Not my Job? Tech Support |
- Not my Job?
- The most memorable screaming match I ever walked into
- "But I'm not a Technician"
- DIY FruitPhone (aka If it sounds too good to be true...)
- The open war between Sec & IT
- The Copy/Paste Password one
- Look at me, you're the support now.
- Right in the SKUs
- We all have that one user!
- Flip phone Freakout
- Geography is Hard
- You need the internet to access the internet now?
| Posted: 02 Oct 2018 08:04 PM PDT Hi guys! This is a lil story that my professor shared that I thought should make it here. $Prof - Professor who at the time worked as Tech Support for $Company $EntitledLady - Employee who you will learn more about. A long long time ago $Prof worked in Tech Support for $Tech, $Prof received a ticket from $EntitledLady about her workstation not turning on. $EntitledLady worked at $Company who had a contract with $Tech for tech support. $Prof decided to start with his basic troubleshooting steps from his own experience and asked $EntitledLady to please check the cords from the workstation to the wall. "I don't know" was the response from her. $Prof reminded her that it was her responsibility to check to make sure her workstation was plugged in as $Tech was offsite. $EntitledLady relented and remarked that it was unplugged in. $Prof: Please plug the cord in. $EntitledLady: Not my job. $Prof: Please plug the cord into the wall so you can continue with your work. $EntitledLady: Its not my Job! I shouldn't have to do this, this is what you people are for! $Prof: You do know that under the contract between $tech and $Company that it is your job? $EntitledLady: I don't care. $Prof so you want me to send someone down and charge $company $$$ to plug you in? $EntitledLady: Yes! $Prof: Are you aware this call is being recorded? $EntitledLady: I don't care! $Prof: You are aware that sending a Tech will cost $Company $$$ as I previously stated $EntitledLady: I don't care, its not my money! $Prof ended up sending the call to his boss who sent the call to $EntitledLady's boss. And that is how $EntitledLady lost her job. TLDR: $EntitledLady should've just plugged in 1 cord. [link] [comments]  |
| The most memorable screaming match I ever walked into Posted: 02 Oct 2018 05:42 AM PDT Good morning TFTS! Today I bring you a tale from a different kind of tech support; The kind that AV techs get to provide. I work in hotel AV, providing support for projectors, microphones, lights, and at my property power services and also internet support as well. The location I work at is small to medium size, and usually is fairly quiet and sedate. That being said, sometimes I get some truly amazing stories worth telling, and this is one of them! For this show, the clients in question were putting on a dinner show. They had decided the company that I worked for was too expensive, and had outsourced large sections of their show to other companies. There were a large number of great things that happened that I was able to appreciate since mostly I was on the outside looking in, but i'm going to tell the best nugget to start. The scene is this; Both me and my coworker had stayed later than originally scheduled to make some more changes to their lighting scheme in the room, the one thing that they had originally ordered from us. While bent over running lines, a lady comes rushing into a nearby door calling out how she needed an AV tech right now. The sound of silence echoed back to her; Other than me and my intrepid coworker, there were 5 other techs from the company they had actually hired to run their show, but they were through with them already, and it was only the set day! Looking into my coworkers eyes, I could see the message he was trying to get across to me. Grumbling internally about being the only halfway gregarious tech in the room, I raised up and told the lady that i'd go with her. Passing from the room, she briefly told me that the attitude in the room was a little "tense" and to be prepared. I barely had time to raise an internal eyebrow before passing the threshold into hilarity. The actors in our play are as follows:
Now, throughout the day, i'd seen these two doing their bits. While I don't know them personally, I do know them a bit professionally. They are mercenary freelancers through and through. You pay them, they do the job up until they agreed to stay, then they leave. Anything else and you pay them to stay one moment more.
Stepping back outside hastily, I grab my coworker in the nearby room, and inform him that we are leaving. It's far easier for me to finish what we were doing in the morning at 6 AM than to hang around here a moment longer. As we are leaving, we walk past the previous room, where I hear $Angry explode that this one is blank too.
