Retail IT can be shockingly simple Tech Support |
- Retail IT can be shockingly simple
- The BSDfH or the Bastard Service Desk from Hell!
- "I know networks!"
- IT should put a note on the computers or something...
- Welcome to IT I suppose
- I think I've graduated as a user.
- Laptop won't connect to TV.
- Driving a Bulldozer through the Brothel
- Screw your airflow
| Retail IT can be shockingly simple Posted: 13 May 2019 04:29 PM PDT Got a fresh one for you guys I work retail tech support, think Nerd brigade style tech support, but with more sales side involved. Being that I do sales, I'm also required to help set up new product displays. My manager was having issues getting the new displayer to turn on. Having nothing better to do I decide to go help. I begin by going over the basics, is it plugged in, is it switched on (were talking extreme basics, basically a circuit board with some lights attached) and csnt figure it out. I double check the power and realise that only 1 of the 2 prongs is in the outlet, the other is sitting snuggly next to the outlet. I reach under the shelf to unplug the display and plug it in properly, when I feel a sharp pain going through my body, and a sudden loss of control over the use of my arms. Yup, that's right, in the middle of the store, I Just electrocuted myself, much to the amusement of my manager and the elderly couple in the aisle. Had a good laugh about it and got an early break out of it at least [link] [comments]  |
| The BSDfH or the Bastard Service Desk from Hell! Posted: 14 May 2019 03:42 AM PDT I work in IT for a big car manufacturer (40.000 employees at this plant alone) and we use a tool to document cables, switches, firewalls, routers, servers and stuff. For this tool you need a user/password to do your work. I started working here at march and we requested this user for me shortly after I started working here. We know that for some tools it will take some time to get the requested users. We applied for my user in march and we waited for a mail telling me to set a password, using my initial password and start working with this tool. Weeks passed and at some point we got suspicious and requested a status update. Turned out, the user has never been applied for! OK, sometimes things get lost, lets do it all over. Again weeks passed and we requested another status update. The feedback from service desk was "User has been created." and we mailed back "Nice, but why did the user NOT receive his initial password? Answer: "User has been created, please send in application form for lost password reset. Use file in link." So, I tried to follow the link and (surprise, surprise) I got an error "temporary unavailable" and this for 3 days. To I called service desk and tried to open a ticket. The guy in the call center 600km away also confirmed that my user has been created and in about two days I can reset my password and use the tool. This was on Friday. Today (Thursday) I received an e-mail saying "Password reset inquiry unable to complain. No such user!" Right now, I feel like driving 600km and beating some guy with a patch cable senseless. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 May 2019 04:07 AM PDT Let me start of by saying this is my first post in this particular sub, but I have been a lurker for quite some time. I'm a manager in a retailer focused on cameras and related gear across a number of stores in a southern hemisphere country, so my role when dealing with customers can vary from sales, customer service to yes, tech support. The type of customer I see can vary from rude and entitled, thick as a cocker spaniel with its head in a peanut butter jar and everything in between. My favourite quick ones are always the ones that decry, "I drove three hours to get here and you don't even have what I want?!" - they tend not to like my, "Well that's plenty of time to call and confirm stock" answer. We also often get customers that don't understand what a warranty actually covers. This is a tale about one customer who refused to listen because it conflicted with what he "knew." Some background information before we start, back in 2011-2012, camera manufacturer's started adding WiFi communication to their cameras, so users could link up their phones, transfer photos and use the phone as remote control, amongst other features. This was generally achieved with the following steps:
Not the fastest process, but it worked. However, for the less tech-savvy user, this was a bit of a headache, so manufacturer's tried to work out easier, quicker ways to get his to happen. One such company (that American's find hard to properly pronounce) created a method that used a combination of Bluetooth and WiFi to work, I'll call this "CrapLink." While they weren't the only manufacturer to use this combined type of communication, they were the first and marketed it quite hard. Now the biggest difference to the earlier method is that CrapLink required all the setup to be done from within the CrapLink app itself, NOT the phones settings. CrapLink uses Bluetooth to communicate with the camera, and only activates the WiFi radio when transmitting photos or acting as a "Live View" remote - ie the phone's screen shows what the camera sees in near realtime. In the early days, it was also quite difficult to correctly set up, as if you did one thing wrong, you'd have to delete any and all trace of the Bluetooth pairing on both devices and start again. I think some of you can see where this might be leading to... One fine afternoon I looked up from processing some invoices to some raised voices from my "miserable" Scottish salesman (that was the description from one interesting customer complaint) and almost shouting from a very thick Scottish accent emanating from a rather rotund, red-faced fellow who seemingly just wanted to