Second day on tech support, someone tried to sell me on a pyramid scheme Tech Support |
- Second day on tech support, someone tried to sell me on a pyramid scheme
- The "Reply To All" button strikes again
- The lost admin password
- How do you even know you need help with that?
- The Chronicles of IT-FREELY and a Bo$$ - part 7: The Revelation
- When All Else Fails, Try The Obvious
- I've been gone a while
| Second day on tech support, someone tried to sell me on a pyramid scheme Posted: 03 Apr 2019 05:47 AM PDT This happened just yesterday, it was my second day on the job (I work in the library at my school campus) and this one lady came over to me asking for the fanciest paper we had. I got her some stock paper and she kept thanking me. I went back to my seat and she called me back and asked me for help printing. I had to email her flyer she was printing to my email so I could print it out and she couldn't stop thanking me. She told me "here have this as a thank you" it was a powdered energy drink, I said "no thanks, helping is part of my job" but she kept insisting so I took it. It took a little longer to help than I expected since her computer was older than my dad and she once again said "Here! Take another packet I've got spares..." to which I just said oh, thanks? This resulted in her handing me her business card saying she's looking for skilled people lmfao. I acted interested in it and she said she'll expect an email from me soon for an interview. I finished up helping her and she pulls out a bottle of face wash for me and says it's another product her company makes as a thank you for helping me. I took it and wished her good luck... I looked up her business and it's basically filled with shit like "doctors are wrong! Try our energy drink to cure your cancer". EDIT: Since this is catching on, here's a photo of the flyer. She said she'd coming back on Friday so I'll also keep you updated. All location info is blurred for privacy reasons [link] [comments]  |
| The "Reply To All" button strikes again Posted: 04 Apr 2019 01:17 AM PDT Okay, so here's another one of those classic "they've only gone and sent the email to everyone" scenario's. MY background is I'm in tech support for a large-ish college in a support team of about 8, offering the usual day to day support from all areas of a college. Below is a doctored email that done the rounds this week, much to the amusement of all of the staff right across the board. All started from a simple typo, from our Head of HR. The initial email starts as a chain at the bottom. ....... I do get the point Sarah and Claire, I was just pointing out a grammatical mistake in the email. There is no need for you two to be corporate shills. Have A Good Day!!!!! Thanks Bob From: Janet Hello everyone, I think BOB has got the point by now, please stop emailing to all, if anyone has an issue please email the people involved directly – Janet From: Claire Bob And a question mark at the end! 😄 Regards Claire From: Sarah Bob I'm absolutely positive that was a typographical error . Don't forget to use a capital letter at the beginning of your sentences.😊 From: Bob shouldn't that be 'With Easter fast approaching....' not We Easter. Bob From: ***** For the attention of Teaching staff Afternoon We Easter fast approaching can you please forward me any requests to amend the annual leave which has been populated on Team Spirit Regards Zoe Director of Human Resources [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Apr 2019 10:43 PM PDT Ftp, on mobile, etc. Background: I'm not employed as an IT worker,but instead, I do IT support for a club I'm in at my school. Tonight takes the cake for how bad things can go, as so far as what I have had to deal with. I also have about 4ish years of experience with the Linux command line. Specifically bash. Comes in handy often, like today. On with the tale. So we got some new laptops a few months back, and we're finally unpacking them, and configuring them. They are running Linux Mint 18.3. When we originally got them, we just set up an admin account on each system, but with the same username/password. Whatever. We box them up, and wait for our competition season to be over before we start integrating these into general club use. Fast forward to today: We pull the laptops out of the box, power them on, and they automatically boot to the desktop. I open up a terminal, and type
It prompts me for the password. So I type in what I think to be the admin password. Now Murphy is paying attention
