Donut Ambush Tech Support |
- Donut Ambush
- No we don't want that. It's too expensive and we want something *bespoke*.
- Uhhhh, can you please repeat that
- RAID Swap requires SWAT Raid
- Today I was the better idiot
- Delivery Failure Report
- The user who can't walk
- Why bother with Outlook's calendar when you can print it ?
- When it was, in fact the network
- A legend in my own lunchtime
- Troubleshooting 101
- Self deprecating IT story, AKA I haven't had my coffee
| Posted: 15 May 2019 07:29 PM PDT Do you like to read in Chronological order? Here is the Index
$Selben: Me! "Technical team lead" previously Tier II helldesk helpdesk technician for a mid-sized company, very skeleton-crew helpdesk 10 of us total for 24 hour coverage (not including supervisors) to support 2500+ company-wide. $Snickers: My cubicle mate, also "Technical team lead" previously Tier 2. (Tier 2 was a more advanced tech, having more experience and system access etc…) $Tex: A new IT supervisor, spurs, cowboy hat the mustache… Yep the real deal. $Focus: One of our IT Supervisors - She has a heavy programming background - She went back to her old team for some time after not doing so well as a lead, but is brought back after going through some more brainwash… er additional 'leadership training'.
The hint of stale coffee and old sweat was permeating the office as a series of chimes from each of the techs' machines acted like surround sound as their email notifications for "urgent" went off. After reading the email and seeing no one budging, $Selben looked around. None of them would meet his gaze.
The current office configuration consisted of a circle of inner-connected desks with a jumbo-tron style set of televisions hung in the center that displayed incoming calls and tech support statistics (See: Ain't this Nice Y'all parts 1 and 2). There were very few active tickets. Most of the techs were waiting around for incoming calls. Based on the suspicious lack of action from his peers, $Selben read the email once more to make sure he wasn't missing something.
$Selben's stomach let out a growl. Giving a final glare around the room, he scooped up his empty coffee mug and headed to the main kitchen.
The door was slightly ajar. Peering cautiously through the crack, he couldn't see anything readily amiss. He slowly pushed the door open and entered. Opening the bright pink box, he was pleasantly greeted by a nearly complete dozen. After making a selection and discovering it was still soft and clearly fresh, he refilled his coffee mug. Happily spinning on his heel with a little dance, he turned for the door intending to return to his desk when he stopped dead in his tracks. In the doorway stood an $HRep. Her eyes locked on him like a lion seeing an antelope. $Selben froze in the same manner as the antelope. The kitchen only had one exit, besides the window, anyway. He briefly considered this but let out a small sigh and put up his shiny smile instead.
He tried slowly walking towards her, intending to slip by, but she stood firm.
$Selben considered throwing the donut at her to escape. Nothing good came from HR "bumping into you in the hall." Without waiting for him to answer, she continued.
She turned and extended her arm in a direction, clearly showing he had no option but to follow.
He followed her deep within HR territory. An all glass conference room was on a raised platform in the center
Both HReps shared knowing smiles of having captured their prey and closed the glass door. They sat on chairs outside, effectively sealing $Selben inside the cleverly devised trap.
$Selben knelt over one of the boxes and began to rummage through while slipping his phone out of his pocket sending an urgent text to $Snickers asking for help. No response. He pulled out a couple of the tablets and grimaced. They were the cheapest possible option you could get and would never do what HR had planned.
After 30 minutes of head shaking, hopelessness, and growing terrified he'd never be released from this glass prison, he spotted a familiar ponytail moving among the HR cubicles. $Focus rounded the corner, with $Snickers trailing behind her as she approached the door to $Selben's cage. She turned to face both $HRLead and $HRep, who felt their prize was being contested. The room was soundproofed, but things clearly were getting heated: $Snickers was occasionally flinching while cowering behind $Focus. Both $HRLead and $Focus would pound their fists into palms and alternatingly took power stances when defining their argument. With a final blow and an accusational pointing, $Focus won. The $HRep ran back to her cubicle. $HRLead stood defiantly, but as $Focus opened the door, she moved out of the way to let $Selben pass. He closely followed $Focus out of HR's domain, with $Snickers right on his heels.
$Focus spoke without turning around.
$Selben was about to thank her but she stopped and turned.
