Call Nine-One-One, not tech support Tech Support |
- Call Nine-One-One, not tech support
- You travelled from Europe to do what now?
- Shut the system down NOW!
- You can submit a ticket next time
- Just Open The File
- The Blind Leading the Blind. Or "The One Where the Helpdesk is Helpless
- Swedish fish theory in action.
- 100% CPU usage
- Wireless does not mean no wire at all
- of sessions
- Very urgent for weeks
- Help me to help you
- The Dreary Drizzle, or, you're using WHAT for your call schedule?!
| Call Nine-One-One, not tech support Posted: 14 Feb 2020 08:41 AM PST The call:
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Needless to say, their server was hosed… [link] [comments]  |
| You travelled from Europe to do what now? Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:25 PM PST I'm travelling in the US at the moment and thanks to the insane hub-and-spoke system that prevails in this country, by which you fly west to end up east of your departure point, I am between flights. I fly a lot and I don't normally bother to talk to the person next to me, but I detected a French accent when the guy next to me on my last flight spoke, so I initiated a conversation. This is his story Dun Dun The guy in question lives and works on the coast of France; he is employed by a company making $SpecialSensors that are used in factories to measure the properties of the $Product and ensure that said $Product is meeting specifications. A factory in some podunk town in a flyover state had a $SpecialSensor that wasn't working properly; vendor support in France was unable to resolve the problem by liaising with the factory tech guys, so our protagonist was dispatched from western France to the US midwest several days ago. After three flights and a fairly long drive, our intrepid traveller reached the factory in question and was ushered into the room containing the $SpecialSensor... ...whereupon, within a few minutes, he figured out that this equipment - that needs to be in a stable environment to get accurate readings - is sitting in a room without airconditioning; there was a duct, but no air (conditioned or otherwise) was issuing therefrom. So our hero did exclaim in a charmant French accent (maybe - after all, I wasn't there), "why is there no airconditioning? This room needs to be at a stable temperature." A very brief investigation revealed that somebody had unplugged the airconditioning unit. The unit was plugged back in, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth gave way to "huzzahs" and rejoicing. Our hero then spent several days sitting around doing nothing and as I type this out on my 'phone, he is sitting elsewhere in the airport waiting for his flight to Paris. TL, DR: guy flies from western France to Bumfuck, Idaho at vast expense to essentially plug in a cable. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Feb 2020 10:55 AM PST A recent post reminded me of this one from my days on the phone. User calls in asking how to shut down the audible alarm on a drive array. Me: "Theres a button on the back that silences the alarm but we should figure out why its going off." Customer: "Its too hot to work in the machine room today, I'll call you back tomorrow." Me: "Wait, how hot is too hot?" Customer: "Like 110F, way to hot to hang out in there troubleshooting." Me: "We need to shut down the array right now, permanent damage will occur (probably has actually) if you keep it running." Customer: "No way man, my boss would be pissed if I shut this all down, people wouldn't be able to work." Me: ... Customer: <click> I called back but the tech I'd spoken to before refused to answer my calls so I looked up the main number of the site. When the receptionist answered I told her that I desperately needed to speak to whoever ran engineering. Something in my voice apparently told her I meant business because I got transferred to the Director of engineering, I met him in person years later and he actually remembered the call. I explained what I'd been told. Director: "What the f*&^?" Calling out away from the phone "Shut down the machine room, NOW!" To me: "I'll call you back." It turned out they'd had a catastrophic failure of cooling for all of their machine rooms but the tech on duty, the guy I'd spoken to first, hadn't bothered to tell anybody. They ended up having tons of hardware failures for equipment that had massively overheated, none of which we would replace under warranty... [link] [comments]  |