Well then. That appears to be a small issue. So for the next half-hour, my partner and I try every password either of us has ever used. No dice. Hoo boy. This isn't good. At this point, I go to the coach who helped us acquire the laptops and ask if, per chance, he remembered the sudo password. He did not. Well shit. If I don't know the password, I can't reset the password with the passwd utility. But then! Lo it struck like a bolt of lightning. Google! So I google, and it turns up. . . nothing. Then. . . $(me) Hey, $(partner) do we know the startup interrupt key to access GRUB? $(partner): Yup. Shift + Esc. $(me): Thanks. I then proceed to interrupt the boot, and lo and behold, I can edit the startup configuration. Do a quick replace of the line that said And that, is why you always record the admin password somewhere secure, so that when you return to a system you haven't worked on for two months, you know the password. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you even know you need help with that? Posted: 03 Apr 2019 11:15 AM PDT Okay, LTL, FTP, and on mobile First up - I'm not technically in tech support. I'm a developer. I'm used to providing help to clients after I've done stuff for them - that website I built seems to be having an issue when you randomly deleted your database? I can help you with that. I expect to help with stuff like that. I didn't expect this. At all. I'm preparing to launch a new SaaS web app, that I've built entirely myself for myself. That means there's no client involved, about 2 other people knew I was working on it (friends who I'd spoken to about it), and there are no links to it. From anywhere. It's in the final stages of testing, so it's on a live server, with a domain pointed at it, and the actual code is finished. Today, I received an email to the dedicated support email address I set up for that product (help@product-name.app) A user was having trouble upgrading from the free plan to the paid plan, because it wouldn't accept her card details. I didn't need to ask anything, I knew what the error message would be. It would be the message stripe gives you when you put a live card into a development API. This woman had found a product that wasn't even launched yet, and tried to sign up. I explained that it wasn't in production yet and she'd have to wait (about another week). I don't know how she found the right web address. [link] [comments]  |
| The Chronicles of IT-FREELY and a Bo$$ - part 7: The Revelation Posted: 03 Apr 2019 09:11 AM PDT I was already searching for new jobs. I had my resume updated, and a list of what I wanted for the next job out to dozens of recruiters. I had even applied directly to a few roles and had many phone interviews . I was being careful about sneaking out of the office to a secluded area to talk. I had to be careful about taking time off to interview as once you start doing that, people know what's up. Anyhow, at this point, despite being on the down low, I also resigned to not giving a crap. I was still working hard, being polite, doing what I needed to and then some. But I made sure to divorce my personal life from work while being there until I was out. I made sure to not walk by bo$$'s office on the way out at night (did I mention he ALWAYS stopped me to discuss stuff he should have discussed earlier in the day, causing me to miss trains or basically waste an hour of my day while he bemoaned about something). Now I snuck around the other exit out of the office and avoided him as much as possible during the day. He was busy enough to not really notice. I even avoided going to the holiday party that year. While I liked everyone else there, I couldn't stand to be around bo$$ more than I had to be, and frankly, I basically lived at the office for nearly 20 hours a day. The last thing I wanted was to spend time outside the office with anyone there. I had missed so much over the year with my wife and kids. I was so tired of being too tired to help out with basic chores and upkeep at home, or even just to play with my kids and sit and talk with my wife. I was constantly a wreck emotionally. I had gained roughly 30 pounds while there between stress eating, having to eat at my desk and gulp food down, and then just finding excuses to go to the local stores to get out and ending up eating my stress. My health was absolute shit and I'm still trying to lose that weight to this day. At some point around this time, the office decided to do employee reviews. These would be conducted by your peers and would be anonymous. I was also asked to review my boss. At that point, I figured, fuck it. I'm committed to getting the hell out of Dodge asap and if I'm fired right now out of retaliation I just wouldn't care. It'd be sweet relief. But I also didn't want to burn bridges and wanted to leave of my own accord. I hadn't gone to HR with this just yet as I still wasn't sure if HR was friends with bo$$ or what. So I took the full week to do the review that was allotted to us. I had been documenting everything. Every weird thing bo$$ said to me, his volatile nature, his dropping things on me last minute, making me chat with him when I'm trying to leave for the day, the fact I couldn't have a day off and that I was losing my mind, everything. But I was very professional about it all. I had specific examples. I also dished on the email request and how I had a major ethical issue with it. Everything. It was like I was back in school writing a term paper. By the time I was satisfied with it, and hit submit, it felt so good. Therapeutic really. A couple weeks went by and HR pulled me into their office. HR was like, wtf. Are you serious? Why didn't you bring this up sooner? And I explained why. And I explained how this job was making me feel and that it's