I broke it, he paid the price. Tech Support |
- I broke it, he paid the price.
- I'm a strong independent VM, I don't need no host.
- My 7-year old niece called me today... for... tech support.
- Hubert did what?
- Here in the U.S. of A., we always replace parts that break rather than repairing them
- He’s colluding with my husband!
- Rolling out (Part three of hopefully less than a thousand)
- A cautionary tale for the masses (well, mostly sysadmins)
- Physical Patterns & Physical Troubleshooting
| I broke it, he paid the price. Posted: 02 Jan 2020 06:56 PM PST I worked for a large electrical company about 25 years ago and this transpired with the finance managers desktop. He insisted on getting a new machine, a Pentium 200mhz or something as I recall however he wanted his old hard drive in the new machine (secondary) so he could get to his old files. Nothing unusual. So there I am and the drive is entirely loose but will not come out of the drive bay. It's like it's glued in place or something (it wasn't). I call him in and tell him I can't seem to get it to budge. He says, "I trust ya, just yank it out.". Let me foreshadow this guy's PC knowledge... He installed Windows Millennium on a work machine without any IT involvement. Yes, Millennium... Not Windows Me. So I yanked this puppy hard but as gentle as possible and it gave in... And on the way out a few odds and ends popped off the underside board. Apparently there was a bent support that was caught in the bottom of the drive. Well, he freaked out. All his important data was there apparently. He was fuming and went on a tirade... We got a quote for data recovery and the price was astronomical. And we ended up calling the home office IT team at his request. He demanded something be done because "the IT guy here just broke my hard drive..." I explained what happened and told them the recovery quote and they were pretty silent at first. He demanded action and so they asked "where are the backups?" Of course he replies "there aren't any." Their reply, "corporate policy is to save to network and no files should be stored on your local drives. You violated that policy and you didn't even back it up even when you knew it would be transferred to another machine... We aren't paying for data recovery. You'll have to redo whatever's gone." Finance guy was at a loss for words. they asked if that was everything? He said yes and they said good bye. Never heard another peep about that hard drive. [link] [comments]  |
| I'm a strong independent VM, I don't need no host. Posted: 03 Jan 2020 12:13 AM PST Hi everyone, long time lurker, first post.. I work with a VM product that provides scsi storage, I'm on the support desk as a L3 tech. I stumble into work half asleep having gone from an late shift to an early start the next day... As I caffinate my brain and begin reading new tickets that have come through one catches my eye... "URGENT, VMs offline" I Don my metaphorical Cape and hop into action, asking a flurry of questions about the configuration and the exact issue, the customer in their infinite wisdom was not able to provide me with this information, and told me they would get back to me.. A few hours later, we get a request for a remote session, still not having log files to review or any idea what the issue may be, I push back a little, asking for some of the information needed to be able to help. I get an emailed response saying "It would probably just be best to remote in and look.." So off to wonderland we go, where the techs have no information and I'm expected to just fix the issue, Yay! So we get a remote session going, took the customer about half an hour to set up the remote access, finding buttons can be hard :) I ask them to pull up their hypervisor.. And our customer provided me with some useful information. "The hypervisor is turned off.. " Yeah, that's right, they set up a virtual machine and then turned off their host, muting my microphone and laughing hard enough for my colleagues to begin thinking my plan to take over the world has just started.. Eventually I calm down enough to remain composed and to explain that virtual software still needs hardware to run, their response was "oh! Thanks.. " Tl:DR customer set up some vms and then turned off their host, expecting the vms to keep running. [link] [comments]  |
