Where did Dave go? Tech Support |
- Where did Dave go?
- The easiest "Emergency" I've ever had
- Infinite Powaaaa..... not
- The Chronicles of IT-Freely and a Bo$$ - part 3: Ethics and you - when the bo$$ asks you to delete emails from someone's mailbox without them know knowing
- I can do it myself!
- Oldie
- GPOs, perms, and file shares, oh my!
- I created this file! It's not a template!
| Posted: 30 Mar 2019 04:03 PM PDT About a decade ago, my ex-company outsourced all of its infrastructure to one of the big datacenter companies, so while we would still support our apps, the OS, hardware and networking are all supported by this other company. Most people in this story are great people, but you occasionally run into an idiot, and we will call this one Dave and he worked in the datacenter. I supported an app that used SQL Server clusters which were really hard to support - so many things could go wrong with them, and they were really hard to diagnose. We were on first names basis with the crew in the DC because we had support bridges going all the time. When Dave was on the bridge, he'd be angry, indignant, overly confident and eventually refuse to troubleshoot. Keep in mind that a good 90% of the failures were things that he'd have to fix, but it would take hours to convince him that our app hadn't caused it. One day, our cluster had been offline for something like 48 hours straight, and everyone is losing their minds. Dave shows up... Dave: I just heard that Microsoft is trying to blame the NIC, but I'm telling you that it's absolutely a bug in their product and I'm not going to troubleshoot the NIC or any other hardware. Me: Its been running just fine for three years. The NIC is throwing errors and the network guys agree it's likely the cause. Can you try swapping it out? We've already gotten the swap approved and it's in your queue. Dave: No. Dave's boss is on the call, and probably his boss' boss too. Everyone is quiet, waiting to see what's going to happen. Dave: I need to check something. I will be back in 20 minutes. 45 minutes goes by and Dave calls back in from his cellphone. Dave: Sorry for the delay. My badge stopped working and I couldn't get back to my desk. Dave's Boss: My apologies everyone. We are going to close down this bridge and re-open a new one. Check your emails. <beep> We find out later that Dave had gone outside for a smoke break and they disabled his badge. He got a phone call after the bridge shutdown telling him he's fuckin fired. Probably the only person I know to get sacked during an incident bridge real-time. [link] [comments]  |
| The easiest "Emergency" I've ever had Posted: 30 Mar 2019 10:59 AM PDT TL:DR at the bottom. I'm retired but used to do tech support for a main frame billing program. Now I do PC tech support as a hobby. I have a dozen or so clients, some paying, some Pro Bono. This includes one small business. I've always avoided businesses because this is a hobby, not a job, but I was asked to do it as a favor to someone. I was over there recently checking on an issue and the machine that gets the most usage was just crawling. Click on something, sit back and wait. It was Windows 7 on an ancient piece of hardware so I suggested they upgrade. Windows 7 is reaching EOL so they'd get Windows 10 and a modern machine. A twofer. They took my advice and I spent some time moving all their files, reinstalling their programs and making it look as much like the old machine as possible. This included configuring a newer version of Outlook and moving over the PST files. I delivered it yesterday, confirmed everything was working, including the email. This morning the first thing in my inbox was from their secretary, "Help!! All of the email settings, addresses and important archived emails are gone! Can we recover them?" What the hell? I know it was working yesterday. So I went over there, sat down at the machine, with the secretary standing behind me, and clicked on the Outlook icon on the taskbar. It opens and everything is there. Secretary: Oh, it's that one (pointing to the Outlook icon)? Windows of course had installed, and put on the taskbar, it's "Mail" app. That's what she was opening. In her defense the new version of Outlook had a different icon than she was used to and as she moved the cursor along the taskbar she hit MS's app first, which says "Mail". TL:DR New machine, moved from Win 7 to 10, secretary panics because all her old emails are gone, can't get new ones, etc. She was opening MS's Mail app instead of the new version of Outlook, which had everything she thought was missing. "Oh, it's that icon?" [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2019 07:36 PM PDT Not on mobile this time, so yay formatting! Typing