not right as the rest of everyone and the aspects about it were great but, I just couldn't do this anymore. I had wondered if they seemed to know what was going on behind the scenes. They really didn't as it turns out. I had several meetings with HR after that. The premise is they would figure out a way to breach the subject about bo$$'s behavior and issues with him without letting him know it was me. They also revealed that he was essentially coached for managerial issues before. HR was really great about their support and asked me to see if I could provide them the proof of him deleting that aforementioned email. They were upset he'd do that, and if he did that without issue what else was he capable of? I also revealed how if he kicked the bucket, we'd be screwed as he held all the admin keys to the kingdom and that was also when I mentioned him turning on and off our admin accounts and got confirmation that his explanation of it being from the execs was bogus. But soon, this nightmare would come to an end. Next up: Part 8 – the sweet taste of freedom! Index: Part one [link] [comments]  |
| When All Else Fails, Try The Obvious Posted: 03 Apr 2019 08:14 AM PDT This is another short tale from my job in financial planning, and making technical tools for my team. Every plan we do starts with a PDF questionnaire, which is saved to text, and then imported into an Excel workbook to do a bunch of calculations for us(same as I discussed in "But it's easy if you know exactly what to do!"). The PDF has about 1400 fields, and importing it to Excel takes about 25 seconds on my machine. We're soon switching our full team to Office 2013, and our Office 2013 test machine was showing times of almost a minute. This was getting ridiculous(we'd be looking at about a man-week per year just spent watching a macro run), so I decided to take a crack at optimizing it. I'd previously dug into this and found that the algorithm used by the guy who created it was a simple O(n^2) lookup - take each entry from the text file, search through each of the possible destination fields for where it goes, and update it when you find one. I figured this was a big culprit for the time taken, so I decide to dig in and clean that algorithm up. I switch it over to a Collection of possible destinations (which is a nice fast hash table under the hood), give it a test, and...it's not much faster. Look into code profiling, add some profiling to my algorithms, test before and after, and realize it's saving maybe a few seconds overall - that's not nearly good enough. So I try to figure out which of these things are causing the bottleneck. Add more profiling points, analyze it, and I realize that the biggest time sink is simply assigning the value (a short string) to a known cell. There's no way that should take 22 milliseconds every time. And then I slap my forehead. Excel will recalculate the whole workbook whenever you change any cell, by default. I'm changing 1400 cells, so that's 1400 recalculations. I've seen this in other contexts, I've used it to optimize other macros, but neither I nor the long-time VBA expert who wrote this ever thought to turn off auto-calculations. Despite it being just about the first entry on every "How do I make Excel run faster?" guide on the internet. I set calculations to manual, and even with the old n^2 algorithm I'm doing the whole thing in under a second. And then I remind myself, yet again, to start with the basics instead of trying to make everything perfect from the start. One day I'll learn... Previous: It's finally easy, so we don't need to do it any more! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Apr 2019 08:24 AM PDT I never posted this story and I just got the conclusion of it so this may be a little long. So about a year ago I get a call from one of our users, a sales rep in another state. He's having issues with email on his phone and in the process of troubleshooting the settings he mentions that he's in the hospital bored. My eyebrows went up and I asked why he was bored at the hospital and he said "Oh I went in for hip surgery and I died on the table. They said I should be doing physical therapy next week." That's right he had a near death experience and was casual about it and wanted to call his customers. Phone call to his manager ensues, we're told he's on leave so no he can't be working. He does need a new phone so go ahead and order it. That was the last I heard about it. Time passes, no offboarding request so he's been kept in AD and email but we did set forwarding to another sales rep to cover his area, until today. I've been in the office for about 10 minutes and my phone rings. I pick up and it's the sales rep calling for assistance on setting up the new phone with his email and mileage app. We had a nice conversation with him laughing the whole time, joking about how we thankfully didn't change too much while he was gone. "I started calling my customers on Monday and they kept saying 'Is this an April Fools joke?'" tl;dr: Sales rep nearly dies, wants to keep working from the hospital [link] [comments]  |
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