I made a regrettable mistake on family vacation... Tech Support |
- I made a regrettable mistake on family vacation...
- Instructions unclear...
- What corporate thinks of as an adequate tech level for an IT company
- You're not escalating to the right department
- How I Went From the Tech Guy to The ID10T
- If you don't work it like it's hot...
| I made a regrettable mistake on family vacation... Posted: 24 Jul 2019 05:28 AM PDT I feel like such a dumb-ass for letting this happen... So, my uncle bought a beach house on the east coast and organized a large family vacation, to which my wife and I were invited. Hell yeah! We're going to the beach! The house is HUGE, and every room is decked out with wall mounted TVs, DVD players, and Roku sticks for video streaming. The biggest downside is definitely my neurotic, antisocial, suuuper needy aunt (lets call her Nancy), who clearly has no social graces or sense of personal boundaries, and zero chill...she reminds me of folks I've met who have Asperger's or mild Autism except, in her case, dial the "neurotic and annoying" meter to 11 and you've got my aunt Nancy. She decides that she's going to spend this whole vacation flitting about, working on and stressing out over every single little item at the property in need of repair. This includes appliances, furniture and, yep you guessed it, electronics. She was going to stress and freak over this stuff for the entire 9-day vacation, though I didn't realize it at first. So we arrive and begin to unpack, greeting our family members as they come in and getting a feel for the place we'll be staying. Nancy tries to switch on the living room TV, but the remote isn't working. It turns out the Roku remote needed to be re-paired with the TV. It's a simple fix; I offer to check it out and get it working in short order. And then, my friends, I uttered the thing that would haunt me for the next 9 days...I couldn't stop myself...it all happened so fast... I turned to my Aunt Nancy and (oh you poor, ignorant fool), looked her right in the eyes and I said: "Hey, I'm an IT technician! Just let me know if you need help with anything!" ... (edits for grammar n such) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Jul 2019 03:44 AM PDT Not my first post but quick background: I work for unnamed bank/ building society in the UK doing admin / maintenance of banking systems. There's about 50 separate 3rd party systems we administrate, setting up new and resetting user credentials. The users manager sends in a access request form, we complete it and the database sends the user their log in details directly. I'm working first line support today and I get a call from illiterate customer (IC). I will play the role of me: -phone rings- Me: Hello, how can I help? IC: I've been sent a new password for (credit card system) and it's not working. Me: Alright, I think that's what we'd call a single sign on system. That means you just use your admin password to log into it. IC: No, there is a password here on the email and it's not working. I even tried to copy and paste it in and it's still not working. Me: Okay, I'm sorry about that. It could just be a mistake on our part. Can you try your admin password though? IC: My Windows password? Me: Yes, please try that! IC: It worked! Did you change it just now? Me: I've not changed anything, I don't even know your employee ID. We're also not allowed to do that over the phone. IC: Why did they put a password for me to enter then? It was very confusing. Me: I'm not sure, the database keeps what's sent to you confidential. What word was there in the password field out of interest? IC: Oh, I'm not sure how to read it it. It looks very technical, I'll have to spell it out. It says open square bracket U-S-E-A-D-M-I-N-P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D, then close square bracket. Me: It says [use admin password]? IC: Yes? [link] [comments]  |
| What corporate thinks of as an adequate tech level for an IT company Posted: 24 Jul 2019 01:29 PM PDT Okay, so this is my first time... Please be gentle. I work for a relatively massive IT company in a role that would mostly be considered customer support, but we are a weird hybrid with tech support. The following is a condensed version of my long struggle with corporate to get us some upgrades, since we are a legally vital, country level department. Me: Okay, so, we need some upgrades. Best would be completely new office PCs everywhere(about 200), but I realize that is unlikely to happen. Can we at least get a second 4 GB RAM stick and a small SSD in our current PCs? (those are our bottlenecks for various reasons) Corporate: Oh, no no no, that would be expensive. Me: Those are literally the cheapest computer parts. It would be a drop in the bucket. Corporate: Sorry, that cannot be done. Besides, your team has the newest set of PCs anyway. If we did have a new batch, you would have to be the last ones to get it. Me: Wait, what? How old are these? Corporate: 5 years. Me: ...what? How old are the rest? Corporate: Only 10 years. Me: .....We are supposed to be a first rate IT company... Actually, nevermind. Okay, fine. Then can we at least get an upgrade to *second most important program*? You literally have to wait 5 seconds at the very least after every single click, and it is full of things we do not even need, which are slowing it down. Corporate: What do you mean? We even held a poll and put in the things you wanted. Me: Literally no one asked for those things. Everyone wanted it to be faster though. Corporate: Well, we did tell you that that is not a valid request. Me: ......And what about *most important program*? Corporate: What about it? It is literally the most modern in the industry. Me: The developers stopped support for our version 2 years ago... It is so slow, we are literally spending half our time just waiting for it to do something. Corporate: well, we still have a contract to use it for some years... Me: .......I dread to ask, but do you know all that admin stuff you force us to do besides everything else? Corporate: Yes? Me: Here is a list of simple things that would be easy to implement and massively boost speed and efficiency. Corporate: But we would have to pay the developers to do those, no? Me: Alright, then here is a program I wrote. You literally just have to get IT security to nod on it, and everyone just has to run it. It costs nothing, I volunteer as support, and it should make life much easier for everyone involved. It just simulates a very fast user. Corporate: You are not allowed to put any outside program on these computers! That is strict corporate policy! And so on, and so forth.... The struggle continues to this very day... Edit: I just remembered. I have been constantly pestering IT for months to get things updated too. I am talking about things like Firefox, free programs that we support but have no right to install, JAVA 8... we still use 7 and our supported programs do not even run with 7 anymore most of the time, etc. So far, all they managed is to make the out of date problem with some of them, change to a corrupted install problem... Edit 2: So, I just woke up and people seem to like this... Many of you suggeste I explain to management in money sense. This may work, but t will probably not. To put it simply, the problem is that we are so massive, our department is not even a blip on the radar, and that the company is basically a government money sink. No one is motivated by profit, we get it pumped in intravenously. [link] [comments]  |
| You're not escalating to the right department Posted: 24 Jul 2019 04:26 PM PDT This was a short, but sweet one that I got a few weeks ago, that still makes me laugh when I think about it. Cast: me = some guy named azisles02 $cus = customer Backstory: Working on an issue with her computer with something that I can't fix remotely & need to send to our on-site staff (called Desktop). Me: Unfortunately, I'm unable to get that fixed for you here, but I'm going to escalate this to our Desktop Support group and they'll be able to get that fixed for you. $cus: Why are you sending it to desktop? I have a laptop! Me: That's just the name of the group, but they handle laptops too don't worry. $cus: You sure you're sending it to the right group? Me: Yes I am. I've seen them work on many tickets for laptops before and get them fixed. $cus: I still don't think you're right. Please send it to laptop support. And people wonder why I have so little faith in humanity. [link] [comments]  |
| How I Went From the Tech Guy to The ID10T Posted: 24 Jul 2019 10:50 AM PDT This happened at my old employment. I worked in finance and used computers to service customers. Everyone thought of me as Peace, the Tech Guy. I swear all I do most of the time is Google it and if that doesn't work I'll mess about with the device until the issue is fixed. But hey, they gave me free cookies sometimes so I didn't mind helping out with their personal devices. This is a tale of the time I was the ID10T. You see my keyboard wasn't typing in the specialist system we use for payments. By 'wasn't typing' I mean it took 10 seconds for the word(s) to appear on the screen. Queue internal rage at how businesses still use outdated and ancient legacy systems.i At the time, there wasn't anyone on the phones in my dept as they started later than I did; so nobody saw me headdesk which worked in my favour. I put my tech hat on and did what I thought was the best fix; swap keyboards with the workstation next to me and see if it is my keyboard or the actual system. So down I get on my knees and take out my keyboard cable and put it on my desk so it doesn't get lost in spaghetti junction. I take out the cable of the keyboard of my neighbour's workstation and plug it in. What do you know; it's still not working. After gulping down on my (first) cup of Joe, I sat up thinking this was going to be a very technical; after all I did have my tech hat on. Before I thought to get into the nitty and gritty side of things, I just thought, "hey, let me just turn it off and on again." And what do you know; that worked! Great, I thought and put the keyboard's cable back into my neighbour's tower. I sit back and I'm ready to start, or so I thought. I had the same issue that caused me to switch keyboards in the first place. So I shake/move the mouse quite fast and I feel my hand hit a cable. Turns out it was the cable for my keyboard. I hadn't plugged it back in. Cried internally. i This was at my last workplace and they ran Windows 7 Enterprise. A few of my friends have let me know that they now all use Windows 10. I call it ancient because this happened at the end of 2018. [link] [comments]  |
| If you don't work it like it's hot... Posted: 24 Jul 2019 03:37 AM PDT Hi all! So excited to finally post here! So about three years ago I got hired at a small electric brokering firm to help them develop a new IoT hardware product that would report electricity usage in real time. The grand idea was that by receiving minute-by-minute updates, we could more accurately bill customers and also try to help them save money by sending notifications whenever their usage was abnormally high. Over the course of that project we went down a ton of rabbit holes to try to interface with power boxes: IR receivers, proprietary wireless protocols, proprietary hardware devices, and finally, the clear winner: magnetism. See, inside every circuit box in a building, there are 2-4 "poles" that current runs through. This current happens to be strong enough that it actually projects a magnetic field around the pole; you can measure said current with special Current Transformer clips like these. If we hooked these up to an Arduino we could measure current usage in real time - problem solved. Except, we needed to make sure the problem actually was solved. This involved opening up a live power box and installing our clips so we could get readings off of them, to make sure the data we were getting was actually sensible. Now, I'm not an electrician. I just pounce on a keyboard a bunch of times and people seem to be happy with that. There's no way I was going to clip a piece of metal with my hands to another piece of metal that is carrying power directly from a freaking power plant and connect it to a $25 Arduino. Luckily for us, the nice thing about working for an electric company, they actually tend to have a few electricians around. Scene. Location: Our electric firm headquarters. Basement. In front of the power box.
