What do you mean "it's GONE"?!?! Tech Support |
- What do you mean "it's GONE"?!?!
- My final moment in home tech support.
- I believe I could fly~ I got caught by the FBI~
- Make sure you plug everything in
- Java is broken - please fix
- When a warning isn't a warning
- What's your computer name?
- Rolling out (Part two of who knows? Maybe a thousand)
- Unexpected Fixes
- Driving me insane
- The wacky switch
| What do you mean "it's GONE"?!?! Posted: 12 Dec 2019 04:13 PM PST This happened yesterday. One of the Helpdesk guys was over at our warehouse location. As you all know, when IT walks into a location that they don't frequent, they get pulled in 47 different directions and 572 problems pop up that you've never heard about before "but it's been happening for months!" Same thing here. Tech is over there and someone mentions that they can't pull data off the security dvr anymore. Not terribly unusual so I ask the tech to go make sure the hard drive is still spinning (I figured disk failure) He called me back about 5 minutes later and said "There is no hard drive in here...it's gone" Queue title of post the the tech says "well, that answers one question, and brings up SO many more..." [link] [comments]  |
| My final moment in home tech support. Posted: 12 Dec 2019 04:50 PM PST So one of my biggest pet peves in tech is showing someone that I fixed it, they pay attention, understand it is working, but then grab the mouse to test it themselves. Anyone who has worked with an end user has heard these words. "I just want to make sure it is working." Like I didn't just meticulously show you that it is working on your own PC. Its infuriating and I generally ignore it. My final time doing home tech work was when I was asked to setup a win 8 machine laptop, an off label dock, a brother printer with SMTP scan to email, 3 monitors, and setup their network using the new netgear router they were sold at blue store. I get there and see the stuff sitting in boxes on her front porch... it was raining. I ring doorbell...
She got this look on her face like I had just shot her puppy. The router was completely shot. It was soaked through and I did not even bother plugging it in. I told her it was destroyed by rain and that it would be dangerous to plug in. Everything else had plastic covers so it was possible they were fine. I setup her laptop with a local account, got the docking station installed, and setup the printer through USB. I setup classic shell on her win 8 machine as I knew she would not be able to navigate the win 8 tiles screen.
She goes to start and searches for word. She didn't purchase office 2013 so it obviously was not on her PC.
I create a shortcut to yahoo mail on her desktop and save it as the yahoo mail icon. I take her to the login screen and look at her. And she looked at me. And I looked at her. And she looked at me.
Side note. Everyone who has ever worked with the public KNEW that exact answer was coming.
I take her through the password recovery wizard and we get her logged in. She then proceeds to send herself a test email... She opens said test email and then proceeds to print it off.
I give her a dumb look and move on.
I freeze and explain to her the that the router is soaked and that the printer only has a USB connection to her PC. As I turn around to pack up my stuff I hear a loud pop, and the smell of syrup. I turn around and see her wide eyed and backed away from the smoking router on the table.
I facepalm and look at the, now, blackened socket and how her entire den is dark.
I do not wait for anything, I turn and I leave immediately calling my supervisor to explain what happened. He headed off her complaint calls at the pass. Two weeks later. I get another work order for her place to do the same things I had already done. I arrive and find a router box sitting on her front porch. It had not rained in several days.
eye twitch
I resisted the Urge to tell her this was already done and simply smiled. I got onto her PC and showed her how the shortcut for yahoo mail was already there, showed how her password was already remembered in chrome, and showed her how windows was already configured while explaining it was already done.
She said as she proceeded to open yahoo mail, send herself a test email, and then print it off.
I had to stop myself from explaining that I just demonstrated it was working and simply smiled choking back pure rage.
I got the router connected and had to switch it to a 10.10 setup as oldest and most useless phone company had set her up with a combo router/modem with only 2 extra ethernet ports and no wifi. I got her printer setup and set it to port 200 as static and setup her scan to email. I had to smirk at the SMTP order on the work order as this was yahoo mail and would undoubtedly use pop3. Got scan to email working and had to fight back the urge to tell her just how badly she got ripped off. I show her how to do scan to email and let her practice it on her printer. Each time she scans a document to herself successfully. Everything is all said and done. She opens up yahoo mail in front of me, and pulls up the satisfaction email that is sent before I arrive. In front of me she types out a glowing review for me and talking about how bad the "other guy" was when he came out last time. She then prints the email off from her sent box, and scans it to herself.
I lose my smile and state it is all working and that I was the last guy who came out. I walk out her door while ignoring her protests and call my boss.
