I Almost Made A Doctor Retire Early Tech Support |
- I Almost Made A Doctor Retire Early
- "...do you want a job here?"
- Why it is important to 'not' layoff the competent
- Oops, accidental tech support.
| I Almost Made A Doctor Retire Early Posted: 14 May 2019 06:36 PM PDT BACKGROUND: In the not so distant past, I worked for a doctors office group. Desktop support was my main role, but I had to do a little of everything some days. The medical field can be very frustrating and hectic, especially when the people around you are in sour moods constantly. One doctor in particular was very difficult to deal with when things got rough. If things were running smoothly, he was easygoing, calm, and fun. If one thing went wrong, he would throw very childish temper tantrums. The following story is a retelling of one of those childish temper tantrums. This doctor was very resistant to change. While all of his other colleagues used shiny new Microsoft Surface Books with Windows 10, he insisted on using a 3-4 year old (at the time) Fujitsu LifeBook running Windows 8.1. This was due to his preference of Windows 8.1's handwriting recognition as well as our IT department not being able to migrate this handwriting data over to Windows 10. My boss (the IT Director) was very butt-kissy towards the doctors and executives. My boss made a big deal that this particular laptop was to never join the domain, never receive Windows Updates, and had to be treated with kid gloves at all times. I soon found out why. At this point, I have worked there for 3-4 months and knew many, but not all of the "gotchas" of this environment.
At this point, I'm getting concerned. I'm trying to find the fastest way possible to put things back where they were. Doing a system restore looked like it worked, but it failed and didn't restore the missing account. This ate up 10-15 minutes. I tried this again, same result. Tried a system restore from safe mode, same result and more time lost. Finally, I tried a system restore but booted into safe mode immediately afterwards. The account was restored, so I did one more reboot and everything was finally back the way it was an hour ago.
EPILOGUE: It turns out that doctor's primary local account was named "user" instead of the one with our usual naming convention. At first glance, I thought his daughter's Microsoft account was a new user account instead of linking his usual local account (he has local admin rights). This was 100% my mistake, and I let the doctor-level pressure affect my judgement. It was also not the first time he threatened to retire early (he uses this as a leverage tactic to get his way during important meetings). I checked on him a couple more times afterwards and everything was fine. TL;DR: A doctor let his daughter use his work laptop at home. She messed with it, I made it worse accidentally, then I fixed it. Said doctor threatened to retire early due to this issue and refused to use a loaner laptop. He makes this threat fairly often and I don't work there anymore. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 May 2019 08:40 PM PDT This story happened a few years ago, but u/SinthoAlb 's story reminded me of this. So I used to work in a call center and did tech support for about 2 and a half years for cell phones specifically. So it's safe to say I know most phones OS and features inside and out. BUT, enough about me. I got tired of the provider I had, so i decided to jump ship and start service with my GF. We go to the store since I want to get a Note 9 so I have to buy it. While we were waiting for mmt number to port over and data to transfer, I was paying attention to another store rep working with one of the other customers. The customer is an older woman but she knows what she wants. She just wants a smart phone and to transfer her contacts over. But she didn't have an SD card and the old one won't turn on. I hear the rep say "I'm sorry the contacts are gone, there's nothing I can do unless the phone turns on." I usually don't butt into other conversations, but I didn't want her to lose her contacts. I interject and all her the normal questions about her phone, like "Do you know your Google account info? What about your Samsung account? Those can all back up your contacts." She says she doesn't know the logins. I then asked the rep, "what about the SIM card? Did you try that?" He said "The SIM just carries over the cell phone number, not contacts. " I told him it can hold up to 250 names. He got frustrated at me and said all stern-like "SIM cards haven't been able to hold contracts for years dude. " So I just turned my attention back to my phone and it doing its business. I notice the rep that's helping me is the district manager. She saw the whole thing go down, so I called her over and showed her the option that's says "IMPORT SIM CONTACTS." She just looked at my and said "huh... you want a job here since you know what you're talking about?" The other rep heard her offer me the job too. His face went beet red with embarrassment. I declined the offer too because I can't stand people yelling at me for billing issues. This isn't the first job offer I got in a situation like this but this one's just the more interesting one. TLDR; I tried helping a fellow customer and I knew more than the rep that was helping her and the district manager who was there offered me a job. [link] [comments]  |
| Why it is important to 'not' layoff the competent Posted: 14 May 2019 08:00 AM PDT From ages ago so things will not be perfect. Umm, does anyone remember the when a certain Northern country pledged support for the interventions in the Middle East? Where a small amount of FA-18's went over over? Can't be too far from people's memory, it was a short time ago. Key to this story is understanding how how all of those planes received their communications via a place I will call 'low temperature pond' - LTP. National Defence is renowned for it's ability to keep running junk from ages past, parts so old they have been rebuilt dozens of times and cost a fortune to do so (I once found the group of machines handling a large part of the phone system, all running Windows Embedded cruising along with Celeron 300's). The military hires contractors to maintain this gear, specifically one large unnamed phone company to handle most, if not all, of their PBX and network requirements. The company making this gear? Nortel. Nortel made a HUGE amount of gear that the military bought, that still runs today, that an ever-dwindling amount of people know how to repair. These lads