this up before the booze makes me forget. (Please make me forget) Background: $me - it's ya boi $grocery - big grocery chain, also has gas stations $emp - employee at $grocery gas station $grocery is our biggest client and probably makes up about 95% of our tickets So this story happened recently, I'm still the newest guy on the team and, as such, still do all the FNG type stuff. So I get a Sev1 page for a $Grocery Fuel Center that is down Ticket Reads that the site wouldn't come back up after a power outage (<--- See that dear reader? That is foreshadowing) Ticket also says that the UPS is beeping and they want me to go up and see if its the issue. Its worth noting that this is one our furthest sites, and is about an hour or so away, so a 6 hour time window to get it fixed is a bit of a pain. So I drive the hour or so out to this site, only to get stuck at a traffic light... That's not working. (Do you understand yet, fellow reader?) I make my way the short remaining distance to the fuel center (read: I took a wrong turn and had to backtrack several miles) Once there I knock on the window of the Fuel Center, only to be greeted with a voice yelling at me $Emp- WE ARE CLOSED! *points at sign* (Sign Reads: WE HAVE NO POWER! (You should have guessed that by this point)) $Me- I know, you called me out here? *presses badge against glass* $Emp- *Looks slightly embarrassed, but lets me in* $Emp- I don't know why they called you out here, the power is out ("they" is $Emp as he was the one whos name was on the ticket) $Me- (Internally: *annoyed* Duh) The Ticket says they thought it was a UPS issue $Emp- Yea well, the guy this morning was messing with that stuff over there, but it didn't work (The help desk was walking him through bypassing a UPS, again, trying to shift blame) $Me- *Looks over, sees a mess of cables where the UPS used to be* Okay, I'll plug it back in So I plug everything back in, reversing the half-done bypass. $Me- Alright should be good to go. $Emp- Sorry they called you out here for this. $Me- It's fine, not your fault (It was. I knew It was. He knew it was. He knew that I knew it was. But I will let him have this one.) $Me- *Leaves and closes ticket, being rather snippy* I just hope that my boss notices the ticket and marks it super billable (if that's not a thing it should be) EDIT: Typos [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2019 12:06 PM PDT By now, I had been in the role a while. Fantasy games were in season and folks in the office, like many places, had their teams and were forming their strategies and such. A couple of $users in the office had the same first name and bo$$ was wanting to send his strategy to his teammate who was also named $user. Unfortunately he sent it to the wrong $user, who said he promptly deleted the email out of fairness. Well, bo$$ didn't want to chance the email not being deleted. Nevermind the email could be printed, copied, forwarded by then anyways. So bo$$ comes to me, and quietly asks me use exchange to administratively delete the message from $user's mailbox. Red flags began to signal in my brain. I said, let me look into it, while trying to figure out how I was going to report this to HR. It may have been an email about a game, but if bo$$ is this casual about deleting it... It was all around unethical and didn't sit nicely with me. Well, he had already been dropping threats about my job (coming in part 4) and I kind of had bills and a family to support, so I figured for now, play dumb and then let my brains wrap itself around how to best handle this. I certainly was not going to comply and he obviously didn't want a paper trail or anything to possibly get him in trouble. So after he asked about the status a few times, I said I was working on it, but the lack of admin creds being on was thwarting my attempts, etc. Finally after an hour he said 'nevermind, I did it'. Well crap. I kept my mouth shut…for now. I would be documenting all this now. Regardless if I stayed or left, the company had the right to know to do whatever they felt was appropriate about the situation. Coming soon: Part 5: Yawning may offend others, and other pearls of wisdom. But first, part 4: Threats and you – when your bo$$ threatens your job because he didn't like your predecessor [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2019 05:57 PM PDT I've been working it IT for 6 years at a small company. We do small businesses (biggest is 4 locations now) and lots of home customers. This one is a church. Finished about a week ago. This guy bought a desktop from us for basic accounting, an i3 and nothing special. We tell him it's $150 for a full transfer in the shop or $230 for a full transfer and setup on site. That was 