Hotel Wi-Fi shenanigans part 3. Tech Support |
- Hotel Wi-Fi shenanigans part 3.
- Really? You expect me to follow a legally-required process? Seriously?
- Helping an old lady with her phone
- Doing I.T. for family is always fun
- We all love execs don't we?
- This Missing Contact is IMPORTANT
- Netnotworking: Realtime
| Hotel Wi-Fi shenanigans part 3. Posted: 25 Sep 2018 10:37 AM PDT Got a call last night from a woman asking if we could fix their network and internet. She had gotten a glowing referral from the person she and her husband had bought a hotel from. As soon as she said that my warning bells went off. I confirmed her address/hotel name and no surprises its the infamous hotel I just blacklisted. I explained a little bit of what had happened and she embarrassingly admitted that was her husband. Soon to be ex husband specifically, she apologized, offered to pay the last call out and also pay me again to fix the network. She promised he wouldn't be on site or need to be contacted on the phone and would pay the base call out fees in advance. Against my better judgement I went out this morning early to look at what happened. Before I started work I had the lady sign our paperwork, pay the last call out plus a retainer for the work she wanted us to do today. She asks me to tell her everything that happened in detail. After I was done she apologized again profusely and explained that her and her husband started a divorce in the middle of buying this hotel but it was too late to back out. He never really wanted to buy it and she was getting the hotel in the divorce. He was pissed he had to manage the hotel for a month and stopped paying bills as some sort of power play on finances. The old front desk manager quit and he never told her. So things kept getting worse and worse as the front desk manager was supposed to be running the day to day operations. They had already lost their biggest housing contract for the hotel and a good portion of the long time staff. So then I go look at what he had done. Nothing as bad as I might have expected. Everything was just unplugged so people would stop complaining about the internet not working. It was a simple matter of plugging everything in and testing connections. Then the lady got trained on the equipment along with the front desk person I worked with last time. She did tell me to call the police if he started harassing us again and that he wasn't supposed to be involved with the hotel at all ever again. So happy ending I suppose? The whole story feels a bit sadder with the full context. I hope she can turn things around. [link] [comments]  |
| Really? You expect me to follow a legally-required process? Seriously? Posted: 25 Sep 2018 06:59 PM PDT So we have this user for our corporate system; let's call him Mr. Joyboy. He got one of my helpline people up-in-arms today. Joyboy had called in because he got some drawings released, but he'd checked the wrong files in to the objects. These objects went through a review process, but the reviewers must be pretty crummy, since they let this error get by. So Joyboy wants our helpline to just put the files in. The key part is that Mr. Joyboy works for a government-regulated area of our business. There are federal laws which determine where reviews are required, for example. So my helpline person rightfully said, "No, you need to revise your objects and put the proper files in." This is what prompted Mr. Joyboy to respond, in e-mail, "Really?" To which my helpline person said he'd talk to his manager. Mr. Joyboy then copied my helpline person on an e-mail he sent to a number of his coworkers, saying he was going to have to make them go through the whole review process again because my person wasn't being helpful. This, understandably, upset my person. In discussion with my other helpline folks, mentioning "Mr. Joyboy" got an instant, "Oh, him!" reaction. Apparently, he has a habit of doing this sort of thing. His business area has superusers who can do what he asks...if they deem it acceptable under the rules dictated by federal law. We can't make that call. We told him to talk to those superusers. But it seems he wants to pester us and make us look like the bad people, for not letting him break the rules, after already failing to do his job. I'm waiting for him to pushback on the idea of talking to the superusers in his area, because I'll be more than happy to forward his actions to our internal auditors and his manager. [link] [comments]  |
| Helping an old lady with her phone Posted: 25 Sep 2018 10:22 PM PDT So my grandma enjoys having coffee and talks with some of the other older women from my town and the other day she was having a coffee with this German lady from church. Well the German lady was having problems with her phone (she couldn't call or text anyone, the service said emergency calls only), so my Grandma, who views me as some sort of tech wizard because I can connect her phone to the tv, said that she would bring the phone home to me and that I would try fix it. I get home from school that night and my grandma asks me to have a look at it, so I decided I would just pull the SIM card out and then put it back in... and what would you know, it started working fine, but I was sort of frustrated as I was tired and had a big assignment due the next day and wondered why someone else couldn't have done it, but that was the last that I thought of it. Then the next day when I get home from school, my grandma tells me that she took the phone back to the German lady and that she was really appreciative and then she points to the kitchen bench where there is a nice chocolate cake sitting there. Apparently she had thought I had done the greatest thing in all the world and it made me so happy because I literally did the smallest thing but she thought was the greatest thing and how easy it was to make her happy. I just wanted to share that. Edit: double word [link] [comments]  |
| Doing I.T. for family is always fun Posted: 25 Sep 2018 11:08 PM PDT I'm sure many of you have been put in a similar situation. You know computers so your friends and family just offload all their problems onto you instead of figure out how to solve them themselves. It's a tale as old as time. Well, this short entry describes the pain I suffer from one particular member of my family.
My dad is a smart dude. He's an A.P. teacher so revered by his school district that, although he never would admit it, he's to go to guy for many students, teachers and administration members. Everyone who meets him is overwhelmed by his intelligence and worldliness. He's travelled the world, worked in many fields including television, hospital management or, of course, teaching.
Yet for all this he still doesn't know how to use his technology correctly.