whinge. So I decided to head off yet another complaint and try to work out what the problem was. Turns out this gentleman had purchased one such CrapLink supported camera, and couldn't get it to work. He went on to say he'd been a computer and/or network technician for x amount of years (I really wasn't paying attention) and that his camera was faulty because he couldn't get the WiFi work. He hadn't read the manual or the CrapLink instructions, but insisted it should work like any other WiFi camera according to his camera club (just imagine the worst technical forum you've ever been to, where people just argue and fight over fractions of a percentage point of performance, mix that in with public hall full of salty old men and throw a few cameras into the mix, and you have a camera club. So a REALLY great place for advice /s) Both my salesmen and myself attempted multiple times to try to explain the way CrapLink works, but our raging tomato-faced friend just wouldn't let us get a word in. Eventually my salesmen stormed off to calm down and I had to enter my manajerk form. Essentially monotone voice, modulating amplitude as required - the louder they get, the quieter I get (and I'm softly spoken to begin with) - and not offering any emotion whatsoever, and often talking to the customer like a child. Me: Stop User: It should work thi- Me: NO. User: What? Me: Are you prepared to listen? User: I know networks Me: But you don't know CrapLink. User: The camera club says- Me: Do they use CrapLink cameras? User: No Me: Then they don't know CrapLink. Let me repea- User: Doesn't matter, it should work this way, I've worked with networks for x years and... **I eventually stopped paying attention, just stared at him with no reaction until he finally sputtered out** Me: Let me repeat myself. Are you prepared to listen, and not talk over me? User: Yes. Me: Ok. Forget what you know about networks, it's not relevant here. Forget what you camera club says, they don't know anything about this. You will NEVER be able to connect directly via WiFi. It's only active when the CrapLink app tells it to be. **The next few minutes was essentially me repeating myself several times, with "Not relevant" and "No" thrown in a few times for good measure.** Eventually I managed to either calm him down, or just wear him down, when he realised I wasn't just going to agree with him, and cleared all trace of past pairings on the camera and his phone, and carried out the proper CrapLink pairing procedure. User: I'm going to get my WiFi tester on this at home to make sure its actually working. Me: *groaning internally* As I've explained several times already, unless CrapLink is actively sending photos or transmitting LiveView, you won't find anything.... User: I don't believe that... *and left the store without thanks* Luckily he never ended up leaving a complaint, it's probably the most blunt and uncaring I've ever been with a customer. [link] [comments]  |
| IT should put a note on the computers or something... Posted: 13 May 2019 08:34 AM PDT So this happened last week, I am still trying to wrap my head around the general ability for some people to breathe let along operate a computer. Ticket comes in, the Projector and computer in the classroom are both showing black screens. The issue we have been having is the computer defaulting to the projector when the monitor is turned off. We have told the departments several times not to turn off the computer monitors, just the projectors. And yet this is still an issue. But normally, one screen or the other will show something. I make my way over to the classroom and find the instructor bringing up the class work on the projector so I asked if there was an issue. Instructor: "Oh there was until about a minute ago when I looked down and realized the computer was turned off." Me: "Well that would be why it wasn't working. So everyth...." Instructor: Pointing a finger at me. "You know, you guys should put a sign up or something telling us to make sure the computer is turned on." Me: "......" Instructor: "I mean, I didn't even think to check to see if the computer was turned on when I came in here. It normally is on. You should have a note taped up here that tells us we should check to see if the computer is turned on!" Me: Looking around the room to see several students looking at the Instructor like she had just had an alien pop out of her chest. "Well, I mean, yeah. We should probably look into putting a note on the computers telling people that they have to be TURNED ON in order to work. But you are up now so I will let you get to your class." And I left the room before she could say anything else. And oh my fellow tech support friends, I wish that was the end of this tale, but alas it is not so. I received an email from the department head a few hours later asking if there was a way to disconnect the projector from the computer so that it would not keep causing issues like the one I just looked at. I went over to talk to him and asked if he wanted me to remove the projector from his classrooms. "Oh no. We still need the projectors for them to teach their classes. I just want the projectors disconnected from the computers so we don't keep having these issues." So, once more, I explain about not turning off the monitors or the computers, just turning off the projectors. Edited for spacing. I'm still tired [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 May 2019 01:48 PM PDT I work for a chain of primary care clinics as an IT Support Tech. One of my first tickets said that the DVR for one of our clinics was down. I grabbed a company car and drove the 23 miles to that clinic. Upon arriving, I go the closet and began inspecting the DVR. It won't turn on and the office manager tells me that she has tried multiple times to do so. I checked the back of the DVR and sighed heavily. She asked me what was wrong, and I just plugged the DVR's power cord in to the back of the device and... like magic... it booted right up. She told me I was a genius as she had tried "everything". I just smiled and thanked her for the compliment. I have no idea who unplugged it, but thankfully it hasn't been a repeat issue. [link] [comments]  |