| My 7-year old niece called me today... for... tech support. Posted: 03 Jan 2020 02:07 AM PST I was just making my afternoon coffee, then my phone started to ring. It's my seven-year old niece, calling via Facebook Messenger. $Me - Me, MNLYEvanagelista; $Niece - Niece. $Me: Hello $Niece, how are you? $Niece: I'm good. Uncle, do you know what's the password on mommy's laptop? $Me: Why? What are you going to use the laptop for? $Niece: Baby $YoungerSister is using the iPad, and I want to watch YouTube. $Me: OK. Let me call mommy, so I can get the password. $Niece: OK. I called her mom to ensure that she can use the laptop, once she said yes. She give me the password. After this, I let out a big sigh, as I'm not expecting the kid to understand how to use the Shift key, to temporarily type out an uppercase letter. But at the same time, I didn't want to disappoint her, so I gave it a try anyways. $Me: OK $Niece. Press the Shift, and then letter R. $Niece: OK, done. Me: Press o. $Niece: OK, done. Basically, if it's uppercase. I tell her to press shift and the letter at the same time. If it's smaller, I simply tell her to press the letter. Once the password has been typed. I tell her to press enter. $Me: Press 0. $Niece: OK, done. $Me: Press ENTER. $Niece: OK, done. $Me: Did it work? $Niece: Yes. $Me: OK good. Now, to go to YouTube, you would need to... $Niece: $Uncle, I know how to go to YouTube. Thank you. $Me: OK, have fun! *hangs up*. Honestly, I wasn't expecting that we can pull this off. I was about to call my other cousin, whose living with her to type out the password. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Jan 2020 06:41 AM PST Back by popular demand, we have another Hubert story today! Note: moving forward, some of these Hubert stories may be a bit shorter, as while I know the basics of what was done in certain situations, some of this stuff goes beyond what I do on a daily basis, so I probably won't be going as far into detail like I would for something network related. So, earlier this year (or is it late last year since it's 2020 now?) Our IT director resigned. Politics amongst other things led to his resignation, and we eventually got a new one who is still with us. When our new director came on, one of the first things that came up was something g-suite related. from what I gather, they wanted to change the email address for our customer service dept for one reason or another. Guess who got that assignment? Yep, our favorite employee, our summer child, he who shall not be named, Hubert. Readers, this is the part where details start getting left out, because I don't handle any of this stuff. I just happen to be the (un)fortunate soul whose cubicle sits opposite of Hubert (his replacement now) so I hear things.. especially when things go wrong. Somehow, Hubert didn't create the new email address and g-suite profile correctly for customer service. Before verifying that it was good to go, he then deleted/deactivated the previous one. Which was still in use. Which our customers hadn't been notified about. It was chaos for a couple of hours, our new IT director genuinely confused about why Hubert did this, and my boss being asked to help get this taken care of. Needless to say, that day ended with Hubert being on customer service's shit list until he was gone. But, that's a tale for another time. [link] [comments]  |
| Here in the U.S. of A., we always replace parts that break rather than repairing them Posted: 03 Jan 2020 01:23 AM PST One day, I hosted a visitor from Kenya. This gentleman was roughly my age, and he had traveled to the US to study and to learn some things about agriculture. For whatever reason, however, he was interested in buying a PC while he was in the US, so we naturally struck up a conversation about computer hardware. I was basically explaining to him about power supplies, motherboards, you know, the usual stuff. He mentioned how a lot of folks ran older systems back where he was from, and so there was often a demand for fixing the hardware, upgrading things, etc. I told him that most PC repair shops had dried up in the US, but we would still do repairs… basically we would toss old hardware and replace them with new ones. No one would actually fix down to the component level. In my friend's British-(sounding) English, he explained that they would even repair the components on a motherboard. "You don't mean, like, soldering the resistors and capacitors, do you? No one does that!" "Yes. We really fix everything." I shook my head. Anyway, I took him down to my office and I searched out some PC components online. He decided on a really cheap motherboard and low-end CPU. I ordered him a few hundred dollars in parts and would eventually send him on his way… happy to get such cheap PC components here in the States. Fast forward a few months… I think a few years. Some of the old office computers that I was maintaining were just too slow to do much of anything. To give one of them a few more years, I was installing more RAM in it. This one was a Windows 