He's not ancient, and he's not a stranger to technology either. Just at this moment he has an iMac, a Mac, a Windows 10 laptop, a Samsung tablet, an e-reader, an Apple TV and an iPhone. But the requests for help are pretry constant whenever I see him.
Thia particular story revolves around his iPhone, which he had just purchased at the time. It goes a little something like this:
Dad: I'm so sick of this new phone! These are supposed to be the best phones out there (lol) but I've only had the thing a few months and it's already slowing down and can't hold a charge. Me, knowing exactly what the problem is immediately because this happens all the time with every family member: Let me see.
Cue: examining phone to reveal evwry single app he owns in open, from banking to shopping to school (college courses in your 50s, yo. That teacher life) to work to, well, everything.
Me: Dad, show me how you close apps. Dad: Well, I press this button right here. [Presses the home button.] Me: Right. Well, you're not actually closing apps when you do that. You have to do this. [Shows him how] Your phone wasn't running slowly because there's something wrong. It's just that every app you've ever used was open. Dad: Oh. ... Dad: You should work for the Apple Store! They'll pay you to do stuff like this!
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme... [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Sep 2018 06:17 AM PDT Execs that don't care for technology are just the best aren't they? I work for a manufacturing company where I stand as their only form of IT support. I am the IT department for multiple sites. Today I had to deal with a couple execs, lets call them $exec1 and $exec2. I get a call at 9:00am this morning about a label printer not working at a different site to me. Fair enough, I start to pack my things to go over straight away (no label printer means orders can't go out on time). As I'm packing my stuff, $exec1 approaches and tells me that I need to come and help him set up his laptop in the boardroom right now. I tell him there are instructions in the room on how to do it and to call me if he gets stuck, as I have to go and deal with something at a different site. He straight up refuses and basically orders me to do it. I agree as I know it will only take a few seconds to plug in a cable and I can be on my way with little to no fuss. Fast forward a few hours later, both execs now in the meeting. I am on the phone to an MSP about fixing another printer that has stopped working. #ILovePrinters. Suddenly $exec2 storms into my office. "Slackmastergeneral97, i need your help, come quickly" I tell the MSP I'll have to call them back, drop everything and follow him into the kitchen. "We need to lay this food out in the boardroom for the visitors." Are you f$$$ing kidding me?! It wasn't even a lot of food, he could have easily done it himself. What a joke. I now have to go and call MSP again and sit through another 10 minutes of hold music because he couldn't be bothered to carry one extra tray of food. Fast forward another 20 minutes later, I am now on the phone with a user at the other end of the site, trying to walk them through a fix, when this time $exec1 storms into the office and says "One of the visitors can't connect their laptop to our screen, I've tried and it's not working, come and help now", again I drop everything, tell the user I'll call them back and go and see what I can do. $exec1 goes to the toilet on the way to the boardroom so I go in alone. There were two key things that I noticed were wrong with the set-up. First of all, the TV in the boardroom wasn't even switched on, how on earth they didn't figure that out before I don't know. Second of all, it looked like the $exec1 had been trying to plug the mini displayport cable into the usb port on the laptop, surely you should be able to match up the cable end with the socket right? Clearly not. I plugged it in and away they went. The meeting started at 10:30am and isn't scheduled to finish until 4pm. It's still only 1:30pm. Lovely. Of course, all of these issues are part and parcel of being an IT Technician, but it's really sucky that people won't try these things themselves or will abuse their power to get everyone to do simple things for them. It's just annoying that they crap themselves during meetings because they haven't prepared, and then blame you for their lack of preparedness. [link] [comments]  |
| This Missing Contact is IMPORTANT Posted: 25 Sep 2018 02:23 PM PDT We just had a client call in because he had deleted one of his Outlook contacts and wanted to know if we could recover it. We let them know that, since they don't have a granular Exchange backup, we COULD spin up a backup VM of the Exchange server, if there were resources on the host, and try to do some PowerShell magic to recover it. But, through some expert teching, my coworker found all the passwords in his Chrome profile. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Sep 2018 04:51 AM PDT This week started off really nice. Yesterday, after being in the office for less than 5 minutes my colleague informs me about a certain test we were running, which was just plain hilariouss. Hence why i'm sharing. Preface So, this one is about a test we're doing. As some of you might remember, i work as a network engineer in an automotive company. What we're doing at the location i work at is the development of driver assistance systems. This includes optical systems. Now, said test that is going on is basically the preparation for the new generation of these optical systems. We're doing hardware-in-the-loop simulation with them, which requires shoving video data into these things via ethernet. Now, the first and current generations were fine with 1Gbit eth. The next one, gen3, has enough resolution and framerate to require 10G, which in turn requires different switches than those we are currently using. So, we've bought a few switches to test, i dropped a quick config on them and sent them to the "customer". He wired everything up - Server<>Switch<>Camera - and started testing. The people involved need no introduction. "$Phrew" and "$Co"lleague. It was too early to be awake on a monday. 7AM is way too early on a monday. But alas, nothing could be done, $Phrew needed to be in office at 8, which he barely managed due to the traffic being slightly more arduous than usual. Barely through the door into the IT-Space, he gets waved over by $Co. Expecting the worst - bein having to deal with issues before having had a coffee - $Phrew sauntered over.
TL;DR: The NIC that was into threesomes with CPUs. Previous Stories: [link] [comments]  |
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