We quickly briefed Ryan on the job, and he nodded as if to say "this is crazy, but I do crazy." He set to work while the rest of us watched. Basically this, but George was Andre. Tensions were generally high; this was probably the most dangerous thing any of us had ever witnessed at a workplace before. To be fair, as long as there was no current, the poles should actually be completely safe to touch. Not that I was willing to test that theory, but hey, science. What made it scarier is that there wasn't really a good way to verify it: normally with any live wire you can just put a multimeter to it or at least execute the tried-and-true technical operation of putting your hand on it, palm facing outward (so the shock didn't cause your fingers to wrap themselves around the wire.) But with the current and voltages at hand, palm facing outward or not, the resulting force would immediately kill anyone and anything, including most run-of-the-mill $15 multimeters. I'm sure they make industrial multimeters for situations like these, but we didn't have one at the time. Now, being in the power field, we happen to also run a solar installation business. As such, the building is 100% solar powered on a good day and even on most bad days. As part of the installation, we had this big red switch that disconnected us from the grid entirely, allowing us to be self sustaining. We also had fancy "smart" batteries that ran web servers to display their dashboards, so you could set advanced parameters and set up charging schedules and all that good stuff (these become important later on). That made life much easier for Ryan since all he had to do was hit the switch and power down the solar batteries. Once everything was done, it was show time. Step one: Disconnect from the grid. Red switch flipped, now running totally on solar. Yell into the office for everyone to save their emails and unfinished Word docs because the lights were about to go out. Step two. Kill the batteries. Each battery pack had a power button and an LCD screen; all we had to do was hit the power button twice for the screen to say "SHUTTING DOWN..." We shut down all three. Emergency floodlights and cellphone flashlights ON; building lights, printers, punk rock radios, and monitors OFF. A bunch of sensors and random devices start beeping to signal they've switched to UPS power. To reiterate: not only are we scared shitless at what is occurring in front of us, but we are also now totally in the dark with a ton of mysterious beeping noises. Step three: Cover off. Flip all the breakers just to be totally sure that there is nothing feeding into the poles. Grab the clips. Step four: Clip the left side first. Approach carefully and, with expert precision, wrap the clip around the pole. Step five: Boom. Loud bang. Several bright sparks cascading around your vision. Near electrocution. Good, good, all according to plan. You know how in CoD your screen turns bright white whenever you get hit by a stun grenade? Yeah. Something like that. "Now, kids, how come I didn't just die?" Ryan killed the silence with a sentence only an experienced electrician can be proud of. We are still speechless. He walks over to the the third battery pack, and points at the LCD: "UPDATING..." Motherfucker. My God, I had just become an adult and nearly got a front row seat to watch a man explode because of the IoT equivalent of fucking Windows updates. "Why...uh...why didn't you die, Ryan?" I mustered. "Well you see," he said, powering the third box off for good, "if you don't work it like it's hot," clipping the right side (without an explosion this time), "you're gonna drop it like it's hot." He grinned the type of shit-eating grin you could only grin after clearly kicking the Grim Reaper in the balls in front of four college-aged bystanders. To this day I still have no idea what he did to completely avoid getting hurt during that fiasco. And just like that, the clips were in and power was brought back up. The Arduino, thankfully, also did not explode. In fact, our readings were flawless. What a time to be alive when batteries come with their own computers. Back in my day it was the other way around. tl;dr if you don't work it like it's hot, you're gonna drop it like it's hot [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Tales From Tech Support. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment