The humming noise from that bloody cupboard Tech Support |
- The humming noise from that bloody cupboard
- The Email Is Down
- Had to help a coworker CYA against a bad CYA
- Your emails are rude and sarcastic.
- Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to myself
- Things get outta hand because user doesn't know what she needs
- Users are too predictable. In good ways and bad.
- Every day, but I'm always left dumbfounded.
- User wants VTO after calling help desk 3 hours into shift
| The humming noise from that bloody cupboard Posted: 01 Jun 2019 08:30 AM PDT LTL. FTP. My company looks after IT for a small lobbying group in our government (I'm in the UK), and all the users (a mixture of senior representatives and supporting staff) are either of the non-techy or elderly persuasion. Or both. Mostly they are nice to deal with, but somewhat hard work due to the above. One of the senior Ladies (capital L) was working late one night, and she called my direct number really late, like midnight late, in a panic. It was way out of hours so I don't know why I picked up, but I did: User - I was writing a very important speech and suddenly everything has gone down and I can't finish it. Me - Ok, what happened exac... User - This is very important. I'm giving this speech in Parliament tomorrow and I must finish it tonight. Me - Ok, what PC are you using and what application are you using? User - I am on my desktop PC in the office and I am using Word. I can't access the folder where my speech is saved and email isn't working. Me - (tries remote access, all PCs appear offline but it's midnight so not entirely surprising) It appears your machine is offline, which might explain things. Has there been a power outage or something like that? (They have no UPS, I know I know, but they refused to pay for it and it's a small office under 10 ppl. In my defence, all their services are cloud based.) User - No. Me - Ok, let's try to get you back on the network/back online. (we proceed to go through standard troubleshooting of checking the network cable, looking at Windows network status, etc — basically no connection.) Me - It looks like there might be a wider problem at the office, I can't reach any other machines there (including local storage/monitoring server and router). Can you go into the "computer cupboard" ? (their name for it) User - I don't want to go in there again. Me - (again — uh oh) Errr...? User - I was trying to concentrate on my speech and the humming noise from that bloody cupboard was distracting me, so I went in there and turned everything off. What a waste of electricity it all being on all the time is anyway. Me - (massive hand to face slap that she must have heard over the phone) Even the ones with the labels that say "Do Not Turn Off"? User - Yes. Me - Ok, well that does explain the problem. The equipment you turned off provides the network and the internet for your office, both of which you need to be able to work, eg use the shared drive and send emails. User - And? Me - Well, if it's all off then it can't do that. Shall I try and take you through starting everything back up again? We need to do in a specific order to be sure it all comes back... User - I haven't got time for that, I need to finish my speech! Me - You can't do that in the way you want to/intended to, because you've turned off all the necessary equipment. User - Send someone out now to sort this mess out! Me - It's midnight and you don't have 24/7 support. (Didn't help myself by answering this call in the first place!) I'll schedule someone to come to you tomorrow morning. User - But my speech... Me - Do you still have your old printer? (USB inkjet because she "doesn't like" the network laser) User - Yes. Me - Ok, I suggest you type and then print your speech on that, and take it with you tomorrow? (Before anyone says USB drive or whatever, she doesn't own one and doesn't even know what USB is, so I did not try and go there.) User - Ok, good idea, I was going to email it to my assistant to do that, but this will have to do. (click) Me - FFS [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 May 2019 12:58 PM PDT This one is a quick one. Customer calls me and says no one in the office can send or receive Email. I'm at my office which is off site. I log onto OWA and all the accounts are working and the person that called me even has an email in their inbox that they received 10 minutes ago. So I try to remote into the onsite server and it won't connect. So I call the manager onsite that originally called me with the problem and start walking her through getting me connected using my remote support software. I don't get far, because when I tell her to go to the specific website the conversation goes as follows: Me: "Please go to <website>." [link] [comments]  |