3 years ago. Last week he calls and needs help, long story short he blames us for it not working and we sort it out, with him realizing he declined setup. So he brings it in and we do the transfer, offer the setup, and he declines, saying he can set it up himself. He goes back and sets it up, then calls saying nothing works, he can't get his files. We tell him we can stop over at our regular rate or stay on the phone for about 60% of the rate. After a MESS of troubleshooting, including all cables plugged in, internet icon looks correct, says he can access the internet, but no network files or printers. Spend an hour. He finally agrees to us coming over because it's getting expensive. I stop over, Ethernet is unplugged. He liked about the icon being correct because he didn't understand, and thought edge opening saying no internet meant he had internet..... Sigh [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Mar 2019 12:23 AM PDT Back in the mid 90's I had a nice niche business installing and supporting accounting and sales software for small retail Oil and Heating companies. The back end was a solid database for the day called Alpha4. The first Oil company I worked with ran a serial link P2P network on (2)Magnavox 286 with 4 mbs onboard ram and no math coprocessor running DOS 5.0. They did backups on floppy and had to pay someone overtime to get it done each week. It also took about 45 minutes to compile their weekly sales report and about 3-4 hours to print it on greenbar. I upgraded them to 586 IBMs with 16 mbs ram running W95 and both PCs had cdrom drives. The older ones with volume and a headphone jack. (Which imo should have been a permanent feature). They were now on a 10/100 hub and I added a spooler to their old dot matrix printer with 256k ram which was max. The now had a print buffer. I had the entire DB imported into Microsoft Access and they now had a GUI that looked almost exactly like their old DOS screens except they could fill them out and tab through in seconds. The could back up to any page and correct something even after saving a mistake. This wasn't possible with the old alpha 4 system. You had to overwrite the whole record it was so crude. I met the two office ladies on the first Friday they were to use the new system. I set up a trident birds nest removable tape drive that did their backups for the whole year in 20 minutes versus one week taking 60 floppys and a Saturday afternoon. the first time their print job ran it compiled it in a matter of seconds and printed it all as fast as that old Panasonic could go. The only thing the two ladies said after I demo'd everything and showed them all the time they were now going to save was that it was cool to have cdrom drives in their computers. Edits: grammar and spelling [link] [comments]  |
| GPOs, perms, and file shares, oh my! Posted: 30 Mar 2019 04:59 AM PDT So this happened yesterday. Thursday night, in an effort to consolidate/fix/destroy our physical boxes and the fuck ups the previous IT team made so we can switch to our fresh new spick and span Nimbles we're getting rid of old ass-servers that have been around for far too long, bogging down the network and just causing us a headache. Our GPO is fucked, it's so bad, I don't know what monkey with a hammer created it but it makes no sense, full of "IF EXIST" and "SET TIME". What? That's what AD servers are for, Novell Netware set time automagically, WHAT YEAR IS THIS!?! Anyway, we transferred a physical to a virtual Thursday night. It SHOULD have went smoothly (Hint: It didn't). So Friday was filled with "I'm missing my X: drive!" Despite me writing up documentation prior, knowing this would happen, and emailing that to people time and time again there were still problems. Enter $ComputerBob. $ComputerBob works in returns. He prints everything. He doesn't touch a computer unless he has to. "Hi $ComputerBob, please see attached instructions on remapping that drive. In the "folder" path you will type then click "Finish" **Reply from: $ComputerBob "$ComputerBob: Please see previous email, copy paste THIS into the box and click finish. **Reply from $ComputerBob "Hey $Computerbob: I.... I'll just... I'll be over in a minute" I only drink on Saturday morning so I can forget what happened Friday afternoon. [link] [comments]  |
