The box we all have Tech Support |
| Posted: 23 Sep 2018 03:53 PM PDT As a bit of a back story I have "the box", you know the one. We all have it, a box full of cords and adapters that we Well my mother hates cords and cables because they are messy. For the longest time "the box" was her nemesis. She hated the box and the box hated her. About 4 years ago she snuck the box into the pile of stuff for a garage sale and sold it. The entire box gone in seconds. After the garage sale is done and I am back from helping a friend set up some furniture in their new apartment she hands me $10 and says the box of cords sold. I was very confused and then run to my room to find my box missing. Needless to say I was annoyed. Little did we know the box would have its revenge. About a week later she comes to me asking if I had a USB to micro USB cable for her phone. I reply very calmly with a smile, "let me check my box". She then frowns and says oh. The next day she asks if I had a power cable for her monitor that she decided she wanted to use after letting it sit for 4 months. I reply again with "let me check my box", this struck home my point I guess because she has been an avid defender of the new box ever since. This brings us to last week. My grandmother finds one of my boxes (yes I have multiple now) in her garage and sets it with garage sale stuff. (My family lived with my grandparents and my mother still does as they arent as spry as they used to be). I was outside moving stuff into position for the sale when I hear my grandma and mother arguing quite loudly. I wander in and find the two standing over a box yelling at eachother. Mother: DONT YOU DARE SELL THAT BOX IT IS IMPORTANT Grandma: ITS A BOX FULL OF CABLES AND ITS TAKING UP SPACE Treedon: I could just take the box over to my place Grandma: FINE Grandma then stormed out of the room and I stuck the box over in a corner by the stuff I was taking. A few days later my grandma calls asking if I had a power cable for her laptop since hers broke. Lo and behold there was one in the box. TL:DR Dont mess with "The Box" it will get revenge [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Sep 2018 06:51 AM PDT Working in the IT department of a University can be very ... special on some days. Normally I do infrastructure stuff, server administration, etc., the equivalent title would be "Senior Systems Engineer", but in times of need I also man the 1st level helpdesk. In comes an eMail: Mail from student:
Answer:
Mail from student:
Answer:
Mail from student:
Answer:
Mail from student:
I shrug internally and close the ticket. Not my problem anymore. But deep inside I know what will happen ... Mail from student to boss:
Mail from boss to me:
I merge the new ticket to the old ticket, and start over again: Answer to student:
Mail from student:
(Funny how the google search bubble works. When I typed hin her/his name into Google, I didn't get his old homepage on the first two pages, for him/her it seemingly shows up as first hit.) Answer:
Mail from student:
Answer:
Mail from student:
Answer:
I move the ticket to the queue of our legal department and hope to be finally done with this. Thankfully, this time this was the case. The last thing I heard was that the problem solved itself after another 3 weeks because Google removed here homepage from their index. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Sep 2018 01:09 PM PDT Working in the IT department of a University can be very ... special. First a short description about how the onboarding of new students here works. After the successful immatriculation the student-to-be is sent his documents, containing a map of the campus, an initial personalized timetable for the first two weeks of orientation, his student ID-card (which doubles as prepaid payment card) and a letter with his IT userid and a password to activate the account. The letter contains an URL where you put in your userid, the password in the letter, have to acknowledge some legelese stuff and set yourself a new password, to be entered twice (as is usual). Not much more complicated than signing up for a GMail or Outlook account, even simpler because the userid is pregenerated for you. With this explanation out of the way, let's start the story of the Raging Hover Mom: Some time before the start of the semester, the student-run helpdesk is unstaffed at the moment, because of semester break (those lucky bastards), so yours truly and another collegue are manning the front lines of the 1st Level Helpdesk. In storms RHM:
(No, mother, your son is of age, you don't have any more rights than I do.)
(What? Why not bring him with you to begin with?) 10 Minutes pass and RHM and her Very Shy Son enter.
VSS sheepishly hands me the documents, I verify he is he (and I see they are from half the Republik away and I wonder if his mother is going to live with him here) and the state the account is in. It is still inactive and there haven't been any attempts to activate it.
VSS tries to stand up, his mother motions him down again and gets up herself. (Oh boy, this should be a grown-up man, starting to study at a university.) We go to the kiosk system and I watch her opening the activation website and putting in a different username than the one on the letter.
RHM gestures her son to get up and get on, does a 180 and huffs out of the building. VSS does a standing sprint start out of the chair and leaves trailing his mother, but not before flashing me a pained and forced smile and a shrug. oweh needs to sit down and take a deeeeep sip of his now luke-warm coffee. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Sep 2018 10:21 AM PDT Working in the IT department of a University can be very ... special. These are the chronicles of the endless VM, unfolding over several years, reconstructed from the archives of the holy ticket system: March 2008:
I provision the VM from a template and send a mail back to $HoDept and $person1:
February 2009:
(Looking at the VM, is was never booted and is still in its initial state.)
Oktober 2010:
(This time I needed to jog my memory by looking at the ticket system what this was all about. The 2nd VM was also never booted and is also still in its initial state.)
(Oh boy ... I remove $person1 and add $person2 to the permissions.)
April 2012:
(You guessed it, the VM was never even powered on and is still in its initial state. Was zur Hölle?)
(It was later discovered that $person2 ran a mockup of the project on their laptop which had died during their vacation. But nobody could have ever used the software for anything serious because it was more shell than anything usable. So everyone must have just logged in, seen the mockup dashboard and called it a day, without realizing there wasn't anything else there.) June 2015:
March 2018: In the light of Spectre, Meltdown and whatnot, we do a security analysis of all VMs, mailing all admins which may have vulnerable systems on their hand. The VM for the project of $dept lights up like a Christmas tree. At least it seems to have been booted, has a correctly configured IP and is online.
(I sigh heavily internally.)
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