Several months later, I ran into that pair of freelancers again, and asked them what happened. After a few chuckles, they informed me that they had still not been paid that day as they had been originally agreed, so as insurance they had taken the SD card out of the camera as they left for the day, holding onto the footage as per their contract. Apparently it took threatening to delete the thing to get $Angry to pay up. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2018 07:05 AM PDT So this is a short post about an argument i've heard for many different things when requesting a User to perform an Action. Be it: The one argument that has always bugged me is. Like seriously it doesn't take a genius to unplug a USB cable. Buuuuut on the other hand I've had someone SOMEHOW manage to rip a VGA to DVI adapter in half, they even sent me pics via Email. Yet the one thing I will never forget was when I asked a User to press and hold the power button and the User then said she'd do it. About 30 seconds later I ask whether its powered off, no response. To this day the question how someone might mistake "Press and hold the power key" for "Yeah just unplug everything" haunts me. [link] [comments]  |
| DIY FruitPhone (aka If it sounds too good to be true...) Posted: 02 Oct 2018 08:47 AM PDT I just started officially working at a small sales/service shop. This tale comes from when i was as [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Oct 2018 02:24 AM PDT LTL, STP and still wrapping my head around what transpired today. This story's gonna be a long one, so strap in. Preface:
I work for a small company with about ~100 office workers and some people out in some remote locations around the city. The business rents out office-spaces, warehouses etc. so of course, we have a large amount of space that needs to be maintained. To do this, there is a surveillance system in place, that has about ~100 cameras spread out across the very large areas we manage. The problem with this is, that us in IT have no idea how the surveillance actually.. works..The contractor who put this system into place is a one-man company (first major red flag), and to make matters worse, has been ordered, signed, paid for and put into action completely around IT - meaning we have no idea how or why the security system (that still runs on our internal network) actually functions. This has been a back-and-forth cage-match between $lead and $sec for some time, because having a single-man-company $contractor putting into place a surveillance-system with no documentation or maintenance-plan, which has access to the company production-network is beyond idiotic. $lead has been trying to get $sec to see reason and get $contractor out of the company with his solution, because it doesn't abide by the guidelines and best-practices we get from $hostingcompany If you haven't already had your first, second and third mental flip-flop reading that, I'd suggest you spice up your coffee with whatever you have on-hand, because man, this is turning into a The actors in our short story will be as follows:
Be me, sitting at my desk, trying to figure out how to look busy with irrelevant spreadsheets and articles on my screens.
So all is well and good, until the next day where $sec catches wind, that $lead wanted me "in on the action" and became furious that he hadn't been involved in this. He swung by our office and got himself a
$sec storms off and slams the door behind him I call up $niceguy explaining that "I probably won't be coming with you today.."
To conclude our story - nothing's been resolved. There's chaos between the two departments and $lead is currently talking with some higher-ups explaining the sheer idiocy that transpired and how this system needs to be taken down immediately
TL;DR We have a rogue surveillance system, installed by a one-man contractor, that was greenlit and installed without consulting IT, and is hooked up to the production network without following the best-practices given to us by our hosting company.
..I return to my spreadsheets and articles on [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2018 12:09 PM PDT $me: I.T. Manager $user: new employee (a month already in) User moved from departments so she is in a new workstation. We use a website for clocking in / out. ( we all know the type ). User comes to me with an issue.
Users have no access to personal emails or phones due to nature of business.
Same day a bit later im looking at the workstation in front of her old station. User comes and sit behind me and shes talking to the guy next to her and im right in front of her. she was like:
copy password? wait are you trying to copy the ***** and paste it somewhere?