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| I believe I could fly~ I got caught by the FBI~ Posted: 12 Dec 2019 09:10 PM PST Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Did a temp contract for [GENERIC COMPANY]. Unlike most contracts, I had a lot of contact with the legal department, due to [GENERIC COMPANY] slowly and painfully moving the non-tech divisions to Windows 10. One day, one of their lawyers walks up, frazzled, with a priority ticket: record EVERYTHING related to a certain case, mark it cancelled, and then no one except my boss touches it. One of the paralegals I'd been helping and I are a bit confused - we've handled subpoenas before, but nothing that needed a walk-up and my boss to get involved for the hand-off, because it's usually a matter of giving it to the paralegal/secretary working with that legal team. Paralegal asks what the heck happened. Lawyer just laughs and walks off. While we're working on the paralegal's ticket, we both get a very serious-looking report in our inboxes from the FBI (with added commentary from the legal department - specifically, that lawyer): Turn out, [EXEC] from [RELATED SEMI-RIVAL COMPANY], right after going through Discovery in some generic legal clash over something or other involving [MY COMPANY] and [SEVERAL OTHER COMPANIES], didn't show up to court, despite going through the motions and acting normal. Everyone was sitting on their asses until they got a notice (the same webpage we'd been given): [EXEC] ran all the way to a small airport with a bunch of stocks (????) and tried to take off to fuck knows where. FBI were waiting for him, and now the FBI was politely asking for the files, which, as you can imagine, needed to be handled right the fuck now. I like to imagine the showdown was like that opening chase scene from Face/Off. (Also, I've forgotten and changed enough details that I really friggin' hope this doesn't give enough info. :V) [link] [comments]  |
| Make sure you plug everything in Posted: 12 Dec 2019 09:03 AM PST I work in tech support and have always been the goto guy in my family for everything technical since I was about 6. One day I get a phone call from my dad saying that my grandads internet isn't working and I need to go look at it. My dad won't have looked at it, my grandad will have just mentioned it in passing. I call my grandad and ask what's happened. He informs me that the internet isn't working. It says there's a cable unplugged. Now my grandad is quite old and does well with computers for his age. But there must be a hundred post it notes of instructions on how to save things and copy things from previous conversations with me on his desk. I tell him ok I'll be over in an hour. I get there. Mine my way through post it mountain. First just cos it's easy to reach I check the router cables and the cables in the back of the computer. Nothing all fine. I boot the computer. Open the internet. Stick on a YouTube video. All good. I shout him through. Me: "it's all working look." I open internet explorer and show him a video. Grandad: "no not that. It's the internet that isn't working." Me: "which button did you press?" Grandad points to outlook. "The internet, that one." I open outlook and the first thing that pops up is an error informing me there is a missing plug-in. Face palm I didn't bother trying to explain to him what a plug-in was. Just that his internet is fine and everything is plugged in. I fixed the error and let him get back to his emails. He does great for an old guy but he makes me laugh sometimes. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Dec 2019 01:20 AM PST I work for a company that is a tier 1 supplier for some of the big european mobility OEMs and therefore we use a Java based PLM system which another department implements into our CAX infrastructure. $PLMAdmin is the responsible person for the implementation. Backstory: We have to be compliant to all OEMs and what CAX Software they use. Recently VW, BMW and others updated their CAD Software to a newer release. We rolled out all new releases to the user's machines and $PLMAdmin had to update and reconfigure our PLM software as well. This week he sent a ticket titled "Java is broken - please fix". I called $PLMAdmin to see what problems he had. He opened the PLM webinterface on his own testmachine, wich told us sth. like "JAVA version not recognized". With previous PLM versions it was needed to set a registry entry telling the PLM software to use JAVA x64 instead of x32. So I checked the registry first, set the DWORD and he clicked the bookmark to their webinterface again. --> error page appears. Internet Explorer showed JAVA: add-on not recognized. So I reinstalled JAVA x64, x32 and JDK and he klicked his bookmark again: --> error page appears again. After some extensive research, everything seemed fine but it just wouldn't recognize JAVA. I then tried to open it on another machine I had prepared and it worked right out of the box. Turns out, our glorious $PLMAdmin had saved the errorpage in his bookmarks -.- [link] [comments]  |
| When a warning isn't a warning Posted: 12 Dec 2019 04:35 PM PST Working today at my L1 desk & our company is currently transitioning from an old & crappy virtual machine (VM) to a newer one. This caller was still on the old one that is prone to having many issues. Caller: "Yes, my printers keep disappearing from my VM" Me: "Okay. Normally that's fixed up by restarting your VM session. One moment while I get that taken care of for you." (I go in and restart his session so he can log back in.) Caller: "Thank you for restarting it without warning." Me: "I'm sorry sir, but I do remember mention I would when I last spoke." Caller: "Whatever. What's done is done, but I know that won't fix it because they always just re-add the printers." Me: "That's fine. Just normally restarting the connection gets it fixed. If that doesn't work, then I'll gladly readd them." Caller: "Well once I get in, you better be ready to re-map my 5 printers." (Waits for him to get back in). Caller: "Wow. They are in there now." Moral of the story: Trust your techs or be exposed as a Know Nothing and eat crow. TL/DR: customer was trying to tell me how to do my job and didn't listen to what I was saying. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Dec 2019 09:35 AM PST I work as Tier 2 for a university and I received a ticket requesting for a user to be made admin so they may download whatever software they needed for their department. I knew I could do it remotely so I asked for their computer name. $User: Hey I'm trying to download X software on my computer but it is asking for an admin username and password. What are my next steps? $Me: May you try your credentials first, please? $User: It's not working. $Me: No worries, may you send me your computer name? I can remotely make you admin. If you select start menu > search This PC and right-click on it > Properties > Computer name $User: Does 'Realtek PCle GBE Family Controller' sound right? *facepalm* I ended up making a visit to their office instead. [link] [comments]  |
| Rolling out (Part two of who knows? Maybe a thousand) Posted: 12 Dec 2019 01:19 PM PST Hello there, it's me again, the friendly newbie IT guy. May I offer you a new story in these trying times?
