The time I repeatedly solved a problem by doing nothing Tech Support |
- The time I repeatedly solved a problem by doing nothing
- Our own system knows better than the engineer
- Tech can't remove a mobo, Manager removes it easily
- I don't service pencil sharpeners
- How did you get hired?
- The Guest Speaker Rider
- When hardware sales people don't know what hardware they're selling...
- Word really wants me to save
- Why is my keyboard typing by itself?
| The time I repeatedly solved a problem by doing nothing Posted: 18 Dec 2019 01:18 PM PST I had a user call the help desk at 10PM reporting that his computer isn't working, just black on the screen. I didn't want to walk down to the lab in the basement so I started basic troubleshooting steps. I asked about the status light on the monitor and it was on but amber, I asked him to see if there was a red light on the bottom of the mouse and he said "Thanks, that did it." and hung up. For three nights in a row I got this same call from the same user. The third night I said "Don't touch anything, I'll be right down." I walked downstairs to the lab and found him next to his computer, grabbed the mouse and watched the computer wake up. He was calling me as soon as he got back from lunch every night because his computer was going to sleep and not waking up until the mouse was moved. I explained this to him and he said "Alright, well if it happens again I'll give you a call." [link] [comments]  |
| Our own system knows better than the engineer Posted: 18 Dec 2019 01:42 PM PST This isn't quite tech support, but I hope it's near enough! It happened years ago but was good enough that it stuck in my mind. When our university's latest mainframe was installed, it came with a site engineer. For quite a while, one of these was someone who was a graduate of the same university. He was somewhat of a 'company man', and was not keen when we abandoned the manufacturer's operating system in favour of a different one, written by another university. I managed this system; it had a novel way of handling filestore and (for the purposes of this story) peripherals such as printers. These were managed via a spooler process, which handled all of the exception conditions, farmed out to it by the actual supervisor (kernel). Whoever wrote the code (a friend of mine, as it happened) had been a little obsessive about detailed error messages - a good thing, and possible because all of the messages were inside a paged process so they really cost nothing. One day, we saw a message we had never seen before. I forget the exact text, but it indicated that a particular fuse had blown in the printer. We duly called the engineer from his room. He looked at the message, and shook his head, stating that no such fuse existed and "our" system was wrong. We pressed him on this, and after casting his eye over the defunct printer he retired to his office and manuals. He returned a few minutes later, bearing a fuse. He silently opened a small panel in the printer casing, and changed the fuse. [link] [comments]  |
| Tech can't remove a mobo, Manager removes it easily Posted: 18 Dec 2019 01:02 PM PST So this post reminded me of a story of outsourced tech ineptitude. This took place quite a few years ago when I was working for a financial company that no longer exists. This company had, at the time, roughly 300-400 branch offices and all of them used the same model small form factor PCs from a popular PC maker that I'm sure you can guess. Anyway, this took place during the height of the issues caused by the use of huge batches of bad capacitors in all kinds of electronics. By this time our Helpdesk had become pros at handling mobo replacements for these machines and were fielding 3-5 replacements a day. Because all but the two local branches were spread out all over the country and because these were warranty replacements it was the outsourced tech support for $MF that handled the actual, physical replacements. Aside from the usual scheduling/logistical issues and other normal hiccups when involving 3 or more parties, things went mostly smoothly but this particular tech decided to make things interesting.
So I'm working on my tickets when one of the first level Help Desk guys walks up to me with a look on his face that was a mix of frustration, confusion and bewilderment. $HD1: CrackedTech, I'm working with $MF on a mobo replacement for $Office and the tech is having some trouble. I'm not really sure what to do here. $ME: Ok, what's the issue, did the wrong part come in or is the tech late or something? $HD1: No the tech is in the office now but he says he can't get the mobo out. $ME: What does he mean, like it's stuck or he can't open the case or what? $HD1: No, he says he can't get the screws out. $ME: ...He what? $HD1: He says the screws won't come loose. $ME: He's turning them the right way and knows there's four of them right? $HD1: He said yeah to both when I asked. I have him on the phone, want to talk to him? $ME: Yeah, let's go to your desk and put him on speaker. We walk back to his desk but when we take the tech off hold he's hung up already. I tell $HD1 to call him back and let me know when he's got the guy. A few minutes later $HD1 walks over to my desk again. $HD1: It gets better, now he wants to take it back to his office in order to try an electric screwdriver. $ME: What?! No! Let me talk to him. Cut to a few minutes of me asking this guy if he's doing this right and trying not to ask him if he's capable of breathing and chewing gum at the same time after which we tell him to wait for us to call back before he does anything else. We reached out to $MF with basically, wtf is wrong with this guy please send someone else only to be told that he's it for that area right now and the soonest they could get someone else would be almost a week. I don't recall the reason why but we couldn't wait that long for this office so after some talk with my boss and his boss we decide to let the tech take it to his office with a strict time limit of an