On that, she rolled her eyes and confidently returned to her office. Protecting her little antelopes was part of her job, after all. [link] [comments]  |
| No we don't want that. It's too expensive and we want something *bespoke*. Posted: 15 May 2019 08:32 AM PDT Bespoke. The enemy of useful. We built a database software. Our clients use this database software. It contains a bunch of information that's important to them. You know how it goes. Client: It takes too long for our internal team to do all the admin of creating new people records. Is there any way people can sign up to the database themselves? Here's the specs of everything we'd need it to include. Me: Actually, yes. We have a web portal solution for this already. It does what it says on the tin. They just fill in the online form, it pops their details straight into the database. You pretty much just switch it on. Here's the price. Client: No, I'm afraid that's not what we want. We want a bespoke solution. One that's ours, so that we can build it how we want. Me: Ok, but can I ask...for what particular purpose? Looking at your specs here, the portal does everything you need. We can even brand it to look like yours so no one could tell the difference. Also critically, this is directly fed into the database, complete integrated and configurable. Client: No, I'm afraid not. Truthfully, we want to have more control over how it's developed. Also it's too expensive. Thanks anyway. 8 weeks later Client: We have a CSV file with lots of people on it. Any way we can import this information into the database on a regular basis? Me: Where is this file coming from? What's on it? Client: Well remember we asked a while back about getting people to register themselves? We created an online registration form. This creates a CSV which saves to google docs. client proceeds to show me a wordpress template form, and everything on it is wrong Me: ....Well we'd basically need to create a bespoke XML script that finds the file, maps out all the data and pings it into the right spots. This would need to be on a schedule and have a bunch of requirements to ensure the data is clean and not duplicated. It would need to be validated, truncated where necessary, etc. That will cost at least X much. Client: What? That's insane, why is it so expensive? We already spent weeks building the form! Because it's bespoke. [link] [comments]  |
| Uhhhh, can you please repeat that Posted: 15 May 2019 10:59 PM PDT First post, so sorry if I butcher this. I used to work as tech for laptops/printers/plotters/PCs and Servers. Way back when. Now most of my extended family (the wifes side) are not into technology, at all. I have slowly got them to buy computers, upgrade to smartphones and use email, over the past 5 years. But this is before all of that. This tale is about 8 years old, when my sister-in-law(SIL), just bought a laptop and printer. I did the installing, 10 minutes later, print out the test page, and head home(We lived next door to them). A few days later as I pile my family into the car for a nice weekend outing, my SIL comes running out of the house, somewhat frantic. She stops on the passenger side, and asks us to wait a minute.
The page was a youtube page, and she had tried printing a video. It printed out the entire page, but in the video, it just had a black square with the play button. It was broken because obviously when she pushed play on her printed video, it didn't play. I still give her crap about this one just about every family holiday. And now all the kids get to have a laugh with me! edit page = play [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2019 12:38 PM PDT This tale is not exactly a SWAT raid, but is close enough, was proposed by a fellow redditor, and is supremely eloquent. A while ago I was alerted by one of our technicians that a very remote $BigExpensivePart had gone from intermittent failure to full failure, and we needed an on-site visit to replace some broken hardware components, (the technician could tell via a remote control panel that something was wrong but it would need a site visit to determine which parts). Think of the $BigExpensiveParts as being shipping containers full of electronics that make up critical infrastructure that have to be located in the most awkward locations possible to be useful, usually surrounded by high security fencing. This particular $BigExpensivePart is famous in our industry because of its location, at the far end of farmer's field, where the farmer has repeatedly denied us access at shotgun point. Our technicians are tired of having to stare down a shotgun barrel while hearing "get off my land". The technicians have tried many different routes to reach $BigExpensivePart and were stopped every time, I suspect that farmer has sensors around his farm. This farm has a road at the front and 8 square fields arranged in a square, with the farmhouse in the middle. The rear of the farm is bordered by a railway line. As the railway passes the farm it has a steep embankment topped by a high security fence. So access from the railway onto the farm is normally impossible. Our plan A was to sue and/or bribe / pay the farmer for access, but this plan involved moving round lots of pieces of paper, and we guessed that it was not the pieces of paper that were unhappy in the first place. By luck, in the past couple of weeks one of our staff saw farmer out in the local town, presumably getting groceries, and noted a sports team sticker in the window of farmer's vehicle. When I heard of this I hatched a plan B. The plan was: first check on the internet when the sports team in the sticker was next playing a televised game. Second, I had a word with a senior guy in my organisation who had high level contacts in the railway. Third, I found 2 technicians that were trained in the railway way of working, and explained the plan. Then a couple of weeks later I go the