after $30 mins explain how a password work, she gave up on trying to copy and paste it. But im cool , cases like this i go to my happy place. [link] [comments]  |
| Look at me, you're the support now. Posted: 02 Oct 2018 07:11 AM PDT A few years back I worked at a third party tech support company, we had many clients with various needs. As a smaller company we all wore many hats to cover those needs. One of those hats I hated putting on was the "support our third party software" hat. We were forced to troubleshoot anything from Point of Sale systems to Accounting software. This definitely fell out of the scope of our contract but clients always used it as leverage to stop using our services. This particular tale involves one such client who was having trouble with their Quickbooks. I tried to explain we setup the machines, install the program, load the database, and setup the backups on it, but any sort of issue they are having with it's functionality needed to be handled through the Quickbooks support which they pay an additional fee for (Well, they should, we tell them this, but no clients ever do because 'we're their support'). After a short call with my manager, I'm the Quickbooks support now. $dom = me $CU = confused user $dom - OK, looks like I've got through the error you were seeing. Can you finish payroll now? $CU - No I can't, I still need to put in the tax rate. $dom - Ok then. Go ahead and do that and I'll wait to make sure you can complete the task. $CU - Well, how do I do it? $dom - Do what? $CU - How do I add in the tax? $dom- ... Uhh, I don't know? I am not familiar with this program. $CU - How do you not know?! $dom - I am not Quickbooks tech support, I'm your computer tech support. I've never used Quickbooks before. $CU - I need to get payroll out today! I'm already behind! People need to get paid! How can you expect me to... As they rant I look up a video on how to do tax rates in Quickbooks. $dom- OK, looks like you can add tax this way, but I'm not sure it's entirely correct because, again, I am not with Quickbooks. $CU - Oh, that looks right. What's the tax rate? $dom - ...What? $CU - What's the income tax rate I use? After explaining, for a third time, that I am not with Quickbooks, nor an accountant, they finally accepted that I could no longer help them. I never knew if they got payroll going, but they are still in business so I assume they figured it out. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2018 03:40 PM PDT So, for at least 1.5 years now I have been stuck in a "do as your told" support position; though my responsibilities are of the "what do we do about this". In other words, people who don't know are planning/managing and I am the one that does know with limited control. The most recent adventure is the company product list. We have never had a totally in sync product list as long as I have been here. The product list in question contains roughly 150 products (including variants) and appears in the company's instance of Quickbooks, Salesforce, and a pricing document. Each product, most importantly, is given a name and SKU for identification purposes. Avoiding additional painful details, I complained about the desynced product lists screwing with data entry and automation for at least 6 months before the owner decided it an important enough project to dedicate the time necessary to fixing our products. I'd opt for it to have been sooner but, if you're on this subreddit, you know how that went. So me and our accounts payable person team up and provide him a list of products that need reviewed for keepers and goners; as well as any duplicates we may not have had the product knowledge to identify. You'd think that he'd take this list, vet this list, and return the revised list to the project team so that all the pieces are updated in sync and we get out of the data mess that is our product list.... hahahahno Instead, he went into Salesforce, revised the products in Salesforce manually by "removing duplicates and unused products" then called it done. There was, apparently, some sort of 3rd party automation that was to update Quickbooks products based on his changes. Even if that had gone as planned, it certainly would not have been enough to complete the correction of our product list. Rest assured, the automation failed to fire entirely. What's that leave us? After 3 months I have a list of products in SF that is the "new" list (but STILL contains duplicates); an unrefined product list in QB; names and SKUs largely are still mismatched; huge gaps in product numbering (not a big deal but still); and no pricing sheet whatsoever. What's better, I was not made aware that he had done really anything until this past week when I had a totally unrelated project prompt the question for a status update (over 1 month since we provided him the list to vet). Only then did he say it was "basically done and ready to use in SF". I wonder if their out of state leadership meeting will contain discussions on how to sort out our products....I doubt it. I'll just have to provide a well documented complaint to my boss, have him go to bat yet again to try and get something done; and we might see this fixed in time for the new year I am hoping. Life's good man. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2018 05:51 AM PDT Well she struck again yesterday, this will be quick and dirty. I am the sole IT support for 3 sites and about 120 people. I use a management system that allows me to administrate almost anything from my desk. I get a call yesterday: User: My outlook is really small, can you take a look. Me: Sure, I will remote in, in just a second. I take a look and she is complaining that the fonts are to small, I make the adjustments and she is happy. User: Can you fix my monitors now? Me: What is wrong with your monitors? (She has a laptop with a monitor so she can have dual screen) User: The monitor is cut off Me: (I Check the Display settings and it doesn't show the monitor connected) Do you have all of the cables plugged in? User: Yes, can't you see them all plugged in? They are right there. This is the point where I just want to bang my head on the desk. I had 8 calls from her yesterday! I will ALWAYS have a job! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2018 12:19 PM PDT So, let me start this off with the fact that I don't actually work tech support, but I'm not a mindless user either. I've removed some pretty scary and well entrenched viruses before, built computers for profit, dabbed in some light coding back in the day. I'm very far from elite, but I handle myself well enough that most of my coworkers come to me with their tech problems. On to the story. An older coworker came to me with a broken flip phone asking if I could fix it or at the very least retrieve his photos and contacts. Said that Verizon said they couldn't do it. I automatically assumed that they were just being lazy and didn't feel lije figuring it out. He hands me the phone... and then the screen. Joy, broken screen on an old non smart flip phone. I plug it up to the computer and instead of finding the phones files, it pops up with an imagebto install lg software. Ok, whatever, I'll play your game lg. Install the software and... doesn't recognize the phone. Find the manual online, apparently the phone needs to be in USB storage mode. Alright, lets see if I can find enough menu layouts to do this without a working screen. Success... I think??? Software still says not connected. Download lg bridge and lg pc suite. Can't get anything to connect and read the phone files. First desk slam of the day. Apparently coworker liked the phone and replaced it with same model. Ok, now I have a full working layout of the menu system. I can hit the same button on both phones and read the menu on the new one. This opens things up. First thing I do is turn on full read mode under accessibility. This reads out the menus ti me and my options. Second, I connect the new phone to my computer and try all 3 programs, same thing. Apparently, after some Google fu, usb storage mode only allows you to view what's on the sd card. Ok, find a 64 GB micro and slam it inside. The phone doesn't support it. I look around, everything I have is newer and larger. Second desk slam of the day. Plan 3, Bluetooth. I connect new phone to my personal and copy a photo while making notes. Disconnect, unpair, and redo with old phone. Success, I backed up one of his photos to my phone. There's an option to send multiple pics, even an option to select all. Perfect... until I get a message saying it can't do more then 100 photos at a time. Try it a couple more times, even contemplate taking 100 photos on new phone to see the exact message and see if there is a way around it. Third desk slam of the day. Find another coworker who has a 16 gig micro sd card. Backup all the data, slap it in new phone. Formats and all looks good. Slap sim card into old phone. Copy contents from old phone to card. Put inside new phone, copy contents from card to phone. Reformat card, put backed up data back on it, and give back to coworker 2. Finally, coworker 2 has their sd card back just as it was and coworker 1 has their new phone just like their old one was... sans broken screen. Every phone I've ever had let me access the phone files from my computer, even my old Nokia flip phones did. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2018 11:36 AM PDT Hi TFTS, First time Poster, Short time lurker. I wanted to share this tale about a previous colleague of mine. We were both working at a large multi-lingual call center when this story took place. The cast of this story: $CT = Clueless Tech, my colleague $AC = Angry Customer, working at an airport. The call goes something like this: $CT: Welcome to $Aircarrier Service Desk, how may I help you. $AC: I am having issues with Redacted $CT: Okay, where are you located? $AC: I am at XXX Airport $CT: Okay, where in XYZ Airport is the XXX Department? This goes on for a while, until finally, $CT has to reset the password for $AC $CT: Okay, so I have reset the password to XYZ10 (Yes, the same password as the city of the wrong airport) At this point, $AC completely losses his mind, and starts spewing a slur of profanities. Aftermath: Some of our other colleagues who had heard the call, printed the guy a map, marking both XYZ Airport, and XYZ Airport, XXX Department on it. TL;DR: Clueless tech pisses off customer by not knowing his local geography [link] [comments]  |
| You need the internet to access the internet now? Posted: 01 Oct 2018 11:24 PM PDT I recently joined a company as a sole IT guy where the main router was one of those generic ones you get from $MajorAusTelco when signing up to a home internet package, suffice to say it wasn't handling the load we were putting on it and had an up-time counted in minutes rather than days. Because of the excessive random dropouts, I thought it would be acceptable to do the replacement during office hours... A 5 minute swap can't be worse than 10 minutes of downtime 5 times a day due to a poor overloaded router. I sent out an email at the start of the day letting everyone know that at lunchtime I'll be doing the swap and that the internet will be offline for 5-10 minutes, and everyone seemed happy. Shortly before the swap, I did a quick walkaround the office (it's a small building) and confirmed with them that I wasn't going to interrupt anything important, with no complaints. As I am unplugging the old router I hear a voice from around the corner...
They return 20 seconds later...
The user then raised the alarm for every piece of SaaS that we use. This was kinda puzzling to me because I expected them to be used to no internet. Later I discovered through one of the more tech-savvy staff members that the prior IT guy would simply pull the "It's their end" card whenever the internet would drop, rather than having to actually do some work and replace the unit. *Edit: Surface != Suffice [link] [comments]  |
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