hour to have it back in the office and agreement from $MF that they were responsible for it in every conceivable way. Just under an hour later I get an IM from $HD1 that $BM had called to let us know that the tech had returned the machine to the office. $ME: So did he finally get the damn thing fixed? $HD1: Nope, he said he still couldn't get the screws out. $ME: What the actual fuck?! What is this guy doing? $HD1: No idea. $ME: So what is this idiot doing now? $HD1: He told $BM that he was going to contact $MF and find out what they wanted to do. I go tell my boss this news to which he is as blown away as I am. While talking with him $HD1 walks up with the coup de grâce. $HD1: You're not going to believe this. $ME: Oh god, what now? $HD1: $BM just called and said he got the screws out. $ME: Wth, how? $HD1: Said he remembered his small tool kit in his truck, grabbed the screwdriver from it and they came right out with no problem. $ME: Shocked silence $HD1: He also said the guy left the new mobo there and he got it swapped out but wasn't sure about the connectors. $ME: looks at boss and gets a shrug and a nod in return $ME: Walk him through reconnecting everything and have him send you a picture of it before you try to power it on to verify. If it doesn't work then have him swap it back and we'll call $MF back about it. $HD1 is able to walk $BM through everything and they get the machine back up and running with no problem. We make sure to let $MF know the status and that, under no circumstances is this tech to be dispatched to a location of ours again. That was pretty much the end of it but to this day I still occasionally wonder what that guy was doing when he was trying to take those mobo screws out. [link] [comments]  |
| I don't service pencil sharpeners Posted: 18 Dec 2019 09:31 AM PST This story is from a while ago. Was in a teachers room fixing their projector that was doing some weird distortion thing and the maintenance guy comes in and starts working on the wall mounted pencil sharpener. He lets out a loud sigh and look over at me as he dumps the full pencil sharpener shavings in the trash and reattaches it to the mechanism. I think that's weird why would the maintenance guy need to empty your pencil sharpener. On my way back to the office I run into my boss and he informs me he got a call from said teacher about a pencil sharpener and my boss had to explain that we don't work on pencil sharpeners electric or mechanical. We actively avoid that teacher now. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Dec 2019 07:43 PM PST First time posting here, inspired by several other stories of tech incompetence. $Me: obvious $Tech: coworker $UniversityFont/$UF: marketing approved font for email signature and official document headers Background: A couple years ago I was working tech support at a mid-sized university. Coworker was a computer engineering major working part time for the summer. Being summer semester the load was light. I almost never had more than 3-4 tickets in my queue. And most tickets were as routine as finding time to meet in someone's office. I was by no means a support pro, but I had the experience to be the go to tech for the younger/newer employees. DAY 1 Tech receives ticket to install $UniversityFont to a users laptop $Tech: hey crgsweeper, can you give me a hand with this ticket? $Me: sure what is it? $tech: I have to install $UF to users laptop $me: ok, what's the question? $tech: how can you do that? So I sent him the article in our knowledge base about it DAY 2 $tech: hey crgsweeper, I'm still not sure about this ticket $me: what do you mean? $tech: how do you install a font? Aren't ALL of them already in word when you get the computer? $me: no you can download and install millions of other fonts from the internet. $tech: really!? so how do I find a safe place to get $UF $me: the article I sent yesterday tells you step by step $tech: oh. Ok thanks DAY 3 $tech: hey I have one last question $me: sure what is it? $tech: I just want to be sure before I got to their office that i got this right? $me: what about it aren't you sure about? $tech: where to find $UF and how to install it? $me: dude, the $UF is on the network drive in the tech dept folder. Login with your admin credentials, open "search," and type in [4 character file extension]. Right-click $UF then choose install. $tech: oh ok thanks DAY 4 $tech: hey crgsweeper, can you cover my phone support shift? I have scheduled to go help with this ticket $me: yeah sure. Give me 2 minutes and I will jump on another phone. $Tech leaves. I pull up the ticket. That morning he sent out asking for a time that would work to assist. User responded and $tech never confirmed the time. I checked the time stamps on the ticket. "Day 1" was Tuesday. Ticket had been in his queue since the previous Friday. It took him a full week to handle what is a 30 second job. Edit: TLDR: tech thought all fonts were on computers from the start. Took way too long to install one for user [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Dec 2019 11:04 AM PST I'm sure all of you have had it happen; the dreaded unprepared guest speaker/presenter. They email an entirely different department with their tech needs, which never gets passed along to IT. Or they email you, and when asked what they need, reply with "oh nothing, I come with everything needed." At which point they show up with a laptop made in Djibouti, that uses a strange connector with 34 1/2 pins and a usb power interface that also contains the source code for Zombo.com. Very few of these presentations go off without some sort of sweating/swearing/leaving the industry to herd goats. This is not one of those stories. This is the story of a kid wise beyond his years, of an idiot boss, and of the smoothest presentations I've ever had pleasure supporting in a K-12 educational setting. About a month before our guest speaker arrived, we got word from one of the schools that they would be having a guest speaker, and that an email from the speaker