| Had to help a coworker CYA against a bad CYA Posted: 31 May 2019 06:54 PM PDT Document, document, document and CYA (cover your ass!) is a common theme on this subreddit, and with good reason! Today I had to help a coworker Cover Her Ass against an either malicious or incompetent CYA from a customer. I guess this was a CHA? I work for a SaaS vendor, and one of our clients is MegaGiantGlobalCorp. This client is, shall we say, quite difficult to handle. Their IT department is a shitshow that is peopled by Slick Willie types who constantly try to duck blame and shirk responsibility. For any problem we are immediately blamed, and when we show proof that an issue is on their end there's no accountability. But they pay us tons of money, so there's that! I rolled into work this morning and first thing saw a message in our internal IM from a remote-based tech support coworker. Let's call her Patty. She works for us but is based full-time at MegaGiantGlobalCorp's headquarters. Patty's request was for someone to jump on a webex with her, so I did. Patty: hey DeadMoneyDrew! Do you recognize this IP address in the whitelist? XX.255.XXX.3? I didn't recognize the IP, but there was a note from a former employee of ours indicating that he had added it to the whitelist. No other details than that, though. Me: Hmmm, looks like we added that IP, but I don't recognize it. I don't think it's from our data center but I have no idea what it is. Why? Patty: Slick Willie came by earlier and asked me about it. He's cleaning up the whitelist. I told him I'd look into it and let him know if it's safe to delete it. Me: I'd message the network team and ask them about it. If it's not one of our IPs then it's probably safe to delete. Patty: Sure, thanks. Hey, can we look at this other issue blah blah blah... We went on to looking at something else, but then I saw a popup preview of an email from Slick Willie on Patty's screen, and I caught a few words that concerned me. Me: Uhhh, Patty? Open that email that you just got from Slick Willie. She opened it and found more or less this: Slick Willie: Patty, per our conversation, IP address XX.255.XXX.3 is not relevant, and I can delete it from the whitelist. Thanks. Me: Ohhhh. If that's one of our IPs, and he deletes it from the list, it could cause an outage. Or at minimum a service degradation. Not cool. Patty: let out a string of obscenities that would make Samuel L. Jackson kneel and pray. Okay, not really, but she was frustrated. Patty: Ohhh, that guy! He doesn't listen and he doesn't think. I told him to WAIT until I did some research and that I'd get back to him. She went on to say that Slick Willie was constantly pressuring her on tasks and that he was always trying to shift blame to her or to one of our other remote-based techs when things went to shit. Me: Reply just to him. Tell him nicely but clearly that he misunderstood. You do NOT give permission to delete that IP from the whitelist because you don't know what it is. If he deletes it and it's critical then an outage could occur. Repeat that you'll do further research and get back to him, but that he is NOT to do anything until you say so. Then forward the email that you send to Slick Willie to the account manager and let him know what's going on. Later I heard that the account manager called Slick Willie's boss and let the boss know that Slick Willie was possibly out and about deleting things from the production environment without first understanding what they are. I'm pretty sure that Slick Willie got an ass chewing. Man. Having to CYA against a CYA. I've never seen that until today. I need a drink. Bourbon should do. [link] [comments]  |
| Your emails are rude and sarcastic. Posted: 31 May 2019 06:59 PM PDT Recent story from the past week. A bit of backstory. My job is a small place of about 4-6 people, handling 25-30 different sites all around the state, 3000 computers, mostly small clinics that are far away from a big city that require a helpdesk at times. (rant)A handful of these sites are places where grown children work, every dang day its some new bullcrap in a poorly made single sentence, which requires training in reading Moron. I swear there's gotta be a book on how to speak the language of Stupid somewhere in the world, seems to be a skill you pick up.(rant over) One particular site full of these people puts in a ticket on a Friday at 3pm, asking for access to Outlook, a website, and the same website just a different site (think yahoo.com and yahoo mail). Cool, easy enough. Check past tickets, this user she wants was given access months ago. I reply back in email form to let her know this person has the required access, and they should be able to just log right into these items (especially Outlook as this site has an automatic fill-out for the program, just enter the info and you're in). This goes back and forth for a week, till the next Friday. Longer than it should have gone. Mostly trying to get information like "What PC does this person use primarily, have they tried to get into the site or outlook?" Somehow this was taken negatively, as this gal had felt she had given all the information I would ever need:
I call her up at the site, get this settled. I'm not going to get into what was said cause its kind of fuzzy at this point. All in all I have to explain: 1. None of us know where his location is as we work remotely and need a PC name 2. She says he uses 1 PC, but I can search for his last name in our system showing all the PCs at every single site and it shows him logged into three computers for the entire week 3. If he does not have Outlook/Office installed then we can get someone down there to get that done in 20 minutes She threatens to include 2 higher up managers into each and every email in the future, which is actually preferred as it gives us more proof we called and emailed back looking for information, and has the gall to tell me my emails were rude and sarcastic and not appreciated. I apologize and thank her for the feed back as its never my intention to