| You can submit a ticket next time Posted: 15 Feb 2020 02:53 AM PST So, long time lurker here. Also not IT, but as a bioinformatics guy not completely usless. Also English is my second language. This is a story from the other site, as a user. So I am doing my thesis in a big institute that is not directly connected to the university. Most people are biologists, and we have a dedicated IT group of around 5 people, a ticket system etc. Anyway one day I come to the office, and my internet is not working (neither is our internal network). I do the basic "I am below 30 and have owned a computer before" way of troubleshooting. Restarting my machine, using the inbuild troubleshooting tool, crawling under my desk to check the lan cable. Nothing goes. I then walk over to our IT (other building) , and explain the problem. I give him a blank stare. IT-guy: >Ah.... Right.. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:41 AM PST This was more than 20 years ago, so I can't go into much detail, but I absolutely have to share this here. I used to work for Microsoft's Customer Central. At the time, Microsoft had a ton of products and no one support center could be expected to know them all. From software and operating systems, to an interactive Barney the Dinosaur doll that interacted with his show, all calls came to me, and it was my responsibility to verify warranty and forward them on to the correct department. Under no circumstances were we supposed to give support ourselves, as it "set false expectations." One day, this sweet older lady called in, having trouble with her word processor. She could save her documents, but couldn't open them. As part of my job I needed her to open her word processor program and open a little window in the help menu to get a serial number so I could forward her on to the correct department. What happened next will stay with me for the rest of my life. The sweet older lady and I had what could only be termed a "miscommunication." After more than 45 minutes on the phone with her, (calls shouldn't ever take more than 3-5 minutes) I came to the dawning realization that every time I asked this woman to double-click on a "file", she'd double-click on a "folder", because that's what it's called, right? A file? You know, those icons that look like manila file folders used in filing cabinets? It took me 45 minutes of talking with this woman and troubleshooting her problems before I figured out the problem. And once I sorted out this miscommunication, and taught her the jargon of "file" and "folder" and what purpose they serve in a Windows OS, suddenly, she was able to open her files and her problem was solved. [link] [comments]  |
| The Blind Leading the Blind. Or "The One Where the Helpdesk is Helpless Posted: 14 Feb 2020 10:16 PM PST Greetings, and welcome back to another tale of tech
Here's the cast:
$Me - The protagonist of this story, runs on coffee and lo-brau brand beer. He also has a cape that flutters in the breeze of a "hero-wind" branded fan. $Gomer - One of the L1 agents who works in my office. High Charisma, but not all that "techie" (or literate). sounds like Gomer Pyle from the Andy Griffith show. $BTM - Technical manager for the UK branch of our international support team. Dry sense of humor, arms the size of my head. Cool guy overall. $User - Needs the needful, nice lady.
Our organization has a Teams channel where technicians from various escalation teams are able to post their questions about tickets they have. It's a cool system and things generally get handled a little quicker as you can post your ticket in there and someone who's familiar with the issue can offer assistance from their area of expertise. There are also sub channels. The $L1 desk (onshore and offshore) has their own channel where they can ask questions about calls they get. My office is near the $L1 area, and I'm the unofficial point of contact for $L1. Sometimes it's easier for them to just come talk to me instead of following the normal escalation process. When I'm not in the office, they can post their questions to their Teams channel. That's where this story begins.
Scene: It's 8am, about the time I usually wake up, but I don't typically get to the office until 10am. I like my beauty sleep/quiet morning time. Why I decided to install the Teams app on my phone I'll never know, but I found myself regretting that decision on this particular morning. I get a notification that goes off very loudly in my ear.
No, it can't be. He knows I'm not in the office yet, why me? Why not literally anyone else? Maybe if I just pretend I'm still asleep he'll....
Oh thank goodness. That'll have him scrambling awhile. I start to close my eyes and suddenly
I sit up, blink a couple times, murmur a few obscenities to myself before picking up my phone to see what's up.
Greaaattt it's what I always wanted. So I got dressed and went into the office. I pulled up my ticket queue, but I didn't see any tickets for the user. It turns out $Gomer did indeed escalate the ticket, but sent it as a high priority ticket to one of the non-US $L2 techs who was asleep. When a high priority ticket hits our queue, it sends an email to the $L2 agent advising them that a high priority ticket has been assigned to them. Not only are $L1 agents not supposed to assign tickets to individual techs themselves, but they need to set the correct priority. High priority tickets are for situations where there's a minor outage. That's strike 1 and 2. Strike 3 will be be a made-up scenario in my head where I hit $Gomer over the head with a bowling pin, but I digress. I messaged $Gomer to ask about the ticket.
Before I could respond, the Offshore $L2 tech sent me the ticket. I should note at this point, that $Gomer had been on the phone with the user for an hour before finally escalating the ticket.
I get the details and call up $User.
