Have you tried turning it off and on again - how that saved the shift and cured the anger of my postman. Tech Support |
- Have you tried turning it off and on again - how that saved the shift and cured the anger of my postman.
- Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?, Part 4
- "I'm not receiving notifications for new emails!"
- Sometimes you just gotta stick up for yourself.
- User Error
| Posted: 26 Feb 2019 01:09 AM PST Hello friends, LTL;FTP yadda yadda. No actual professional Tech-Supporter here. I dont have much time, have to leave in 10 minutes. Just wanted to tell you guys that my postman tried to scan a little package for me - as clarification here the postmen bring letters and little packages per bike. He tried to scan my package and the camera didn't work. I had a look at the companies smartphone with the app. Since i knew this exact phone (it's the same as my old one), does a little snap noise if the camera gets activated, i listened to it trying it again but nothing happened. He has gone pissed already, calling a co-worker with his other phone, who doesn't know a solution too. (I knew he was a fresh guy, starting, since i know my postmen/women) I told him to restart it, he was curious why and i told him, well - that's what the people say to do first. He restarted it and it was working like a charm again. Thanks tfts :D Have a nice day! TL;DR: Postmans' phone camera didn't work to scan the code. Told him to restart it and worked like a charm. [link] [comments]  |
| Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?, Part 4 Posted: 25 Feb 2019 06:31 AM PST I've written emails to my boss (letting him know about the potential dumpster fire and Ian (to stop pouring gasoline in the dumpster unless he wants to light it from the inside). No response from either. Next morning, I shower, caffeinate, put on an unwrinkled suit and wait in the van near the entrance of the hotel. I can see Ian's be-sandwiched rental car from the rearview window. My phone rings. It's my supervisor at the consulting firm. They believe that I'm over-reacting. Somehow 'sent inappropriate email to client employee and cc'ing counsel' is 'inflammatory'. They don't want me to make anything worse by apologizing to Betsy or making Ian unhappy. I'm reminded that they hold Ian in high regards. I get a little heated with my supervisor and toss my phone into the passenger side footwell in anger. A man wearing a fleece jacket walks up to the driver's side window. Man:"When do you leave for the airport?" me:"What?" Man:"When. Can. You. Drive. Me. To. The. Airport?" me:"Why do you think I'm the shuttle driver?" Man:"You're not?" I'm about to yell at this man for being stupid, then realize that I'm wearing a suit and driving a passenger van, parked in front of a consultant kennel hotel. It's a safe assumption. me:"No. I've made some bad decisions in my life that led me here" The man walks back to the hotel, occasionally looking back at me with a puzzled look. I realize that I'm going to be late if I wait much longer, so I drive to INSCO's office in my church van. I've got to meet with the two people on their Systems team. I've got a proposed solution to the 'everybody is root' problem, but I need to build some grassroots support before I pitch management. I'm in a room with Javier and Samantha. Javier has that "I've been burned out in IT longer than you've been in IT look". Samantha is the 'program manager' for the web application. She nods meaningfully at technical questions, but doesn't volunteer much. I can't tell if she's doing this to not look dumb or she doesn't want to hear Javier's "Cloud's a fad" rant again. I learn more about INSCO's operations.
Usually when I see some really odd, bad design, I assume that someone thought it was a good reason (tm) to do it at the time and nobody's had the time/interest/need to fix it. To identify it, I adopt the voice my father used when he confronted me after I painted the Batman logo on the doors of his '68 Corvette. In white house paint. In my defense, I was 5 at the time. me:"Ok. I'd like to know why you have the one account for everyone's access" Javier:"We did it for performance reasons" me:"What sort of performance reasons did you have?" Javier:"We had an account rep who was complaining that the application was slow when they logged in. I figured that reducing the numbers of lookups to the account database could speed up the process" me:"And that worked?" Javier:"The user stopped complaining!" Javier slaps his knee and laughs. Samantha just stares ahead. me:"I just want to make sure I understand. The application uses Active Directory to handle authentication, so you have a maintained industry standard to work from and you aren't supporting a bunch of users? Javier:"Like I said, performance reasons" me:"Did you allocate any more resources to that system?" Javier (looking at me with contempt):"I put important systems on bare metal" me:"Ok. Is it on prem?" Javier:"Follow me" Samantha and I walk to a closet. There are a few cabinets here and a beige PC that I assume is for propping the door open or acting as a crash-cart. Javier points at the PC. I wiggle the mouse and see that this relic is running Windows Server 2003, which isn't EOL yet. A quick lookup shows that this would have been a low-end business PC some time in 2001. me:"You never felt the need to upgrade?" Javier:"Why, do we have to?" me:"Do you have to justify the expense?" Javier:"Of course" me:"Ok. HIPAA security rule. You have a requirement to follow the principle of least access, or in HIPAA speak, 'appropriate access'. Samantha:"How does that impact us?" me:"Fines, insurers may pull your rights to sell policies. That would have some impact on your bottom line" me, pointing at the racks:"Your customer facing infrastructure is all here? No failover?" Javier points at one rack:"The top half is the primary" (pointing at another other rack):"The failover is down there" me:"I see. Nothing at a co-lo?" Javier:"Nope" me:"I'm going to recommend that we spend a little money on hardware to support the load. How hard will it be to make the app support multiple users?" Javier:"I don't know. That's going to be hard" Samantha:"I think it's doable. Maybe some testing" me:"I'll write up a plan and a proposed engagement" Javier:"Are you going to make me look bad?" me:"The shared password isn't good, but we can fix it going forward" Javier:"I thought it made us safer- the fewer passwords, the lower the chance that someone can brute force one" me:"Huh. I've not heard that one before. You know it doesn't work that way, right?" Javier:"Well, when you've been doing this for a long time, you have to get creative" He does that knee slapping/nervous laugh thing. I hope they give Javier a nice severance when he goes to live on a farm. I take my leave and wander back to the conference room Ian and I have been using. Ian's not here, but his laptop is. I start writing up my notes from the previous conversation and continue on my report. No emails of consequence so I hope things aren't going to get stupid. Ian walks in and spends time with his laptop. I quickly glance at his screen. That's nice. He's ordering someone flowers. With his corporate card. [link] [comments]  |