have my emails interpreted as rude. I end that call somewhat flustered, looking back through the 10 emails I sent back and forth looking for any sign of rudeness. I ask my coworker to check the inbox as we can all see each others emails as long as they have the helpdesk CC'ed, she sees no rudeness. I message the owners wife, who also works there doing different support, about a user telling me that she thought I was rude. She looks at my chain and also says there was no rudeness or sarcasm, just looking for information. In the end, one of the onsite people got to the PC and installed Office at the PC, and the guy who uses this one PC all the time has never been logged back in for 2 weeks now. The nerve of some people. Edit: Tldr, guy needs outlook installed, lady thinks my emails asking about where outlook is needed are rude and sarcastic [link] [comments]  |
| Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to myself Posted: 31 May 2019 11:37 AM PDT I just got off of the most painful support call of my life. G1: the guy who answered the phone. Had a thicccc accent I couldn't understand him. G2: guy who G1 handed the phone to. U or User: person I ended up helping Me: Hello this is IT I'm looking for Sam (name changed of course). G1: okay............... M: um... is Sam there? G1: I'm sorry who is this? M: this is IT I have a ticket to help Sam login to her email. Is she there? G1: oh yeah hold on. G2: hello this is unintelligible how can can I help you. M: eye roll intensifies Hello, this is X from IT I have a ticket for Sam. Are they available? G2: Well I can neither confirm or deny that there is a Sam here. (anyone who works or has worked for a medical institution knows this line) M: this is IT I'm looking for Sam an employee not a patient. G2: Oh I was just handed the phone without context you are looking for unintelligible hold on. User: hello, who is this? M: screaming internally This is IT you can't login to your email? U: yes I'm logging into the computer now This is all painful and slow but wait there is more. I'm going to skip over the 5 minutes of me trying to get her to tell me the computer ID so I can remote in and watch her but I promise it was excruciating (along with watching her mistype her password 5 times and somehow not get locked out). M: okay can you please show me your email login process U: yes... (she proceeds to do everything right except when greeted with the UAC that oddly pops up from our parent companies server only in IE) M: Okay you just need to add @company.com onto the username. U: okay... ignoring what I said and proceeds to type in the password and hit okay M: no you need to add the full email address onto your username. U: okay... does the same thing again M: okay click other user and add- rapid fire clicking the okay button At this point im done. I mute my phone, loudly start cursing to releasing the frustration, locking remote input and fill it in for her. As soon as I do that she logs in just fine. The kicker... drum roll this person isnt Sam. It's someone else I just didn't hear the name and got an entirely different person. now excuse me while I go track down the real Sam. [link] [comments]  |
| Things get outta hand because user doesn't know what she needs Posted: 31 May 2019 05:32 PM PDT LTLFTP, I'll try to keep this as succinct as possible. I am a team lead for a 'start up' company that supports medical centers for the east coast of the U.S. Most of the time we deal with things like their tablet doesn't have data, or they can't schedule a visit for a nurse. So we work with everyone from Medical Directors down to office staff like the clinic manager. Towards the end of my day yesterday, an IT manager from the client side was IM'ing me asking if i can help reset a password for an MD he was working with directly. This MD happened to be part of a new care center our client was acquiring, so their stuff isn't quite set up yet. This is not something he typically does, he's just filling in for someone for the moment. So i said sure, and i sent him the temp password. Then he asks if he can have the user call the helpdesk to get his email set up on his phone. Again, sure thing. Call the number and anyone of my staff can help him out. So i notify my staff that an MD will be calling, but after about 10 minutes it doesn't seem like they have called in yet. Suddenly, one of my T1's is messaging me telling me to pull her call ASAP because the lady she was speaking with was a total...you know. So i pull the call. What basically ensued was the user asking for a Microsoft Office license key on their computer to be activated. This isn't something T1 has the ability to do, so the user (whom was a 'spokesperson' for the MD) got pissed off that we wouldn't help them. She hung up. OK, so i email the call to my manager so he can escalate it up to the client side. As that is happening, the user escalated it up with their AreaVP who called us back but got the wrong department. I get approached by that department head asking wtf is going on. I'm trying to explain the situation, and he transferred the call back to my helpdesk. So now my agent is talking to the AVP, my manager is talking to the client side IT manager and i'm trying to figure out what the hell is happening. There's a lot of other details involved in this but my T1 was able to help the MD (who was extremely nice) do other things he needed to do. The client side IT manager agreed that this was the initial user not understanding what she needed. I.E claiming he needed email on his phone, not his computer and that he never actually used the temp password i had provided like an hour earlier. However, a VIP from the client side somehow got involved and told us that the initial call was something we should have been able to handle and it's our fault that it got escalated. TLDR; User doesn't know what she's asking for, gets pissed. Escalates it up. Things get out of hand and client VIP thinks it's our fault. [link] [comments]  |