| I think I've graduated as a user. Posted: 13 May 2019 12:45 PM PDT Disclaimer: I do not work in tech support, or at any kind of help desk. So I'm not sure if this will qualify for this sub. I have a relatively new phone. A Google pixel 3 to be exact. I had the phone for about six months, when it started acting weird. It would turn off on it's own after about 30 seconds of use. This is an average. Sometimes it would stay on for about a minute, and other times it would shut down as soon as I turned it on. So, using the google-fu that I learned from you guys, I started my troubleshooting journey. It was simple enough. I simply searched my phone model and the issue I was having. First search result was a forum with a list of things I could try. Bingo. So I went through the list as follows: I updated all apps. Searched for any updates for the phone itself. Did a factory reset and backed up my data on my Google account. When that didn't work I did another factory reset and this time excluded apps in my backup in case one of them was causing it. That also didn't work, so I looked up how to do a master reset. None of the above resolved the issue, so I figured it must be a hardware problem. The next day I wrote down all the steps I took to trouble shoot and went to my local $big-name-phone-carrier. I showed the tech everything I tried, expecting him to have at least one ot two things that I hadn't thought of. But he didn't. He looked up my account and told me he could have another phone delivered in a couple of days. It was then that I realized that I was no longer a dumb user. I had tried everything that was possible to fix my issue, and the tech had no other suggestions. So do I get my certificate in the mail, or is there an office that I need to go to? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 May 2019 06:56 AM PDT This happened a few weeks ago. At $company, we have meeting rooms with large TV's in them for presentations, etc. $User called the helpdesk, saying that there must be an issue with the TV, since $User plugged the connector into his notebook, but the TV wasn't responding. I made my way to the meeting room to see if I could find the issue. I found the issue within a second or two. $User thought that the presenter-dongle was used to magically connect his laptop to the TV to transfer his desktop. After pluging the cable (which was clearly connected to the TV and ready to grab from where he was sitting) into $Users laptop, the issue was solved and the $User let out a comment about technology being complicated. After smiling, noding and leaving the room, I took the longer route back to my desk to avoid as many offices as possible. [link] [comments]  |
| Driving a Bulldozer through the Brothel Posted: 13 May 2019 08:31 AM PDT As promised, this recently happened to me. First I have got to lay out the scene. Imagine in a line you have a major road(city thoroughfare), with a narrow gate off the major road, which leads to a narrow bridge (less than 1m wide) which goes over a railway corridor in a deep cutting. And on the far side of the railway (up against the railway brick wall) was a small compound/ yard in which was our $BigExpensivePart. For $BigExpensivePart think of a couple of shipping containers fulll of electronics that are wired up to buried cables to form part of national critical infrastructure. The yard was purchased / made for us infrastructure people a very long time ago (I guess shortly after the dinosaurs), to provide access and a working area for the $BigExpensivePart. Then there was a 3-4 story brick building (converted industrial), which fronted onto a local road Our technicians had not needed to physically examine/ inspect/ maintain this $BigExpensivePart for a while. As I explained in my previous tale, I am one of a team of troubleshooters, think second line support for maintaining lots of $BigExpensinveParts that are spread all around the country (Critical infrastructure) Now onto the tale: a few weeks ago we received a call that a wall was leaning.Inspector was dispatched, inspector arrived, inspector swore, then inspector phoned me. When I arrived at site the wall seperating the yard from the railway was leaning over heavily, and the only thing stopping the wall, a few tonnes of dirt and our $BigExpensivePart from dropping 15 ish meters down onto the commuter railway was the power of prayer. And an $EnterprisingLocal had built a small apartment in the yard, that we had not previously known about. The way that the apartment was built, directly onto the leaning wall to the railway, meant that we could not get to the wall to repair it. We knocked on the front door of the apartment, and were denied access, but by shouting through the letterbox we determined that it was a rental property and the landlord was the owner of the brothel behind us. Queue the scratched record sound. This was the first we knew that the 4 story brick building was a brothel. We got a contractor on site the same day to carefully demolish the bits of the leaning wall over the railway the same day. But the parts of the leaning wall that were holding up the apartment were inaccessible to us, until the apartment was gone. Next day we came back with building surveyors, to examine the apartment, and found that the apartment needed to be demolished in 1 piece or small pieces could drop onto the railway, and that the tennant had moved out in a hurry, (something about tennant being wanted by our equivalent of the FBI, I don't know the details). Due to the location there was no way to get any construction vehicles anywhere near to the apartment, so after a lot of headscratching, we arranged a meeting with the police, local govt, highways and railway people and decided to demolish brothel building, to gain access to the apartment, to allow us to demolish the wall. This is beginning to sound like a professional trail of destruction, but is not as bad as it sounds, we made good the whole area at the end. There are only a certain number of techniques for demolisihing a multi story brick building, and they are: 1/ blow it up. Idea rejected, as too many surrounding buildings. 