go ahead (bat signal) from the senior contact. I procured an engineering train with a flatbed, then hired a crane, and a man basket. The crane and basket were put onto the engineering train, in a siding a few miles away, and we waited for the sports event to start playing its televised game. As I was banking on the farmer to either be attending the game in person, out at a bar watching the game on the TV, or home watching the game on TV, so would not be watching the fields. My senior contact closed the main train lines to timetabled traffic and our custom train crane rolled towards the farm. As planned we arrived at the farm about a quarter of the way through the sports match which was shortly after dusk. The technicians were dressed somewhere between special forces soldiers and alien invaders. They wore railway high vis, military webbing full of replacement components for $BigExpensivePart, abseiling harnesses and 2 way radio headsets (which I suspect were ex-military in origin). When our strange train arrived at the farm we stopped as close to $BigExpensivePart as we could, the technicians checked their radios, climbed into the crane basket and were hoisted over the boundary fence into the farmers field next to the $BigExpensivePart. When the basket touched ground the technicians, looked around to make sure that they were not spotted, climbed out of the basket, and walked the few steps to the gate to $BigExpensivePart, unlocked it and let themselves in. 1 technician worked on swapping the broken components and photographing the interior condition, whilst the other watched his back for the possible approach of an angry shotgun wielding farmer. The job was completed without the farmer either noticing or making moves to intercept us. When the parts were swapped out, the technicians radioed down to the train where a phonecall to control was made to ensure that $BigExpensivePart was operational once again. Then the technicians locked up, climbed back into the basket and were craned back to the safety of the train. Unless the farmer reads this post there is a good chance that he will never know that we were there. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2019 01:18 PM PDT This just happened and I'm still shaking my head about it. I work in IT and have for many moons now. I've dealt with (just like we all have) the idiots that call in for the dumbest of problems and then we speculate how they survive day to day. Today was MY day. I'm the Skype for Business engineer and admin (I set it up and run the damn thing) and I keep a list of people and their phone numbers on a OneDrive stored Excel page that has all the number broken out by city on their own tabs. I was going to a city in the list and it was almost blank. Just a couple of pieces of non useful information. Hit the tab for a different city and all the pertinent info was there. Back to the tab with the original city I was looking for and still nothing. I'm panicking, thinking I'm going to have to go through Skype and AD and recreate this particular cities phone numbers from scratch (about 50 people but time consuming). I asked my supervisor (the CIO) if he could see the document and he looks at my computer for 2 seconds and says the magic words...SCROLL LEFT. I shall say ten Hail Torvalds and five Our Gates to make up for my transgression. Damn I feel dumb.... [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2019 04:01 AM PDT So, i am working as an email administrator in my organization. There's about 10,000 end users I have to support and my day is usually pretty busy sorting out pretty stupid requests (help! my email didn't get delivered to $incorrectlyFormattedEmailAddress). One day, it was particularly busy. We were in the middle of migrating from the legacy system to O365. And, as could be expected, there were lots of problems. People weren't receiving emails, email accounts weren't set up properly, admins from other sites didn't know what they were doing, etc. I was also expecting a large package with some administrative documents to be delivered to me that day. So I'd just finished writing a (in retrospect, very simple) script which had taken me about 2.5 hours to write because I wasn't used to powershell yet. The sense of accomplishment was immense, I had finished the script and, once it started running, most of the problems would be sorted. Of course, I'd been neglecting the queue and email and telephone during that time. A few moments later, a knock at the door came. I know some of you are going to expect me to say 'A user came through with some stupid problem'. But that's not what happened. It was the company's postal worker who sorts the mail and delivers to the various offices. I thought 'Great! My paperwork has arrived, I can finally do that extremely important thing!' So I sit down at my computer, the script was happily running, fixing several problems with several users. The fan was running at 100% and CPU was probably pretty close to max as well. I take a sip of my coffee and begin the process of unwinding the binding string on the unexpectedly large manila envelope full of important papers. I open the flap and slide the papers out and find: 200 pages of delivery failure reports printed out and sent by mail [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2019 07:14 AM PDT Story for context: So I have this HR lady who is a real piece of work. Everything is exhausting to her and IT can never do their job right. You know the type. A couple months ago her Cisco desk phone started going straight to voicemail. This had actually been going on MUCH longer but she decided that she was tired of waiting on IT to realize that she was having a problem, not even kidding. I replaced her phone and it still did the same thing. So I reset it again and it wouldn't take the configuration. Tried setting up another phone and it did the same thing. I tried both ports on the wall and it wouldn't work. So I grabbed another cable and plugged her phone into a port on the other side of the room and the phone worked. No more going straight to voicemail. As I was telling her this, she reaches under her desk and pulls out one of those cable speed bump things to prevent people from tripping over the cable and literally throws it on the floor and tells me to put the cable in the sleeve. I oblige because I don't want her tripping and set it all up. Enter yesterday. Same HR lady places the following ticket:
