worse, if it wasn't a simple issue. *ringeth the phone* $Miscreancy: Hi, you're through to $Miscreancy in $Sysadmin team at $GiantSupermarketChain - how can I help? $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: Hello, I'm calling from $contractor - I have a user here with some account issues. $Miscreancy: Okay - can you describe some of the issues for me? $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed then walks through some issues logging into a machine with $fruitOS. I know right off the bat what the issue is, which is that they need to log into a machine with $SeeThroughOS first before being able to log into $fruitOS. $Miscreancy: Okay, so the issue is that the user needs to log into a $SeeThroughOS machine and do an initial setup before $fruitOS will work. $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: *doesn't pause to ask the user if they've done this* The user has already done this $Miscreancy: Are you sure? $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: *still doesn't ask* Yeah, definitely. $Miscreancy: Okay... I'm going to check the data in $CommonDirectoryService and just check the relevant flags show that's the case. Just hold on for two minutes for me. $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: *spoken away from the phone, clearly under the impression I can't hear him and directed at the user he's helping* I'm sorry this is taking so long, the person at the other end of the phone is absolutely useless. $Miscreancy: ... *ahem* you do know I can hear you, don't you? A panicked silence breaks out on the other end of the phone. I'm running through $CommonDirectoryService checking stuff and sure enough, the configuration of the user profile shows first login hasn't been completed, so $fruitOS has no chance of working yet. $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: I thought I was on hold? Anyway, I'm sorry if I've offended you, but you're not really helping, you're making me wait while you check things unnecessarily when you should be doing your job and getting the user working, which is what I'm trying to do. $Miscreancy: Did you actually ask the user if they'd completed first login into $SeeThroughOS? $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: It doesn't matter whether they have or not, that question is pointless. $Miscreancy: And I'm telling you that the only way to get $fruitOS working is to hand the user a spare $SeeThroughOS machine, have them complete first login on that, and then restart the $fruitOS machine and try again. You have no business talking to me or about me that way, especially not to a user. What's your name? $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: Errrrrr.... Harry. $Miscreany: Harry what? $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: Harry Potter. A beat of silence passes. I know he's just lied to me. He knows I know he's just lied to me. The question is, will he get away with it? $Miscreancy: Alright... Harry. Like I said, follow those steps with a $SeeThroughOS machine and your user will be up and running within 5 minutes. Anything else? $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed: ... No. $Miscreancy: Okay. Have a good day. *end call* So I'm in two minds about what to do here. I could shrug and pass it off as an idiot abroad, which is what I would ordinarily do. On the phones people are rude, these things happen, that's... not okay but it happens and most of the time I wouldn't raise a fuss, I'd just crack on with my day, especially as I was in the right. But giving a fake name is an extra layer of aggravation that has really naffed me off, and the fact that he directed the comments at the user I was trying to help also didn't help. So, knowing that the call recording would show all of this, I pinged an email to $Hagrid:
And I was genuinely not expecting what happened next. I'll spare you the interminable email chains that ensued, but here's a rough flow: > $Hagrid reads mail, listens to recording, and gets absolutely fuming. $Hagrid then emails me back telling me that he's absolutely fuming, and is going to pass the recording on to his boss $Dumbledore to see if anything can be done. > $Dumbledore gets the recording and the email, listens to it and is also absolutely fuming. He emails $Hagrid and I telling us that what happened was absolutely unacceptable, especially from a contractor, and that he would be passing it on to $GodricGryffindor to pass on to $Contractor. > $GodricGryffindor gets the recording, listens to it, and emails me to apologise for the way that $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed behaved. He then passes this on to someone very high up in $Contractor and cc's me in. Eventually, one of $Contractor's guys get back to us and tell us that $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed has been terminated effective immediately - not because of what they said as much as for the fact that when confronted with it, they then lied about their identity, giving a ridiculous false name. Also because they were being given the correct information but decided that because it didn't match something they'd encountered before, it was clearly wrong. Particularly bad when this was $HeWhoMustNotBeNamed's first day working on behalf of $GiantSupermarketChain - amazing that this person thought in the couple of hours on this contract they'd sussed out how all of our systems worked and interacted. Tl;dr: those warning messages that tell you something's being recorded genuinely mean you're being recorded. Also don't give a fake name, it never works, and may get you fired. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Sep 2018 12:22 PM PDT So I do a lot of video conferencing but this time was funny. Had a new employee who wasn't familiar with our systems message a whole bunch of groups vidcon isn't working please help let's call her Jenny Me: Hey Jenny I got a message saying vid con was not working I'm calling you from a different unit and it seems to be working fine Jenny: I can't connect to Seattle Me: ok so do you happen to know the room I can call them for you Jenny: I don't know the room can you just connect it to Seattle? Me:.....I need to know what room you are trying to contact we have many vidcon units in Seattle unless you can get that information I can't help you connect to anyone Jenny: umm ok Like asking to call someone without knowing their number..... [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