Electric heaters in cubicles Tech Support |
- Electric heaters in cubicles
- Call Center Tale #5: The Intern
- Why didn't you fix it yet! No, we didn't tell anyone!
| Posted: 11 Feb 2020 09:23 AM PST I was working at a site that had cubicles in sets of 6. Each set of 6 had a shared power source and breaker. The call came in; a printer was not working. It was a standard floor style Multifunction printer, big, bulky, nothing special. The user said that when they sent a print job they could hear the printer start to warm up and then click off. Walking through the steps I recreated the problem. Sure enough, when a print job was received the printer would power off completely without warning. Incidentally, I just happened to notice the 6 cubes next to me would also power off at the same time… And within seconds come back on. I tested the printer again- same thing, 6 cubes power off and then "click" they would come back on. I tracked down where the breaker was. Can you guess where? In the cubical with the person complaining that the printer was not working. Every time the power went out they would just flip the breaker back on. I looked under their desk and found a 1500 watt personal heater… I asked about it and she said that it gets cold in that corner of the building so she got one for herself… and the 5 other people in that block… They were pushing the power to its limits and the printer was pushing it over. She asked if a new network cable would help… I talked building management into adjusting the thermostat. [link] [comments]  |
| Call Center Tale #5: The Intern Posted: 11 Feb 2020 02:05 PM PST Gather round, all, and listen to the tale of a peer. One that has been in the fire and emerged alive. Maybe a little unhinged, but alive. I have wisdom to share, of deeds unsung, unacknowledged, and always unappreciated. Watch the shine of naivety disappear from the eyes of one new to the calling, and be replaced with the hard bitten glare of one who has seen it all. Okay, enough prose. To the story: This happened a few months after the other programmer left. The other IT person didn't want the responsibility, so it was left to me to take on everything else. So now I'm all on my own when it comes to programming. And networking. And help desk. Wait, that's not correct. I had a helper! Ever since The Move, I had someone they hired to transport equipment. Who was happy to help out with some basic help desk stuff. So they got the simple things, I got everything else. They're not the intern. They're just someone who wanted to be useful, and actually was. The intern was someone hired without my input, or even knowledge. Just someone who showed up one day, and now I have to figure out what to do with them. Me: "Oh, hi. Who are you?" Intern: "I'm the new IT guy. I'm supposed to help you?" Me: "Okay. That's news to me. Can you tell me your background in IT?" Intern: "I've got a degree in networking." Me: "Fantastic! We can use that! I'll get you set up, and I'll hand that off to you, and maybe you can help me figure out some of these stubborn issues with the servers." I only have a diploma from a local college. In programming. Everything else is more or less self taught, and applying face to wall until wall breaks. So I know how to do stuff, but definitely not best practices. So having someone with some more formal training should help out immensely. So I get them going, and I start figuring out what they can do. And find out fast why they were an intern. They couldn't make heads or tails out of our network. Or our servers, for that matter. Some of that...I can understand; it wasn't anything approaching sane, but it wasn't a black hole or anything. Okay. No network help. Onto servers. Nope. Doesn't know how to make things work, even with me walking them through it a couple times. Attempts on their side to help out made things worse. I had to ban them from the server room because of all the screwups I had to fix. Phone switches? Nope. Those blow up if you look at them wrong, they'd already shown they couldn't be trusted with critical infrastructure. Okay. What am I left with? Help desk! Surely they've got the chops to at least handle some basic tickets, right? ...Right? Oh, how wrong I was. To give credit where credit is due, I guess I can't really expect someone with a degree in networking to be able to handle help desk issues; they're not even close to the same thing. Some basic knowledge of technical troubleshooting should transfer over to other areas of IT. Got a ticket that one of the floor computers wasn't working. Okay, great. Release The Intern! Who promptly comes back a couple of minutes reporting the problem, I ask for more information, they dutifully truck back to the computer, gather the information, and come back and report. Rinse and repeat. Great, I have a mobile appendage. Eventually, just ask them to grab the box and bring it back to our area so we don't have to do all the back and forth. Turn it on, and first thing I see is: Shouldn't have taken that long to get to that point. Whatever. Hard drive failed. To be expected. Pop it out, slap in a spare, reinstall Windows, keep on going. I hand it back to the intern to swap the hard drive. Who promptly spends four hours trying to figure out how to even open the case. I had to ask what the hold up was before they'd tell me. It wasn't a standard case, but one of those with a vertical front plate that opened out for the drive. I think it had a back release to open said plate. Neat design, and made our lives easier for hard drive swapping. If you knew the trick, anyways. Intern wouldn't ask. Didn't google. Didn't do anything but pull at the case, trying to figure out how to open it. Couldn't even get the side panel off. I reached out, pulled the release, and the plate popped open. Pulled the drive, handed the spare to the intern, and walked away. I went to the boss right after. Told them that the intern wasn't my intern anymore, and they need to be kept away from any of our tech. Boss tried to calm me down and asked me to watch them a couple more weeks to see if they get the hang of it. I knew they wouldn't, but, fine, whatever. Throughout all of this, I was doing some very tricky work on our servers. This was years ago, so I can't remember exactly what it was, except that it was some sort of server fix that required an exact process to prevent the server from failing during the fix. It doesn't take long, once you figure it out, but it was a little finicky to get right. I had a day off in the middle of the week, and management wanted this fix to be completed. Intern calls me, asking for how to do it. I tell them straight up that it's tricky, and if I tell them how to do it, they're going to screw it up, and then I have to come in and fix it. So they can just wait until tomorrow. A few minutes later, boss calls. Wants me to tell the intern how to do the fix. I repeat myself. Intern will screw it up, I'll do it tomorrow. Nope. Tell intern how to do it. Fine. Intern screws it up. And now my boss wants me to come in to fix it. sigh There goes my day off. Time spent on phone: half an hour. Travel time: an hour. Time to fix: 15 minutes. And since I was there anyways, I decided I'd just fix the rest, and the company can just give me a day off somewhere else. Instant protest. I wasn't there the whole day, so I shouldn't get another whole day off. Aftermath: intern was no longer in IT. They got relegated to office data entry. Good riddance. [link] [comments]  |
| Why didn't you fix it yet! No, we didn't tell anyone! Posted: 11 Feb 2020 06:49 AM PST Background: Our office is not open on weekends but we check out our email during the weekend just to make sure nothing major happened. We also have an "emergency" ticket status that will page a tech on call in the event of a major meltdown. Some departments are open over the weekend. We have a piece of server hosted software that two departments share. Department 1 (D1) is open on weekends, department 2 (D2) is closed. Story time: I walk in on Monday and pretty soon D2 is calling saying that their software has gone offline. They're a little anxious to get it back up but understand that we need to investigate. I log in and confirm that the server is up but the software is showing offline. Decided to restart services and log back in. Finally get an error from the software indicating an expired license. We have to involve a few groups so it took around an hour from report to resolution. Meanwhile D1 (who was open all weekend) is yelling at everyone they can get ahold of that their software is down and was down ALL WEEKEND (and are still complaining). I finally snap and ask: $me - "Well, who did you contact?" D1 - "What?" $me - "When your software went offline late on Friday, who did you contact?" D1 - "Well, nobody." $me - "Exactly. We had the issue resolved within an hour of it being reported as offline by D2. If you had emailed someone or opened an emergency ticket we would have had it resolved within the hour. Now, I don't need to sit here and listen to this bullshit. You have no right to complain about response time to an outage you never reported." Why do end users assume that we will know that their obscure piece of software has gone offline without them reporting it? This is just the tip of the iceberg for this department. [link] [comments]  |
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