For context, I'm Brazilian, working in a car factory that has a lot of japanese people working in management roles. One day, I got an assignment to swap the computer of a Japanese guy. Sure, no problem, they know at least English, so I can work with that. I come to the user's table, and start introducing myself in English, fully expecting him to only know japanese or broken English, like the rest of the others. Me: Hi mister, I'm from the IT team and- NotSoJapaneseDude: Olá, você veio trocar meu computador? (Hi, are you going to swap my machine?) Cue surprised Pikachu face when he talked to me in fluent Portuguese, and explained that he is only the son of a Japanese native with a Brazilian. And that's how he got the nickname "Knockoff Japanese" from the rollout team. Anyway, after surprise cleared up, I proceeded to swap his machine, learning that he is a MAJOR geek and loves strategy games as well as D&D, so, needless to say, we kind of chatted for most of the three hours required to finish the procedure. Later, after everything was finished, he was showing me some of the tickets he sent to the IT team in the past, the best being:
And others of the sort. Anyway, hope you enjoy this long, but mostly boring story of the knockoff geeky japanese. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Dec 2019 01:40 PM PST Sometimes the issue is so atypical that it never occurs to you. I was working for an OEM, and a guy calls in a laptop stuck in a boot loop. He is not a normal caller, he is an IT Professional (which I will save THAT discussion for another time) No recent storms or power events. Happens regardless of on a/c or battery. Windows Recovery fails. We remove all peripherals...so we thought. Still boot looping. For some reason it doesn't loop in Diagnostics Mode - no hard drive or other hardware errors detected. At this point, we decide to just reinstall Windows and see how it goes. He is up to the task, so we say our goodbyes for the day. The next day I call him to see how the Windows reinstallation went. He said it didn't even have to come to that. He noticed at the last minute that an SD card adapter with no SD card inside was hanging out. Once he removed the SD card adapter, the laptop booted normally and all was fine. Every time I got a boot loop call after that, I asked at some point to remove all peripherals, including card adapters. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Dec 2019 09:16 AM PST So, it started like a normal iphone call. Email isnt working, not our job but we have to help them regardless. As she is talking to me she is describing the issue. "The email is not sending out." 'No problem. Go to the app store and download (program)' Flawless execution, person gets it done in a few seconds. P.O.S. program from india crashes and cannot run on the iphone eleven. Sigh. OK, walking the customer through the outgoing issues it seems to be going fine. "Hold on a second let me get into the car." Ok? 'Can you read me the outgoing settings?' "Yeah, outgoing is smtp.mailmaililovemail.mail" After about five minutes of bruteforcing settings the customer says "God damn traffic is bad today." uh... 'Maam are you driving?' "Of course im driving, i have been on the phone for three hours and I am not getting disconnected because of traffic, I need to get to work god damn it!" 'Maam, we are open 24/7. I highly encourage you to put down the phone and call back later.' "No I want this done now!" At this point my team is telling me to hang up, so I tell her again to out the phone down now my boss is mad at me because I hung up, this masqurade continues for about 20 minutes about how unsafe driving is not allowed and how hanging up is not allowed. Its not long before HR got involved and everyone is arguing, thirty minutes later HR yells at the boss to drop the subject and me for dropping the call, then goes back to their desk and shuts the door wtfIsGoingOn.jpeg [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Dec 2019 04:15 PM PST Client: Internet isnt working, no spotify/ YouTube ... Me:" could you please, press Windows key type cmd <enter> ipconfig <enter>.. and read me the ip adres?" Client: 192.168.178.60? Me: looks good, "do you have access to the database system? " { Mysql application} Client: yep! Me: hmm strange, "try ping 192.168.178.1 in the command window" {gateway} Client: no response.. Me:" try ping the database server."(..37) Client: no response! Me: What? Server can be reached on port 3306 but not pinged!? ..." { Firewall?} "Could you powercycle both pc and database server?" Client: now access to database and internet fails!! Me: "okay....could you please find and tell me the ip adres again ?" Client: 169...etc. Me: " okay" {dhcp not working, could it be the switch?} " Could you please power cycle the switch ?" Client: same result Me: " okay, strange. I wil schedule a visit" Arrived an hour later at the clients location. Assigned pc static adress and database connection is ok again. Pinging the server still unable, pinging the intermediate switches ! No problem!? So no firewall issue, but what is happening? Ok, drastic solution: disconnect switch and plug the pc directly into the uplink cable (love those ethernet extenders/connectors) . And yep...all connections restored: dhcp adres assigned, internet working again. Wtf..switch partially dead!? Another power cycle......no still broke. Ok last resort, reset to factory settings, reinstall config file....Yes! Problem solved but Wtf was wrong with the switch,never experienced an error a power cycle couldn't fix. So there is a first for everything.... [link] [comments]  |
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