2000 Server that we used as both a workstation and as a file server. As I was installing the memory sticks, I was having trouble with them flexing the motherboard, plus there were a lot of cables in the way. Additionally, I had some bad RAM involved, so I was troubleshooting which memory sticks were bad using POST beeps. The old memory sockets were really stiff. Remember those? But I finally found the bad memory stick and was about ready to boot it with the good memory. And then I did it. POP! Yes. It was that pop. The Pop. Like, what did I just pop pop? As in, what did I see flying by my face pop? I immediately thought back to my Kenyan friend. This didn't happen. No way. Sure enough, I found a little surface mount capacitor on the tile floor about 5 feet away. The memory was seated but, whatever I was pushing the memory stick with had slipped and struck the tiny capacitor. I couldn't laugh this one off. The other cruel fact of the matter is that I had turned down a soldering job about 5 years prior because I really didn't like soldering. And this thing is really, really small. Well, I'm not sure when I told my boss. And I'm not sure how long it took me to bring out my soldering set. Probably did some Ok, maybe I made that last part up. But I did eventually email my Kenyan friend and tell him of my exploits. Oh, the memories! And I promise… we still have that computer somewhere, and it still runs. We used it for quite a while longer. [link] [comments]  |
| He’s colluding with my husband! Posted: 02 Jan 2020 08:25 AM PST $customer_lady: customer, first act. I work as IT at a service company. I won't get into the specifics of it for obvious reasons, but we have technicians who go out and install/service our product. The company isn't large enough to keep me busy with IT work full-time, so I get pulled into helping with quite a few other things that really aren't my jurisdiction. Hence, this story... I was happily working on whatever I was doing one day this summer, when I got a call from $tech on my company cellphone. He had run $customer_lady's credit card, and when he entered the amount he got an extra zero on the end. Being the kind of person he is, he didn't double-check the amount before running it. He wondered if I could do anything about this. Obviously this is the job of our AR department, not IT. But being the kind of person he is, $tech decided to call me. However, it just so happens I do have both the knowledge and access to issue card refunds so I told him sure, I will refund it. He put me on speaker phone and I informed $customer_lady that I can refund the amount to her card, but it will take up to 3 days for the refund to process. She said that is fine, go ahead and do it. I issued the refund while still on the phone with her. I apologized for the mistake, she laughed and said it's not a problem, this stuff happens. We hung up and $tech left. Easy, right? Wrong. About 20 minutes later I got a call from an unknown number on my company cellphone. I picked up, and it's $customer_lady again, calling from her cell phone. Being the kind of person he is, $tech had decided to give her the cellphone number to our company's IT person. $customer_lady said that she thought about it more, and she doesn't want to wait for 3 days for the refund to process, due to the fairly large amount of money. She had called her credit card company and asked them to cancel the transaction. They told her that the merchant would need to call in and give them the last 4 digits of her card number to confirm the cancellation. Could I do that for her? Well, sure. Still not my job, but hey. Why not. She gave me the last 4 digits of her card, the phone number of her card company, and the number to call her back at. I called the credit card company and, after 5 or 10 minutes of navigating menus, got to speak to $rep1. I explained to them what happened, and that I am the merchant calling to cancel the transaction. $rep1 laughed and told me that I can't do that, the customer will need to call in and cancel it. I explained that no, she already called in and they told her the merchant will need to call them. $rep1 said again no, they will need to confirm personal information like birthdate, SSN, etc. So $customer_lady needs to call them. Fine. I hung up and called $customer_lady back. I explained what $rep had told me, and that they refused to let me cancel the transaction, and apologized again for the inconvenience. She sounded a bit annoyed, but agreed to call the company herself, since there wasn't really any other option. After 10 minutes or so I get a call again from her number. I picked up, and this is where we transition to Act 2 of our story...
