Tried to get doc to let me scrub in on a surgery Tech Support |
- Tried to get doc to let me scrub in on a surgery
- Morons
- It stopped working
- Fax Machines... I'm not proud.
- Dirty Money is still money.
- The Server Rebooted Itself and the Apps Are Down, Maybe A Reboot Will Fix It
- Funerals and sending emails
| Tried to get doc to let me scrub in on a surgery Posted: 29 Apr 2019 02:00 PM PDT Back in my former life I was the copier/printer tech. Yes, I was the poor sorry SOB that all the IT geeks called because " WE HATE PRINTER PROBLEMS!" My territory was a hospital and surrounding areas (all the random doctors and specialists offices that pop up around hospitals). One day I'm called in for a jam and I walk in and see the Doctor trying to work on the machine. Background for those that don't work in hospitals...Doctors are GODS and can do no wrong (well, not really but you get my point). As I said, I walk in and the Doctor is standing there with a screwdriver about to take something apart and I walked up in my "technician outfit" (aka company shirt and khakis) and looked at him and said m: Hey doc, can I scrub in on your next surgery? Dr: No, of course not m: Well why not? Dr: because I've had YEARS of training and experience to get to this point m: uh huh...and how many copier training course have you taken? Dr: …. fine, I see your point m: thanx doc I got this now! This actually happened twice more in this same office and we had roughly the same conversation. He FINALLY learned. One day I was walking through the hospital and saw him down the hall coming towards me and as we got closer he says "NO YOU CAN'T SCRUB IN ON THE NEXT F$%#ING SURGERY!!!" and I cracked up laughing. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Apr 2019 01:15 PM PDT Today i got a call from a client, their new laptop screen was very blurry. After logging in remotely and checking resolutions and that the drivers we not having issues i was demanded to come onsite and fix the screen. After sitting down at the laptop and everything looking crystal clear to me, I asked the user when the last time was that she had her eyes checked and that she may need glasses specifically prescribed for computer usage and setup for viewing distance of around 2.5 feet. She said she had already done that but they were in the other room, after putting on the correct glasses the screen was no longer blurry and the issue was resolved. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2019 02:23 AM PDT User: "It stopped working so we rebooted the machine by holding in the powerbutton." (Not much context, I know, but I have repressed most of what happened in that story, I just remember that part and the STRONG URGE TO KILL!) [link] [comments]  |
| Fax Machines... I'm not proud. Posted: 29 Apr 2019 02:48 PM PDT Okay, my first story got a lot of response, so let's try another. I retired from the USN in 1996 after 26 years of seeing the world on one submarine or another. I explored the job market and discovered that for some reason, none of the local software shops were interested in hiring someone with 26 years of experience, but no degree, so I enrolled in college with the GI Bill picking up the tab. Still, I'd developed a bad habit of enjoying regular meals and living in a place with walls and a ceiling, so I also had to find a job. I ended up working for an Office Supply company. They had very recently moved into the Printer and Computer field and needed someone who could work on them. It seems the photocopier techs didn't like printers for some reason so they needed a tech. So I started doing computer installs in businesses and schools and installing Laser Printers at various businesses. After a couple of weeks, I started installing Fax machines. Fax machines bugged me for a bit until I realized the models the place sold (Mita) were basically laser printers with a scan bed. Easy Peezy. I'd been there for about 3 months when at 4:45 an emergency call came in for a fax machine installed that very day. The customer was livid and wanted someone on site immediately. So, an hour drive to another state later (yay, over time, how I miss you) I arrive at the customer's site. The customer meets me at his door and starts discussing my heritage and my mother's questionable habits with farm animals that could produce an idiot like me. Mind you that this is before I've even seen his machine, A Mita 700 series fax with the installed printer card and duplex unit. He apparently thinks that his use of profanity is a motivating factor. I think it's cute. I've been cursed at by professionals who could peel a potato at ten yards using their words alone, this guy is an amateur. Anyway, I get to the Machine. "It pushes out paper, but there is nothing on it!" he tells me pointing at the sheet of paper in the output tray. "You need to get this piece of crap working, I need it to receive some important court documents!" I pick up the paper in the output tray and turn it over. The Mita 700 series pushed out its prints face down. Mr. Genius never looked on the other side of the paper. My time for a service call was billed at $175 an hour. Minimum 1 hour. Overtime was + 75%. Emergency response: $300. Total bill: $606.75. To turn over a piece of paper. He wanted it covered by his warranty. I explained that the warranty did not cover turning a piece of paper over. After hours. On an Emergency Call. Or, screaming at the tech. He was in the office the next day to complain about the bill. I have no idea what, if anything the sales types did about it, all I know is I got paid. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Apr 2019 04:45 PM PDT The comments in another thread started talking about 'in the last century' so I had to play along. Okay, picture it. It's August 1999, and despite Prince's promise of a party, the industry was in a minor panic. The dreaded (and much hyped) Y2K Bug was on the horizon. Aircraft were going to fall from the sky, computers worldwide were going to melt down into puddles of sorrow and despair, dogs and cats were about to start living together, Armageddon! I was 'the computer guy' at an office supply store and the owner came up with a great idea. Certifying equipment Y2k ready. They got a "Certified Y2K Ready" stamp made and handed it and a box of numbered stickers to me and started selling this absurd certification program at $45 each. This became just about the only thing I did for the last five months of 1999. Usually, it was an office with a few PCs and the occasional Mac, but then I was sent to a regional hospital. It took three days to hit every office. PCs, stand-alone word processors, their Intercom system (this doesn't have a system clock! I don't care, I want it certified!). I refused to 'certify' medical equipment because for the most part, I was clueless about them. Then the Facilities manager took me into this huge warehouse, telling me he had had the maintenance guys 'gather everything'. 285 Selectric II typewriters, about 30 of them still in unopened shipping boxes from IBM. Not the correcting type. The plain, old fashioned, 1971 vintage, Selectric II machines. "These are typewriters," I said. "Yep," the Facilities Manager said, "They all need to be certified." "They're typewriters. Electric, not electronic, typewriters. They don't have a processor, they don't have memory, they don't have anything that could go wrong with a date. Plug them in, they type. The calendar rolling over to 2000 won't affect them in the slightest." "I want them all certified." "It's $45 each." "I know that." So I got out my stamp and my box of stickers and just started 'certifying' everything in sight. The bill at that hospital came out to be more than $5k, mostly for nothing of any value at all. I felt dirty. Oh, I earned a bonus for the job (because my boss thought I sold all those typewriter certs) and took the money, and I felt dirty. [link] [comments]  |
| The Server Rebooted Itself and the Apps Are Down, Maybe A Reboot Will Fix It Posted: 29 Apr 2019 05:44 AM PDT I get paged out because our internal ticketing system is down. Offshore admins are stumped. So I log in and discover that the apps aren't running, and the server has only been up for about an hour. This system has 2 apps: source code control and the main ticketing system. If you start the ticketing system first, the source code control will not work...it has to be up and running FIRST. Because of this, the applications don't start automagically with the server. So I start the source code control app, wait for it to finish initializing, then start the ticketing system. Then I look at the system logs to find out what happened to my server. Looks like it crashed YESTERDAY and rebooted itself. Offshore, according to the incident log, rebooted the server again to try and bring the apps up. Now, after source code control being non-functional for 6 months because someone didn't read the documentation thoroughly (me), I put instructions in the MOTD that basically say if the server is rebooted, you need to start source code control BEFORE the ticketing system. I figured that it was pretty clear: you have to start these up manually because the server doesn't. Offshore apparently ignored it. In fact, they completely ignored ANY troubleshooting. They didn't even check to see if the apps were UP. Nope, they just rebooted the server, and when the ticketing system didn't start itself up, threw their hands up and paged me out. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Apr 2019 12:43 PM PDT Hey all, just joined here. I'm a twenty-year veteran of the IT industry. I've got a couple of stories, but this one may be my all-time favorite of tales from tech support. Back in December of 2003, my now-ex wife's grandmother had passed away. Sweet old lady, so much nicer than her daughter, my former mother-in-law, but that's a story for r/entitledparents for another day. Anyway, the day of the funeral arrives and there's a large turnout. Again, ex-wife's grandmother was a sweet old lady, and so there were many friends, family and members of her small community present. And among these friends was this family of 4, the parents and 2 adult male children in their 30s or 40s. And...something was clearly off. I am by no means stating any of this to be mean, it was just reality. The boys lived with their parents and were clearly very dependent on them and the way they physically looked suggested some kind of underdevelopment or something not quite right. Friendly enough people, but their speech was slow and deliberate and their cognitive abilities were not all there. However, one brother was worse off than the other. I had never met these people before and I was introduced as grandmother's daughter's husband. And then someone said I worked on computers. The slower son got all wide-eyed, as if a gift had just been personally hand-delivered to him by the gods. He says, in a rather loud tone of voice "Ohh...we just got a computer and we can't send emails. Can you help us?" Even that early in my career I was used to people hitting me up with technical questions at unexpected times. Except this was a funeral of a sweet old woman and we were here to honor her and celebrate her life, so I really didn't feel this was the time or place for technical support. Nonetheless, given their lack of social cues and awareness, I decided to drop it and just entertain their question. So I asked what they were doing when sending emails, and it didn't take me long until what they were doing wrong came to light. I didn't think this was possible, but these people had proved me wrong. They were trying to send emails to people's physical addresses. So if they were trying to email your brother John Smith, they would have put in the To: line of the email:John Smith 1884 Anystreet USA, 12345. I. Was. Astounded. It had never even occurred to me that trying to email someone at a physical address was a mistake that existed in the realm of possibility. So, responding quickly and wishing to end the conversation and get back to the funeral, I simply replied something to the effect of "Umm, it doesn't work like that. You have to email someone at an email address which usually looks like [something@something.](mailto:something@something.com)something. You will have to get their email address from them." You could tell this was a news flash to them. The one brother said "Ohh...OK. We will do that. Thanks." At that point, I excused myself to mingle with other guests, still flabbergasted, and the family wandered off. I don't know if they ever did get the hang of emails, because I may have seen them once in passing since then, but never again otherwise. That was 16 years ago, and that story is and always will be a reminder to me that no matter when you think you've seen it all...you have not. TL;DR. Mentally slow people at my ex-wife's grandmother's funeral complain they can't email people. Come to find out the problem is they are trying to email people using physical house addresses. I gently set them straight. [link] [comments]  |
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