| I created this file! It's not a template! Posted: 30 Mar 2019 09:12 AM PDT Had this lovely phonecall on thursday from a normally pretty decent, understanding guy. For some reason however, that day was the day he decided to be a "user". Names have been changed of course. Me: A pretty cool IT tech ABC: My company Boss: My boss DK: User in this case EC: External company - they are a training company RA: Random author (this will make more sense later, but this person is from EC) PC: Parent company On to the good stuff. Me: Hi, ABC LTD, $Me speaking. DK: Hi $Me, I'm really sorry but I think I have a virus, my document is saying someone else created it! Me: (Thinking wtf) Ok no worries I'm connecting on. I connect onto DK's machine and run a scan, in the meantime I try to get more info on this document Me: Alright DK, what document is having the issue? DK: This one (takes me to the file) Sure enough, the author is down as someone that's never worked for the company and DK is NOT happy. DK: I created this file so this $RA must be a hacker getting into my files! We need scans on the all the servers, we have confidential files...(rambling on here) Me: (Interrupting DK)...Ok hang on slow down. First, I'm running a scan, that will give me an idea of whats going on. Second, when did you create this file? DK: This morning. Me: Okay, I can see the file name is DOCUMENT-V2. Was there another version? DK: No, I created this document this morning. Me: Ok, leave it with me for a minute. I hang up to DK and continue poking around. As I suspected, the scan returned nothing and said all was good. I had a look deeper into the file directory and noticed a V1 version of the same file. Funnily enough with this $RA as the author. I'm sensing that maybe DK didn't create this file new after all and just saved a copy, but I called him back. Me: Hi DK, right your computer is clear, there's no virus, nothing of concern there. DK: Well there must be something, other files have $RA as the author! Me: Show me them please. DK takes me to another directory where sure enough, there's about 5-6 other documents with this $RA as the author. Digging into the file details, there is an entry for "company" with $EC in the field. Clearly, DK is not the author. Me: Right, I think I'm getting an idea of what's happened now. When you say you "created this document this morning", did you create from scratch in a new document or "save-as" the old doc and edit it? DK: Created new, I did this myself this morning, this is my file, nothing to do with this $RA. At this point, DK is getting irritated. Me: Did you re-do all the formatting and everything yourself? (The file has a ton of formatting changes which is why I asked) DK: No, it's already there! Me: If it's a brand-new document, it can't be there, you have no templates configured for that. Unless you are editing the old version and saving a new copy? DK: I created V2 from V1! It's a new document, I made it! This $RA has nothing to do with it. Me: Ah, so when you say you created it from V1...are you editing V1 and saving as V2? DK: (at this point I think understanding)....Well....yes, but in a new document. At this point, I know totally what's happened. Me: Where is the original version of this file? DK: It was made in 2013 by $PC. Me: Right, do you know WHO specifically made that document. DK: No, but I've made all the changes since. Me: Okay, so from what I can see, the original version of the file has come from $EC as a template. DK: No there are no templates, I created this document! Me: No, not THAT document, the original. The original has been created by $EC and $PC used that template to make their copy with all the logo's and what-not. DK: No, $PC created this in 2013. Me: No, I promise you, they did not. They are using a file provided by another company, they just edited it. More conversing happened here, me trying to explain how this works to DK but no need to include all of that. DK: Just, ask someone else at ABC, they will probably know. Me: I don't need to ask anyone else at ABC because $Boss is sitting next to me, nodding with me when I'm trying to explain to you that the ORIGINAL file was a template. Every time you have copied and made a new version, it is keeping the author and othed details from the previous file. Make a new file and literally just copy and paste the data into that file. DK: No, I will be using the same file, this is not the problem, $RA has never touched any of the versions we have made. Me: (Hearing that he's missed the point completely) Okay well I'm really sorry but there's nothing I can really do on this. DK: Ugh, fine whatever, just ask $Boss and he'll fix it. My boss at this point is shaking his head and saying just close the ticket, he's a moron. DK is from Greece but his English is totally fine, but that's the ONLY explaination I can come up with for him not listening/grasping what I was trying to say. TLDR: User has a document with someone else as the author. He refuses to believe that the original copy came from someone other than the parent company and won't listen to reason. [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