2/ steeplejack technique, I.E. send workers onto the top of the building and remove 1 brick at a time and throw it down. Rejected as too slow. 3/ Wrecking ball, rejected as insufficient space to get a swing of the ball. 4/ Mechanical jaws on the ends of mechanical arms, rejected as there was no space to position the vehicles that the arms were attached to. 5/ driving a large armoured vehicle such as a bulldozer or tank through the building, this was the option selected. So I had the task of sending out emails to lots of friends in low places, asking "have you got a working tank that we can borrow?". (I want to add the joke comment "don't you know that there is a war on?" which has nothing to do with the tale, but it makes me laugh. None of our friends had any tanks to spare, so we modified a bulldozer, A Team style, to reinforce the roof of the cab and add a battering ram. A colleague had job of going into the brothel with a plain clothes policeman to explain that he premises needed to be vacated, so that the building could be demolished. As an aside my innervoice went into overdrive, thinking if the occupants decided to hold a seige / sit in protest, they would probably have enough bondage gear on the premisies to make their extraction very problematic. Once we had vacant access to the brick building (former brothel by this point) we operatives made the building safe, by cutting off gas and electricity, removing glass windows, and removing gas bottles. Then early on a sunday morning a couple of weeks ago the armoured bulldozer was driven through the brothel to demolish it. Then almost as an afterthought, the apartment was pulled down, yard cleared, $BigExpensivePart temporarily moved to a new location, and the leaning wall was taken down brick by brick and rebuilt properly, and the whole area brought up to code. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 May 2019 07:05 AM PDT Tl;dr at the end. About seven or so years ago, I worked for a fair-sized K-12 school district, as the junior IT person. Essentially I did all the "field" work: swap out, dust out, blow out, take out, PLUG IT IN~ PLUG IT IN~, shake about, pull out, have a smoke out, look like I was doing something important-errr... out doesn't really work here... We supported both the computers the students used, as well as any equipment the teachers and other faculty used. (I. Hate. Smart boards.) Strangely, the most trouble I personally had was with the elementary teachers. Why they thought they were such tough cookies, I'll never understand, but they were often in the stage between being ignorant and being knowledgeable enough to be dangerous, and cleaning up their messes afterwards was always annoying. One of them I remember very clearly, because she made me so much extra work for no reason. She'd put in a ticket due to her (very old, 6-7 years old at the time, to be fair) laptop that she used for the overhead projector becoming extremely hot, occasionally shutting down unprompted. The first time around, she helpfully placed the machine on a crisp, clean corner of her very-large desk for me to work on in peace. I dusted out the fans, thinking that would solve it. The next day, the ticket was reopened. I grabbed a spare fan out of another very old laptop that I knew worked, thinking the fan was just dying and not whirring at optimum efficiency anymore. Once again, she'd helpfully placed it on a crisp, clean corner of her very-large desk. I swapped the fans out, went back to the office, closed the ticket. The next day, it was, again, reopened. Except, this time, it was "too hot to touch." I went back out to her classroom, which, of course, was in the elementary school that was the farthest away (bright side, I got fuel reimbursement), to find her machine sitting on the shelf she usually has it when using the overhead. After some fiddling, I flipped it upside down. Under this laptop was a very large stack of sticker sheets, envelopes, letters, notebook papers, what looked like student worksheets, just, whatever, a stack thick enough to completely block all of the bottom vents. Well, no wonder it was getting so hot. I took this stack, moved it to the side, and told her not to do that anymore, because she was blocking the vents and preventing the fan from working properly. Apparently, she heard "it's fixed," and stopped listening. Over the course of my remaining half a year with that district, I replaced probably over ten fans that she'd burnt out with her selective hearing affliction. Short side-story, this district had computers of the manufacturer known for thoughtful machines in the libraries, that ran better than everything else in any district building, that I'm pretty sure were built back in the age of dinosaurs. They inspired my love of this manufacturer. Tl;dr: I, but a lowly computer repair technician, could not possibly understand the overwhelming urge to stuff paper items beneath one's laptop a teacher is often overcome with. Many dead laptop fan. Very constant replace. I was not a big fan of this teacher. [link] [comments]  |
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