I called back the credit card company and got $rep2. I again explained what had happened, and that I called in earlier and the $rep1 told me that the customer needs to cancel the transaction. $rep2 sounded confused and said he had no idea why $rep1 told me that. They don't need to confirm any personal information. In fact, he'll go ahead and cancel the transaction right now. I thanked him and asked him what course of action we should take from here. He explained that he was unable to just refund part of the transaction. He would have to cancel the entire thing, and we would need to send $crazy_lady a bill. This all sounded fine, and I hung up with him. I tried to call $crazy_lady back, but she declined the call. I left a voicemail explaining that the entire transaction had been cancelled, and apologized once again. I then went downstairs to talk to our billing department and let them know they'd have to mail a bill. While down there, I learned that $crazy_lady had apparently looked up our company on FaceBook and proceeded to call in on the company number. She immediately started screaming and cursing at the receptionist who answered the phone, then demanded to talk to the company founder (his name must have been on FaceBook), who has been dead for quite some time now. Eventually she got shunted over to our HR guy. There, she proceeded to tell him what a terrible employee I am. She told him that her husband works in IT, and she's sure that he put me up to this! They're going through a divorce, and he paid me off to do this to her and try to get more money! (never mind the fact that I am not the person who ran the card, and had she just let us do our normal refund process everything would have been fine.) She knows exactly how IT works, we're all in it together and conspiring to do this to her! HR listened while she talked his ear off, then hung up and laughed. We know each other personally, go to church together, so fortunately there was no chance of any repercussions on me. The last little cherry on top came a couple of weeks later when $crazy_lady received the mailed bill. Apparently her credit card company told me one last lie and did just refund part of the transaction instead of cancelling it entirely like they had told me they would. $crazy_lady completely flipped out and called in again, once again giving the HR guy an ear full of it. After that we never heard from her again, never received a bad Google or FaceBook review, or.... anything. Now it's just a fun story to tell. [link] [comments]  |
| Rolling out (Part three of hopefully less than a thousand) Posted: 02 Jan 2020 11:31 AM PST Hello fellow redditors, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, it's ya boi, the one who has to deal with stupid management that is worse than illiterate users. Quick reminder to anyone who hasn't seen part 01 and 02, I work in a Japanese car company here in Brazil, doing the rollout of win 7 machines into win 10
Long story short, we had to swap machines in one of the farthest areas inside of the factory plant, which required us to catch a ride with one of the internal IT support guys. On the way back, it was about time to leave, so he said "Just lock the machines on the trunk of the car, you can get them Monday morning (it was Friday)" Sure thing, we did that, only to be greeted by the local IT manager fuming because the trunk was filled with about 20 desktops. Obviously, we just shrugged and went with our day, after collecting the desktops and carrying them upstairs, since the elevator is broken.