I walk the client through opening the command prompt through the run dialogue (first clue is that we know explorer.exe is running. Have you figured it out yet)? I get the IP address and remote in. I should note here, that prior to calling them, I mapped their C drive to my virtual desktop and found the desktop folder in %UserProfile% still definitely had icons. I remote in and the first thing I notice is that it's not "all black". It's in tablet mode!
I disable it
I walk the user through the process of turning tablet mode on/off.
I hang up with the client and post back in the Teams channel explaining the issue and what I did.
I proceed to explain what I just finished explaining to $User to $Gomer. $BTM PMs me.
That's the end of the story. Sorry it was so long. On my last story, some complained that it didn't need to be two parts, so I figured I'd cut it to one post to make all you fabulous people happy, handy, and dandy. As always, if you have questions, compliments, or death threats, I'll be happy to answer them in the comments.
Good night everyone! [link] [comments]  |
| Swedish fish theory in action. Posted: 14 Feb 2020 12:28 PM PST Sorry if this isnt the sub to post this in. I thought it might be more appreciated here Recently the left controller on a certain console of mine decided it did not like to charge. I had to constantly dock, undock, resync it, and power off power on. I bought a separate charger and it still had the same issue. I dident want to replace it but my system is out of warranty. I filed a support ticket anyway and they sent me a ups label. I rememberd reading about the swedish fish theory and thought hey it cant hurt. I went to a local shop and bought some locally made candy. Tossed in the box and sent it on its merry way. I got a confirmation email last night they received it and a fixed email this morning with a return tracking number. My original estimate turn around was two weeks but this was less then 24 hours. So yeah a little appreciation goes a long way. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:08 AM PST I work in managed webhosting in a chat support escalation role. Earlier today one of our techs rushed an escalation as a premium account owner was reporting that their server was consistently running CPU usage over 100%. Initially i was concerned as to how the customer knew this info, since you generally need backend tools to see that on our platform, and most of our users pay us to "manage" the server on this level so they don't have to. After reviewing the logs for several mins and not seeing any thing over an average load of around 20% with several occasional spikes in traffic I asked the customer how they where seeing this info and they sent me a screenshot of their Windows Task Manager which showed their Chrome Application running at 100% CPU usage on their local machine... [link] [comments]  |
| Wireless does not mean no wire at all Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:16 PM PST First time here, on mobile. And sorry if English bad, second language I'm what we call a Cable Guy, not the kind of TechSupport on phone we see on this sub, but I still do a lot of support face to face with the client. The situation just finished and writing this from my car. I'm still in shock. Another tech came here, maybe a week ago, to install the Tv Box and the internet. He told my client, (40/50 year old lady) that she can "use the wireless now" he show her the password and left. But now my client just remembered wireless, so she removed every wire she can find. The Cable Box, the router, the TV, the lamps, the toaster, the refrigerator, the list goes on . Everything was unplugged She shouted a at me for maybe five minutes because she lost a week worth of food while I was staring blankly on the floor not knowing what to do. She wanted me to reimburse everything and to fire the other guy. At the end, I left her my boss number, helped her plug back everything and was able to explain the "Wireless". But the situation and all, amazing story that I needed to share. TLDR: Client went wireless to far and unplugged everything, even the water fountain for the cat. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:11 AM PST TL;DR whenever you change something check the scope first $me: obvious $coworker: good at what they do but limited view $teamlead: usually quite forgiving So, we are in the middle of a migration. Applications come and go. Some licensing methods are questionable at best, some seem to be straightforward, I.E. connect an USB dongle and you're all set. We have stuff we install at the endpoints directly and we have stuff that is offered through remote sessions, virtualized desktops. $me: "So $application345 needs to be offered on the VDI session?" $coworker: "That would be nice so they can work from home as well." $me: "Ok, I'll see what I can fabricate. It has a license dongle, it's a bit iffy to get those working inside a virtualized application package on a virtualized desktop." $coworker: "There's a cake waiting for us if we can make that happen." I duly build a package that is working, dongle is seen in the session inside the virtualized application, all hunky-dory. I deliver the package + documentation to the delivery team and expect not to hear anything. ********* 3 weeks later ********* $coworker: "Eeeeh $me, it seems we have an issue with $application345" $me: "Oh, that is surprising, everything was working as