Your internet is working? Then you don't need me Tech Support |
- Your internet is working? Then you don't need me
- Semper Fi!
- I hate myself for doing that.
- Nothing like losing the president's data just before the holidays!
| Your internet is working? Then you don't need me Posted: 25 Dec 2019 02:15 PM PST I work for a small local ISP. There are 10 of us total on the phone, if you include myself & the other 2 senior support people, who generally only take escalation calls. To give everyone the holiday off (Or to inconvenience everyone equally, depends on your point of view), we are all taking turns working 2 hour shifts on the phones for any "MY INTERNET IS DOWN!!!" emergenies, yesterday afternoon & today (the 24th & 25th). That is all we are here for. That is all we are ever here for. We don't help you set up your new router, get the wireless working or set up email on your new device. Is you internet working in general? Yes? Our job is done. I just finished my shift. Out of the 17 calls I received, 3 were genuine (for a given value of genuine) internet issues. 2 were user error when setting up a new router, they just picked the wrong port originally, swapped the cabled when trying to correct it & got all confused. Easy enough to sort it. 1 actually was our AP flaking out & her equipment not reassociating to the right secort properly. Temporary fix until a tech visit can happen Friday The other 14 were variations on either "I can't get my new iPad to talk to *your* router" Nope, sorry sir, it is in fact YOUR router & not my problem. "I can't remember the password you gave me". Again, sorry, we did not give you that password nor do we have a record of it. And lastly, my very favorite "The internet is buffering terribly, fix it" Well, sir, you are paying for our cheapest & slowest speed service (5mbps down) and I can see 9 devices currently connected, all no doubt trying to stream something. 5 is fine if it's just you streaming but you and 8 other people will have issues. Unless you want to upgrade your plan I am sorry but there is nothing I can do. And sorry but no, you can't upgrade speed for one day, you will have to remain on that plan for 90 days. And nearly every last one of them made some comment about how they cannot believe "you people have to work today", as if they themselves were somehow not the cause. But my shift is done, I was working from my parents' house, my kids are busy downloading their new steam games, my mom has prime rib in the oven & I shortly will be making Yorkshire pudding. So all is right with the world. Merry Christmas everyone. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Dec 2019 03:26 PM PST (Please forgive the formatting. Still new to posting on a tablet.) I was working at a cable company doing internet connection support. Me - Your humble help desk tech. Me: (call opening blah blah blah). User - Can you please help me? You're my last hope. 10 minutes later, I had remoted into her machine, copied the files, put them on a blank USB drive I had on me, and promised to mail it to her. User - Thank you so very much. 5 minutes later, my supervisor comes over to me with tears in her eyes, thanking me. I got a nice bonus for that. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Dec 2019 09:56 PM PST Hi folks, I've got a YIFU TFTS tale that includes a new router.... of course, on Christmas Eve. I showed up to the site at around 10AM, new router in hand. I spent a lot of the night before configuring it and I was destined to walk out with a nice network with real VLANs, you know, the dream. After getting down some MAC addresses for static IP assignments (damn printers) I got to work. Unplugged the old, non-VLAN compatible router (no one else was there and they have 2 data circuits), and plugged in the new fancy router. Mind you this was around 12:00 in the afternoon. Everything powered on with no sparks or smoke, which is always a good sign. I connected all the interfaces, and could ping from the router outside... but not from the switch or any PCs on it. This freaked me out a little. So I started research, looked around for a while on the internet, but found nothing wrong with my router config that I could see. I did that until about 6:30 PM... yeah, before I said "fsck it" and posted my router config to Stack Exchange network engineering in a final cry for help... when someone responded about 1 minute later with "where's your NAT for your VLANs?" Aaaaand... I saw my mistake. No NAT routes at all. However it was late and I didn't feel like messing with all of that (plus I still had gifts to wrap!), so I plugged in the old router and thank God everything got the right IP address. Then I headed home and repeatedly hit myself in the head with a keyboard. God, I hate myself. [link] [comments]  |
| Nothing like losing the president's data just before the holidays! Posted: 26 Dec 2019 03:48 AM PST A ticket came in last week for the president of our division. His Skype wasn't working correctly. When the application launched, it would sign him in, but, the application window was completely white. He could IM with people of they messaged first, but, none of the buttons loaded, nor did his contact list. The problem began the weekend before. He's running Windows 7. It sounded like an easy enough fix. Just reinstall Skype and hope that whatever update borked his machine doesn't reinstall before I can get him over to Windows 10. Should be a quick, easy, fix, right? Oh, you poor newb, I wouldn't be sharing the story if it were easy! So, I sat down at his machine and instantly noticed he was getting a temporary profile. Might as well fix that first! After all, it could be the root cause of what's screwing up his Skype. Log in as admin and make the required changes to fix his profile, reboot, log back in and find the profile issue is now resolved but Skype isn't working correctly, still. Crap. Go to reinstall Skype and notice he's only got 15 GB worth of free space. Crap. Normally, I'd copy the data from the old profile to the new one, but, there wasn't enough free space. Had to do a move instead. It's not the way I like to do things, but, you do what you have to do sometimes. After the data was moved, I reinstalled Skype and went back to my desk. As soon as I sat down, the phone rang. He said he couldn't find his data. It was all gone. Uh huh. Someone must have been looking at their recent files and couldn't find something, right? Connect in over Skype to show him where his files are. Son of a bitch! He's right! His data's nowhere to be found! Did I delete it by mistake? There's nothing in the recycle bin. Free space didn't increase. In fact, there's less now than before! It HAS to be there! Install WindirStat. That should help me find it! Everything looked as it should. Massive appdata folders, though. I didn't even ouch those. Keep looking. Where the hell could it be? Call the server guy. He should be able to restore a backup! Our document folders are redirected to a file server and backups are automatic. I'm granted access to his shares. Nothing after 2017 in two different directories. WTF? Server dude comes back and tells me that this guy has a notoriously robust archive and it caused their 2003 servers to choke up so badly that they disabled the automatic backup on this guy's machine. Whatever is backed up is whatever he CHOSE to backup. WHAT! Why would you do that? Why would you put that responsibility on the user?! Rule number 1 in tech support is NEVER TRUST THE USER!! I'm told that this president insisted it be turned off when he felt the server sync was impacting the speed of his machine. WHAT?! You let a user dictate how IT should operate?! WTF kind of Cracker Jack operation am I working for?! The user, regardless of rank, never dictates policy to IT! What's the point in having these policies in place if they're just going to be ignored?! In all my years of doing tech support, I have never been responsible for end user data on a fat client! That's why we have folder redirection! That's why we're moving to a cloud backup solution! OK. Plan...where am I now? G? ZH? Whatever... The executive is pissed and my manager is having a meltdown. start searching file types. I found the data! I couldn't find the folder structure, but, I found the files. Well, many of them, anyway. Everything was hidden deep in the Appdata folders of the bad profiles. Send someone else to the store for a USB External drive while I start sorting the data. 90GB worth of data recovered in appdata folders. Documents, spreadsheets, PDF's, pictures, movie files, etc. Copied all the data off the machine, removed the bad profiles and junk files, put the data back on the machine and gave the user back the USB drive that contained everything I purged from his machine. Told the boss that when it comes time to move this user over to W10, he can do it. Close to 15 years in support and I've never lost a user's data before. It took part of 3 days to get everything situated and get the president to sign off that he was satisfied with my efforts. I've already given my boss an earful and I'll do it when he gets back from his vacation. [link] [comments]  |
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