would be following shortly. Not knowing what to expect, I immediately made a ticket to begin preparing a few days ahead of time. This was usually required due to a need to prepare for anything. The email arrived the next morning, just in time for the <period of time> tech meeting. My boss, a worthless human being in all regards, read the email out loud (it was on the presentation screen) to us. Immediately my boss became indignant over the fact that a mere teenager, our speaker, was sending us a list of their demands. It was a tour rider. It contained very specific and detailed needs for what the speaker required. It left absolutely nothing up to chance. I could not contain my excitement. For the next month, my boss continued to make snide comments about the guest speaker and their "demands." Said guest speaker had a disability, and that was included in some of the comments. My boss is no longer in their position, and probably terrorizing a small village somewhere else, thank Gord. The day of the presentation came along, and for the first time in my entire career supporting these events, I felt like I was fully prepared. The speaker arrived, everything was ready (and had been ready for a couple days). Tested, working, prepared. The teenage kid arrived, and immediately apologized for the rider...until I cut him off by saying that he had nothing to apologize for. He, a 16 year-old kid, had given me the fighting chance to be ready for this presentation, which the kid proceeded to completely knock out of the park. There's satisfaction in being able to sit back and relax through an event you're supporting, knowing that there won't be a need 30 minutes into the event for a VHS tape to be played out of freaking nowhere (this happened one time). [link] [comments]  |
| When hardware sales people don't know what hardware they're selling... Posted: 18 Dec 2019 10:12 AM PST At my office, we lease all our computers through Dell. It works out well, because everyone gets a new computer every 3 years (staggered throughout the office). We have a few dedicated account people, who I usually just forward the previous lease quote to and say "please duplicate this." Barring any personal anecdotes you may have, I find that the service team I had was quite helpful and speedy when it came to new orders and sorting out issues. The current model we were on was the Optiplex 3050. There was a new representative who responded this time saying that the 3050 has been discontinued and the only close one available was the 3070. OK, fine. Except, she says "The only difference in the configuration is the hard drive, which is a 500GB SATA SSD rather than a 128GB SATA SSD. The 3070 does not have a smaller hard drive option." I usually choose a small SSD because it keeps the cost down and all documents are stored on our network drive anyway, but this is quite the jump. I look at the quote in more detail and in the spot for the drive option, it says "2.5 500GB (5,400 RPM) SATA" which leads me to believe this is a traditional hard drive vs. the SSD, despite what she said in her email. I have found that for whatever reason, hard drives slow down the Microsoft Office suite tremendously compared to the SSDs, so I question it and cite my suspicions. She gets back to me a full day later with a new quote for a slightly different model, which "supports a hard drive without any RPM." Lovely. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Dec 2019 02:22 PM PST This is from about 15 years ago. Working an internal support desk at a university department that had offices all over campus, I got a call from one user who was having an odd issue. Her computer worked fine, but every time she opened Word it would immediately prompt her to save, and if she did it would just pop up again. I remoted in and watched the problem occur first-hand, exactly as she described. Browsing websites was fine, her other specialized apps were fine, Word really wanted you to save. I couldn't do much else by remote (our remote software was super janky and quasi-unreliable anyways), so I packed up and headed over to her office. Once there, I immediately saw the problem. She had an under-desk-mounted keyboard tray kinda like this, and part of the mounting hardware was holding down F2, and only F2. F2 did nothing in her browser, on Windows itself, or any of her other programs, but its the save button in Word. Moved her tray a centimeter forward, problem solved, laughs were had by all. It was a nice day, so I didn't mind getting paid to take a stroll across campus. [link] [comments]  |
| Why is my keyboard typing by itself? Posted: 18 Dec 2019 04:36 AM PST A former colleague of mine told this story. He was working in IT support at his former company. Kind of an "all-in-one" role where IT would be responsible for everything from replacing monitors, refilling printer cartridges and solving general IT/OS/Software issues. This elderly lady mentioned that often when she was typing an email or word document, random letters would appear. She asked my colleague if there was a way he could fix this. Of course he naturally thought malware and that sort of thing and went to her desk. He sat down, and tried writing in a text docment. Nothing. Tried Outlook. Nothing. Opened Word and did the same - still without anything out of the ordinary happening. So he asked her to try. Now, this elderly lady with somewhat impaired vision of course leaned close to the monitor to see what she was typing. As she was doing that her... eh... lets just call them "lady features" sagged the keyboard enough to actually press the keys leading to the reported "letters appearing while she was typing" My colleague had a really hard time not bursting out laughing, and not entirely sure how to explain what happened he decreased the desktop resolution, increased the scaling, made up a complete BS excuse as to what could have happened and told her to let him know if it should happen again. [link] [comments]  |
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