Mind you, when I set this up a couple months ago, she was completely fine with this being a permanent solution because the cost to fix the ports is a couple hundred dollars. So I emailed her thinking someone removed the cable sleeve and got the following email back:
Apparently it's too hard for her to lift her foot a couple inches off the ground =/ EDIT: Adding on since so many people here are telling me how to do my job. Management doesn't want to pony up for the cost to get it fixed and believe that a cable sleeve is an adequate fix for it. I would have GLADLY put in an order to have it fixed. She has 8 other ports in the office to use but she chooses to sit on the wall that only has 2. [link] [comments]  |
| Why bother with Outlook's calendar when you can print it ? Posted: 15 May 2019 03:29 PM PDT Hello TFTS, Very short story which occurred a few weeks ago with one of our VIP. It gave me one or two facepalms, so I thought it could be worth to share it. So, this VIP is actually our CFO, and therefore he has his own assistant. She came at our office to ask how she could export an Outlook calendar on Excel, so we told her she could do that by switching the calendar's view to a list and then a simple copy and paste on an Excel sheet would do the trick. We showed her how to do that, and she went back to her desk. We didn't ask much questions. Then, about one hour later, we received a call from her. She asked if someone could come to check on CFO's calendar because he apparently faces an issue with it (assistants never take many details, so "CFO apparently has an issue" is definitely the most details I could ever get from her). So I came at CFO's desk, and it turns out they actually wanted to print his entire Outlook calendar, for the entire year, week by week... but he couldn't figure out how to display more than five meetings per day on the monthly view (you can't). Hence why they wanted to export it on Excel, though it wasn't apparently convenient for them, in the end. I still have no idea why he would want to print his entire calendar, for the entire year. Especially when he receives more meetings requests in a day than I do in an entire month. [link] [comments]  |
| When it was, in fact the network Posted: 15 May 2019 12:19 PM PDT Before I go into the actual story, there is some background on the site that is important. I started an internship for IT support at the university I go to about a month ago, where they put me with the team in the middle of the city the university is on the outskirts of, primarily handling the college of medicine. Although our group and the main campus group are merging, we use different PC images and are still essentially separate. There is one building that we support that is under the main campus IT, which is where out story will take place. During my first week, on the 5th of April, a ticket came in saying that the PC that a previous intern tried to install was unable to connect to the network, but their old PC could. So, being the diligent new employee that I am, I go over to their office, and see the issue for myself, and after confirming that it is in fact not connecting to the network, I take it back to our office to look at it more thoroughly, and where I could also re-image the machine if it needed it. Upon booting it in the office, it works, and provided us our first clue that it might be a networking issue. Taking it back to the $User I asked if there was an empty station that I could use in order to see if it was just the $User's desk that had an issue, which it was. With that information in hand, I ask the networking guy on our campus if he can fix it, to which he says no but gives me the email for main campus $Networking and I put in a ticket. After a month of essentially no response the other intern tries to call $Networking only to get the general helpdesk which are not the people we want to be talking to. I eventually try hitting 0 to get me directly to an operator from the phone system and get put in touch with the $Networking tech $C. I tell $C that the PC works on every port other that $User's desk, that I had already emailed about it, and ask her to send a tech out to look at it. $C replies that she will look into it. $C's version of look into it is assume that it is to sit around and ask questions for a week, even after we confirm that $User's old PC is the only one that will work on that port, insisting that we check that the machine is on DHCP and does not have a static IP and saying that activating the other jack at the user's desk would cost a fee. Eventually a tech is sent out and to no one but $Networking's surprise, there was a bad connection in the server closet causing the issue. The tech moves some cables and $User was able to use their new PC as of yesterday. I also made a mental note that the response time for $Networking is about 40 days. As a side note, the other intern and I might have created a Wall of Shame from sticky notes, and Main Campus IT might be on it, for more than just this... TL:DR - I tell networking it is a networking issue, they say no it isn't, I say yes it is, they say oh look! it is a networking issue. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2019 12:52 PM PDT Most of my accomplishments - including having an electro-mechanical terminal emit smoke while I was using it - are not tech support related. This one is, I guess. I faked my way into the programming business back when few real qualifications existed. Going to work for a consultancy outside London, UK, I found myself writing documents and a time-logging program. That got me familiar with the revolutionary "word processors" in use in the secretarial pool. Yes, it really is that long ago. I used to hand write a document draft and get it typed up and printed by the ladies in the pool. I also programmed that time-logger on those machines, which let me into the secret world of something vaguely like CP/M, BASIC, and 8-inch floppy disks. One day panic broke out in the pool when one of the ladies tried to stop a printout by administering the 3-finger salute. To her dismay this made a floppy, on which she had been storing a vital document, unreadable. Deep in the middle of IF-GOTO I heard her cries and offered to help. You see, I had found an interesting program that gave low-level access to the floppy disks. You could pull a sector of data into memory and examine it in glorious green on black. You could edit bytes and write the sector back to the disk. I was obvious that sector 0000 of her floppy was scrogged. Sector 0001 didn't look too good either. Inspiration! Pull in a good sector from another disk and do a transplant. Did I dare that? It was possible that all would be lost. Young and foolish, I went ahead. There were details that I thought needed to be fixed carefully, like the start of the file directory, but it was getting to beer o'clock so I left the disk on the desk expecting to carry on next day. The day dawned, and there was much joy. Apparently the lady had picked up the disk, put in it her machine and found that she could recover the document, despite my applying what seemed no more than a band-aid. The outcome: lunch with a not unattractive woman of a certain age. Alas, my heart belonged to another.... [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 May 2019 06:23 AM PDT So this literally just happened 30 seconds ago and I had to share. I'm actually a sound tech/stagehand by trade in a corporate setting, but you know how clients can be: if you work with electronics, you must be an IT guy or at least good at tech (and to be fair, I'm pretty decent until we hit the advanced stuff). So one of the event coordinators comes up to me and goes "hey I'm having trouble printing, can you help me out?" Not a problem. We're on a holding pattern for another 30 minutes before today's conference begins, and we did help her install the printer yesterday, so whatever the issue is it should be a pretty easy fix. When setting it up yesterday I noticed that she has a billion other devices in her device history, so I figured it probably just got changed to another printer that's not currently online. I go sit down and do the basics: is the cable plugged in, is the printer on, correct printer is selected. So far so good, so I notice there's already a document in the queue pulling an error. Ah, that's probably our problem. Delete that, try the print job again. No luck. Odd. So I figure turn the printer off and back on. Nope. Still weird. Well okay, it's just a printer, let's uninstall/reinstall. Should only take a few seconds, and it's not like we'll lose any data. Uninstall, run the install wizard. Unsuccessful, can't find device. Okay, fine, screw Microsoft's auto-wizard anyways. It has the IQ of a dead weasel with a lobotomy. Go straight to HP's website and download the printer driver and run the install. "Please connect device." Okay now something weird is going on. Keep in mind, the entire time it's telling us that the printer is pulling an error. Not disconnected, but error. So I reach around back of the printer to ensure everything is seated tightly. Should've done that before, but again, it never said disconnected. Everything feels tight. So then I'm like "did they plug it in wrong?" It would be pretty hard to plug in a square USB cable incorrectly, but we know users can sometimes be capable of incredible feats of "wtf" so naturally I have to cross that off my list. So I pull the printer forward, look behind it, and lo and behold am greeted with the square USB end plugged into the ethernet port. With a sigh - mostly at myself for not checking my cables fully from the beginning - I plug it into the correct port. By the time I push the printer back into place, it's already finished the installation and ran the print job. Everything works and is happy. The client just dropped off the updated schedule she printed for me. Moral of the story: troubleshooting 101, don't skip steps and don't assume. Bonus: this is a MAJOR tech company who was in the headlines yesterday who's name rhymes with a certain well-known brand of cooking shortening. Extremely nice, wonderful people but ironic. [link] [comments]  |
| Self deprecating IT story, AKA I haven't had my coffee Posted: 15 May 2019 09:59 AM PDT I strolled into the office to a panicked employee who said she was locked out. I check A.D. and nothing. That was a few minutes passed. I go to the desktop and she's trying to sign in as I said I don't see the lock. It sticks at the spinning welcome screen. When it finally says failed, I see the computer is no longer on the domain, and it's the computer name as the "sign into" location. I do the .\ for one domain. Nothing. I did another of our domains, and I get the message of "no domain servers found." Restart the phone, that usually works. Nope. Okay, cool, let's use the local admin and fix that domain issue. All our local admins aren't working. I shut down the computer and start to swap out the temporary hardware for further diagnosis. I get that set up. I bring it to our station, and boot it up. It brings up the domain, I'm able to sign on and everything was there as needed. I forgot the first rule of IT. I need to repent somehow. [link] [comments]  |
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