We used to have a strict rule of: "We can only format a user machine 48 hours after they validated the change", to avoid problems. Recently, our management changed it to: "You are authorized to format any machine after the user validates the change." Needless to say, it was a problem waiting to arise, and it just happened. A user forgot some data inside the C:/ drive, and just requested her machine back. Guess which machine is undergoing formatting right now? Hers. So, she is going to be missing what are probably critical files, because our management wants to make 40 machines out of 10. [link] [comments]  |
| A cautionary tale for the masses (well, mostly sysadmins) Posted: 02 Jan 2020 07:10 AM PST I received a ticket into my queue today: "Alert: Disk on XXX-XA1 is Warning". Fairly standard alert from our RMM tool, ezpz fix as a general rule. After logging into the offending server without a hiccup, I get a follow up email with the subject: "Alert: Disk on XXX-XA1 is Failed". Uh oh. This is less than 2 minutes later. That means it's chewed through 5% of it's total available disk space in less than 2 minutes (for those playing at home about 10 GB in 2 minutes). A quick scan with my favorite tree sizing application quickly reveals that **the pagefile.sys has ballooned to 72GB and is climbing!!!* Confused words come from my mouth, other techs raise eyebrows at the scale of the file and it's speed of growth. Digging into the resource manager, I find the culprit: Microsoft Teams. Having 45GB of non-committed changes to make. A low level user had decided to go against company policy and install the product onto the servers (user based instances requiring no Administrator credentials) and was happily A quick boot of the process resolved the performance issues and returned the server back to it's rightful state of operations. This was followed by a quick word to the Client's relation manager, and a cautionary word to the client themselves, along with some security policy changes in the AD to prevent it from happening again. All in all: Keep the Team working by keeping Teams off your servers.* *Unless you want to deploy it properly, then by all means, do your darnedest! TL; DR: Never, not ever, not even once, should you allow your users to try and run Microsoft's Teams on a Citrix Server/Terminal Server (unless you like swift and painful doom to befall your client's servers, in which case: game on). [link] [comments]  |
| Physical Patterns & Physical Troubleshooting Posted: 02 Jan 2020 10:16 AM PST Background: Some of my favourite TFTS stories are those where the root cause was some wild Layer 1 or PEBKAC that could never have been discovered remotely or over the phone. This is one of my stories in this category. Being the only field IT person in a large rural area with limited "high speed" internet availability meant almost all of my work was done in-person. Most of the time this was my preference anyways; reading TFTS posts where OPs either aren't allowed or just can't go to the user's desk to troubleshoot possible PEBKAC is sometimes quite painful. And a significant chunk of the issues I was called for usually had an element of user education and/or Layer 1 that made my travel time well worth the fee for the customers in the end anyways, so usually everyone involved was happy with waiting for me to arrive in person. This user in this case was extremely good at her job; once upon a time she'd done pretty much every other job in the office, so she knew everything in the organization inside-out and backwards, which made her present job even easier for her. Part of what made her so good was that she would break everything down into repetitive tasks that she would practice, improve, and then master. On top of that she was genuinely a wonderful person to interact with. One day while on site she asked if I could help her solve a computer issue that had started plaguing her soon after my last visit. She had difficulty describing it beyond that anytime she switched from using her computer to working with paper files, then went back to her computer, everything on screen would be...screwy. Wrong. Broken. She really couldn't figure out how to describe it due to the absolute strangeness. If this lady was having this much trouble just describing it, it really must be a doozy. So I stood off to the side in her office and asked her to continue her work while I kept an eye on the computer for our mystery problem. And sure enough, as soon as she switched to working with her paper files, her screen did something most people who didn't already know what it was would have great difficulty describing to a tech. Remember when I said this user broke everything down into repetitive tasks? Well, when I say repetitive tasks, I mean she does the exact same thing every time, down to the micrometer. This is important to the story. She had an L-shaped desk, with the computer workspace on one side and her paper workspace on the other. When she rotated herself in her chair 90 degrees to switch from computer to paper, she would lift her hands off the keyboard and mouse, rotate, and continue with paper. This collection of physical motions was the exact same every time, for maximum mastery and efficiency of course. And during part of this motion, her keyboard hand would ever so gently brush the top of the mouse just enough to send the cursor to the lower right corner of the screen. Normally this was not a problem, but her computer had updated, and "Aero Peek" had rolled out. If you don't recall this feature of Windows (I don't think it's still a thing in current versions of 10, is it?), just do an image search for it, and you'll know what I'm talking about. For someone who didn't know what it was, it would be terribly confusing to return to your computer to find. Basically, all your stuff is "gone" and all that is left is ghosts, until you wiggle your mouse. After pointing out her wrist brushing the mouse and explaining what was happening, she practiced lifting her hands a little higher when rotating from computer to paper position, and never had the issue again. TL:DR: Aero Peek installed, user's physical motion patterns activated it, problem solved by user training themselves to lift their hands higher when moving, could not have solved remotely. [link] [comments]  |
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