| Users are too predictable. In good ways and bad. Posted: 31 May 2019 03:58 PM PDT Simple four step process was required for 20 of our users. We are a small business under 50 employees so I know everyone very well. I made a mental bet in my head on how things would unfold after I sent out the directions and flipped a switch. Like clock work. One specific person emails me within 10 minutes with 5 questions and proceeds to loop others in to share their concerns. 10 certain people do not send me anything and the process goes smooth for them after following screen shots and directions. 3 people will not realize whats going on until Monday because they constantly check out on Fridays at 10am. 6 people do not follow the directions at all and send in tickets because it "Just isn't working" or "I did everything and it still doesn't work". All with no screen shots or usable information. The serial Skyper sends me "Hey." "Are you there?" "Ugh." "This is being such a pain and not working." "Call me." (In five different skype messages). Then proceeds to argue with demanding to get on a call and not even send screen shots. Don't even bother mentioning a ticket. For fun, schedule a call later in the day, continue to walk the through the 5 minute process they just waited 4 hours to go through with me and just wait for it to click and watch them find their own mistake. Wish they would just learn to spend a little extra time because it is equally awkward every time with the silence and them realizing what happened. Good times. But those users that can just get stuff done without the hand holding are really awesome and are to be treated like Kings and Queens. If they were submitting the 90 % of the tickets like the other group I do not know if I would be sane. [link] [comments]  |
| Every day, but I'm always left dumbfounded. Posted: 31 May 2019 11:21 AM PDT User calls in
... (I find out she needs a password reset for a certain system. She's been reset earlier today but is just now getting to change her password.) ... It won't take my new password.
Yes
Okay, it won't take the new one either.
Yes
Summer4
Okay... still not working.
Winter4
You make this so complicated! How am I supposed to remember the password if I make it too hard?
That worked. (click) [link] [comments]  |
| User wants VTO after calling help desk 3 hours into shift Posted: 31 May 2019 09:01 AM PDT This story isn't necessarily 100% tech support related, but I got this call while I was a temp for a tier 1 help desk for a retail company. Feel free to remove if you don't think it belongs mods. Pretty much just involves $Me and $Lady. I probably spent about 20 minutes on the phone with her. There will be some paraphrasing, this happened back in early december. Also all of the calls we took were recorded. $Me: Thank you for calling help desk, how can I help you? $Lady: Hi, yes, I live in an apt complex and the fire alarms started going off about 3 hours ago and we were forced to evacuate. Can I get troubleshoot time or VTO from you? For context on the policy for this job. We were allowed to give any user 1 hour of paid troubleshoot time if they have issues, whether it's a technical issue or not. After that, if they weren't going to be able fix their issue within that time (Generally hardware issues where they needed new equipment or something) they would need to call back and request 1 hour VTO from us. But that's all we can give anyone. After that they have to call the VTO desk to request further time off. Next thing I noticed while on the phone with her is, I hear absolutely nothing going on in the back ground on the phone. Not saying she is lying about the fire alarm, but the fact I hear nothing besides her is fishy. $Me: I'm sorry, I won't be able to give you any time off, you're already out 3 hours from your start time, you'll need to contact your supervisor and VTO desk to request time off. $Lady: Why can't you just give me the small amount of time!? I wasn't able to call you sooner because I don't personally have a cellphone! I was only just now able to borrow a phone from someone! $Me: I'm sorry that you weren't able to contact me until just now, but since you specifically stated that you've been out for 3 hours, I'm unable to help you in this regard. $Lady: *Getting quite upset* Just give me the time! This went back and forth for some time all the while she is getting more and more upset. She eventually hangs up on me because I won't help her. I proceed to forward the ticket number to my supervisor with all the details of said conversation. Who in turn, reports it to her supervisor. I'm unsure as to what happened with her, but I would assume it was less than good for her. EDIT: For clarification, customer service jobs at this company were generally WFH (Work From Home). [link] [comments]  |
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