know how to code the big phone systems, how to finesse and caress them back into working order, how to treat a PBX right. Eventually, a certain phone company fired them all (or most) and replaced them with cheaper trainees. You know the routine. Let's get back to the Middle East. Unaware of events transpiring; I'm at my desk, just a lowly admin, doing changes and inputting things here and there, when I overhear my colleague making calls. He's frantic, voices are getting louder, the call moves to the boardroom where much almost-shouting ensues. We all can hear the jist - there is a problem with communication from LTP and the jets in Syria. SLA stipulates any downtime will be met with penalties if it is over 15mins. The outage is currently at 60mins. Money is being lost, people are getting spicy, jets even spicier. My colleague is trying everything he knows - resetting things, weird commands I'm barely familiar with, instructing the 'new' on site support guy how to reboot the system manually. Support dude is clueless, he's never had to do anything remotely like this and in way over his head. Military is getting angry, it is now approx 24hrs since frosty PBX went down. An idea is hatched: what about the old tech? He worked on this exact unit for years, knew it like his children, perhaps he could help? Oh wait, you let him go. Much tracking down finds him a few towns over at a computer shop working the tech things. A call is placed and situation explained. 'Sorry, I cannot fix it from here' is relayed. A bargain is struck - they want him to go back on site as a contractor and sort the mess out. Travel time included, min. 1hr charge. He leaves work right away, it's a 30min drive to LTP. Gets on site, he knows where he's going, rolls into the PBX room, performs magic. If anyone has known these old Nortel PBX's, they use cards. Huge things, like a foot square, which must be placed into the machines in specific orders else it won't work. Some of the weirder machines need them placed in even more specific orders not found in manuals. Years of constant rebuilds have left a lot of these cards cranky, you need a special person whom can commune with the machine gods to feel the PBX's pain. These people are magicians, the knowledge they possess cannot be taught, it must be learned through trial and error, sweat and frustration, constant swearing and pleading. We lay them off at ever alarming rates, then hire them back at 2x their original salary as 'consultants'. Or, in the "PBX Whisperer's" case, 5k an hour. He was on site for 5min, PBX came back to life without issue, LTP was speaking to it's jets. Everyone is happy. Dude drives home (this is included in the travel time btw), was working for 65ish minutes, 2hrs billable. Not a single blink was made at his bill. The system had been down for over 48 hours. Edit: The dude got 10k for 65mins, min. 1 hour intervals. [link] [comments]  |
| Oops, accidental tech support. Posted: 14 May 2019 06:55 AM PDT TLDR: Fixed a printer, got coffee and a job offering Sorry for bad english and/or formatting Before I get to the "tech support" part I would like to "set the stage", provide some background info to help understand why what happened was out of the ordinary. A few years ago I was a trainee at a large ISP. Most of the trainee program was me hopping from department to department, getting to know the company and the workflow. And most departments were not to happy to have a trainee assigned to them. By the time they teached them what they need to know they would move on to the next department and all the work they put into them would feel wasted. Thats why in the most cases as a trainee you wouldn't even get a "good morning" when you enter the office, no "thank you", when you get somebody a coffee. You were just "another trainee, lets hope he isn't to annoying and in three months we will get rid of him". Thats what I experienced in most departments during my trainee program - all but one. The department I was assigned to at the start of my third and last year in training was very different. It began, like most of my first days in a new department, with a talk with the manager. This was part of the standard procedure, welcoming me to the new department, telling me what I should do there, when I should work, etc. At the end of that meeting he wanted to print a timetable, so I could see when the people that should teach me some stuff were available. And it didn't work. He apologized to me, started fiddling with some stuff.. meanwhile I saw, that the printer setting was set to "print to pdf". While he picked up the phone to call the IT helpdesk I asked if I could try something. He was like "sure, whatever" and proceeded to call. By the time he had someone on the line I simply changed the setting and got the timetable. Fast forward 6 hours. On the early afternoon there was a team meeting, and among other things the manager introduced me to the rest of the team. "Hey, this is [Sintho], he is our new trainee. But he is not like the others, he knows stuff about computers. So if you have any problems with that, before calling IT just ask him." He didn't ask me if that was ok for me. And IT support was not the job I was in training for. So I was kinda surprised. This was a huge company. 200k+ employees, and the process of opening a ticket at IT and getting it fixed could take up to two weeks. Over the next few months I didn't learn much for my traineeship. But I fixed a lot of printers, showed features in outlook and excel, just simple stuff like that. And it wasn't to bad. For the first time in that company everybody treated me with respect. I never got told to "make coffee", or "get lunch". People got me lunch. People made me coffee. And as my last week in this department started the manager called me into his office. He told me, that he spoke to the trainee manager, and asked him if I could stay longer. He wanted me to stay in his department for the rest of the year, and offered me a job for when i finished my training. This felt really good. But after some time the tides began to turn. Some of the employees would call me when I was on vacation, or on the weekend, when they had IT problems at home. People from other departments heard about this and started emailing me. I had some very "interesting" IT-Service-encounters during that time, but those are stories for another time. I finished the year there, but didn't want to stay for the job I got offered. This was two years ago. [link] [comments]  |
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