designed, we got an approval signed and all?" $coworker: "Yeah not that. We had an incident in production. It has been put on hold until further notice." $me: "Any idea why?" $coworker: "Not yet." I walk over to our teamlead. $me: "What's the story on $application345???" $teamlead: "Ah yes. You see it is using a license dongle. We constructed a policy so that type of dongle is redirected to a VDI session." $me: "Yeah, that was the idea, so why..." $teamlead: "We have $application123 and $application567 that are using the same type of dongle." $me: "So? I am not doing anything with those workstations or those applications" $teamlead: "Correct. The problem is those still run locally. Because of that policy, whenever they start a viewer session for a VDI, they loose their dongle because it's redirected into the VDI and no longer available locally" *facepalm* $me: "So now what?" $teamlead: "We have to hold it off until the VDI/policy teams come up with something useable." *********** 1 month later ***************** $coworker: "Cake should be on its way." $me: "Oh? How was it fixed?" $coworker: "Apparently the policy team was lazy, they did not want to make separate policies for specific groups of systems, just one overall ON/OFF policy per USB device type." $me: "%$#@%$# it. No cake for them." [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Feb 2020 12:30 PM PST I work for a small company providing various IT services, from hosting to software development, web design, system administration and consulting, etc. We don't have dedicated support staff, and while some support requests are free, some of them are paid. On some plans, it is pay per minute. On worse plans each time we start working on it, it is rounded up for the next whole hour and pay per hour. Urgent calls outside of business hours cost extra (2* higher). The first request for this story was at normal working hours, it was a most basic request: We should change a password for one of their mail accounts. The request came from their phone, we even recognized them, etc. So it was something easy. As they manage their devices, it was supposed to be super easy. But as they have their info@ e-mail address set up on multiple PCs and Phones, in my response I have made it clear that it has to be changed on ANY device (and app, etc) where they have set up that e-mail address. If they try to log in with the old password (now invalid) that might get their IP address blacklisted. That can be alleviated by solving a captcha, but if it keeps being a problem it might require our help again to remove them from the blacklist. And of course, they should tell us, when it is good, working, etc. It was "okay" according to them. The guy who requested the password change made it clear that he knows how he has to change the password everywhere. Yet a week later it was urgent to help them because some phones can't download some attachments from the mail server. They claim they got their e-mails, etc. it was about their office. So I knew their Office IP, fired up good old ping plotter, ouch there is some packet loss. But they use the cable from an ISP that already announced it is a known problem. The next day the problem repeats itself, but that time I learn it is solved by connecting the office WiFi. Strange. What would stop them from downloading attachments, while letting them get fresh e-mails first? Okay, sometimes one device connects from a random cellular IP, downloads mail, then another device tries to connect a lot of times, gets the IP blacklisted due to too many login attempts with the wrong password, and after that, they try to download attachments. When they said they can get the e-mails fine, only attachments are a problem, that was a bit misleading as it was clear they didn't get the new e-mails for most of the day. Deleting them from the blacklist, exempting that IP from similar bans for a few days, etc. and telling them they have forgotten to update the password on one of their devices. The guy who asked for the password change said he updated everywhere. Yet, soon (next weekend, in the late evening) he had a problem connecting from home. The incidents repeated itself, often urgent calls, out of working hours, etc. As he CCed his coworkers, boss, etc. at some reports, I have CCed them as well. It had explanations of what happened and why. I think He wasn't happy as he was sure he changed the password everywhere and this way he might look a bit bad. Yet in a few places where he went, some mobile device tried to log in repeatedly with a bad password and he got a lot of IPs blacklisted. So it was clear it was tied to him, yet he insisted he done everything right... So assumed it is a problem on our side. The moment when I said that having to adjust passwords on each and every device includes tablets, digital assistants, even if he doesn't even open the mail app on them anymore but the device tries to connect to the server with the old password that can be enough for a blacklist. Guess what, it was his iPad. A lot of people have bought tablets, set up everything on them, but no longer carry them as they still need their laptop, and when they don't use a laptop their phone is enough. Those tablets often only used to see movies (or let the kids see cartoons) but often they try to connect to various servers. They might be still a security risk (if stolen) and they might cause such problems when you forget to update passwords on them. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:20 PM PST Obligatory disclaimer: LTL, FTP. User = $user [Original Ticket] $Me: I have left you a VM regarding this. Can you clarify if you need to recover deleted emails or archived emails? $User: Hello, would be emails from July that are no longer in my deleted emails. $Me: Can you clarify what these emails were, are these emails you deleted? Are they emails that are missing from a folder? $User: Emails that I deleted but are not longer sitting in the recoverable folder. $Me Hi $user, I have left you a VM to discuss this in further detail, we need more specific information to recover the email such as dates of the email, the sender/receiver email address and the subject line if possible so we can try locate these to restore for you. $User: Its an email from (insert generic name), in July $Me: I don't have a user by that name in our system, is this an external email? Can you provide the email address if so, we need specific information to locate an email? $User: Its an external email from a client: (insert same generic name) $Me: Please send the persons email address to me, I cant search for an email without an email address. $User: Provides email address $Me: There are 20+ from this email address, would you like all of them to be retrieved? $User: Yes, They are all empty Forwarded all emails to user, ticket closed. Strong drink poured. [link] [comments]  |
| The Dreary Drizzle, or, you're using WHAT for your call schedule?! Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:31 AM PST The players:
Yesterday morning I'm driving to work on a cold and dreary morning. Suddenly my Slack pings. It's a coworker reporting that one of the PC's in the doctor's workroom at $practice had been kicked over, and that it was now reporting a "hard drive not found" error. So now I'm heading to $practice in the dreary drizzle, rather than to my comfy desk chair at the office. Sigh. I arrive on-site, $nurse shows me to the PC and I open it up in hope that the worst to happen was the SATA cable knocked loose. To no one's surprise, the HD is borked. After informing $nurse that the PC is out of warranty and will need to be replaced, I pack up and once again brave the dreary drizzle, with hopes of comfy desk chair in my future. My slack pings again. $bm has been notified, and has a spare device in her office at $umbrella HQ. I'm now to divert to HQ to pick up spare from $bm and replace borked PC because it's super important that the workroom at the $practice where there's only one doctor on duty today has 2 working PC's. Sigh. Furthermore, it's EXTREMELY important that we identify whether this is the computer that contains the only copy of the doctors' on-call schedule for this practice. Wait, what? Why would the on-call schedule only have one copy on one PC? $umbrella has O365 for all employees, why wouldn't the schedule be on an O365 group calendar? $bm informs me that $doctor has been using the same program to make the on-call schedule for over a decade, and he doesn't want to learn a new system. She doesn't know what program it is. After dragging myself once again into the dreary drizzle, I get back to $practice. Blessedly, the borked PC is not the one with the on-call schedule. I replace the borked PC, and start the replacement updating since it's been sitting in an office for a while and is still on Win10 1803. While I'm waiting, $pm comes in with a thumb drive, declaring she's going to "back up" the on-call schedule software onto this thumb drive. Sigh. Ok, let's take a look at this thing. There's a calendar program of some sort open with the on-call schedule. You might ask what kind of calendar program only hosts local data? Palm Desktop. If you haven't heard of Palm Desktop, don't worry, neither had I. Probably because the last stable release is from 2008. The purpose of this program was to sync data from Palm Pilot devices, which were a precursor to smartphones. The company that makes them went out of business in 2010. It's got a very basic calendar in it that can be synced back and forth to Palm devices. $doctor doesn't have a Palm device anymore, but he really likes this calendar. I guess familiarity breeds comfort. For over a decade he's been making the on-call schedule here, printing it out, and hanging it in the office. The only place the other doctors can view their schedule is this printout pinned to the announcement board. At a company that has O365 for all employees... Sigh. $doctor walks in, and almost immediately starts telling us why he likes this program so much and doesn't like O365. So as gently as I can, I start to explain the benefits of using the already existing physician group calendar in O365. Things like the ability to invite the person scheduled so that it shows up on their calendar and they don't have to look at a piece of paper to find out when they're scheduled to be on-call. Ultimately it took about an hour of myself and $pm patiently teaching an old doctor new tricks, but we managed to drag him at least partially into the 21st century. Afterward $pm thanked me profusely. Apparently she'd been trying to get him to switch for a year, ever since she took over from the last pm. And finally, the happy ending. After once more steeling myself against the dreary drizzle, I finally made it to comfy desk chair and all was well with the world. [link] [comments]  |
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