| "I'm not receiving notifications for new emails!" Posted: 25 Feb 2019 11:47 AM PST Today I get a call from one of our employees, who will be E. I will be M, for Me. E: "I'm not receiving notifications for new emails. Every time I get an email people have to call me to tell me they sent me email or I never know it's there." M: "Ok, are you actually receiving the emails though?" E: "Yes, but it doesn't tell me I've received them until I check!" M: "...ok, let me come take a look." So I walk downstairs to check out what's going on. I get to the guy's desk: M: "Ok, let me see what's happening." E: "Look, see the email icon?" (we use Outlook here) M: "Yeah, I see it." Now at this point I'm already pretty sure where this is heading. But just to be sure, I let him continue. E: "It used to be when I got an email a little orange envelope would pop up on here. Now it doesn't!" I look again, just to confirm my suspicion, before telling him "Go ahead and open up your email, I want to try something." He opens his email, I send him an email from my phone. Lo and behold, the little orange envelope shows up on the Outlook icon. M: "You have to have Outlook open to receive email." E: "I never did before..." M: "Yes, you did. You just had Outlook minimized. You've been closing it instead, and that's why you're not getting email notifications... you don't receive any emails while Outlook is closed." E: "...are you sure?" M: "Yes, I'm sure." It's only Monday, people. Monday. This week is going to be fan-freaking-tastic. [link] [comments]  |
| Sometimes you just gotta stick up for yourself. Posted: 25 Feb 2019 11:50 AM PST I tried to post this the other day, but it got removed and I couldn't figure out why. I think I figured it out now though. About five years ago I got called into a meeting with the CEO, CFO, Products VP, and Marketing VP of the company I currently work for. I was working as a developer at the time (I'm the IT Director now). One of our SaaS offerings, a buggy mess of a thing that wasn't even supposed to have been released yet, was down, and the bosses were all trying to get me to fix it because my boss worked remotely and I was the only IT person actually in the office (even though I had never worked on the project before, it was developed by a third party and I'd never even seen the code). So I'm in this meeting with all the upper management peeps, and the Marketing VP who had been trying to get rid of me for years starts to blame me for everything I literally could not have had anything to do with. They didn't even know why the software was down, but somehow it was the fault of someone who'd never even touched it before. Now, I knew the problems they were having with this software, from an IT standpoint, because even though I hadn't worked on it I had been involved in the planning process a bit and had seen some of the emails flyin' around about it. It wasn't even finished yet. But our Marketing VP had somehow managed to convince the IT Director to let him grant full access to unreleased software to not just one, but four of our clients, so that they could do what he called "Live Production Testing". Only this guy didn't tell them they were guinea pigs for unreleased software, he told them it was fully released!!! (That in and of itself is a whole other mess... but long story short there was a lot of downright stupid shit going on within the company at that time. The Marketing VP, my boss, and the CEO were buds from another company where they'd worked together previously and the CEO let the Marketing VP get away with basically whatever he wanted. The IT Director never spoke up about a damn thing, either... not that it mattered anyway because any time he tried the CEO would shut him down.) So now I'm getting hammered on by everyone in the room to fix this thing immediately or I was gonna get fired. I was so frustrated and pissed off I said "Well, if certain people in management would stop giving clients access to beta software that doesn't even function a year before its intended release date, maybe we wouldn't have these kinds of problems!" I had basically done the verbal equivalent of depantsing the CEO and Marketing VP in the middle of a meeting with upper management. That room got awkward fast. And funny enough, not one of those people who were in that room with me are with the company anymore. Every last one of them got fired two years ago. Coincidentally, the year they were fired was the first time this company turned a profit in nine years. Who'd'a thunk it? And I did manage to fix the problem. It wasn't even a problem with the software. Someone had input invalid data and, since the software didn't have validation in place because the Marketing VP would not let IT code in form validation because that would make the site "too hard for clients to use", the invalid data was saved to the database and crashed the SQL queries required to retrieve data for the site's dashboard. A couple delete queries later and the software was running again. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Feb 2019 02:39 AM PST Hey there. This literally just happened. I'm currently managing a cute little database which the people in the building use. Some of them sit around me. It's basically an Access database, nothing fancy, but we have a custom "install" method so you get an easy link on your desktop. Sometimes I have to do live-maintenance which could lead to the database not working for a few minutes. I wasn't doing something like that when this user asked if I was, because he couldn't start the database tool. So I briefly panicked, closed the tool and started it up again, everything running smoothly. I walk over to his desk to look at what's happening when he said he accidentally deleted the link. He was also spamming the install exe (which doesn't work if it's already installed). I put the link back to his desktop and asked him to run it again, which he did. It didn't start. Then I realized that there's an Access symbol in the task bar. He never actually closed the tool! I'm not sure what happened there but that was some serious user error. [link] [comments]  |
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