His first words were "Uhh...hey" Tech Support |
- His first words were "Uhh...hey"
- Engineers VS Technicians
- A spot of technical support has unexpected side-effects
- The AV Saga Part 10: Occam’s Razor
| His first words were "Uhh...hey" Posted: 01 Feb 2020 07:08 AM PST Backstory: So I work the help desk for a robotics company that specializes in autonomous robots that deliver supplies and equipment to certain departments/facilities in the healthcare industry. So, the pharmacy at a hospital will have their supplies for the day delivered from someone in the arrivals department of a hospital. Or there might be garbage that needs to be dropped off and the robot will take an elevator down to the basement and drop it off and wait for its next job. Stuff like that. Well last night, I get a call from one of our hospitals. "company name help desk, this is *my name", how can I help you?". The guy on the other end starts off with "Uhh... hey" and then tells me that one of the robots is stopped in a hallway. I log into it through our software to see him on the map and see that he was stopped near the pharmacy because a fire alarm had apparently gone off earlier and he's supposed to pull off to the side to give people enough space to go up and down the hallway. "Well I'm right near the pharmacy. Can I just take what I need from it to the pharmacy?". Usually I'd say yes, but I'd never heard this person call before. He also has yet to give his name. AND his sentences took forever to complete. I then check out our database of specific users in certain departments we're supposed to talk with and call the pharmacy. "Hey this is my name from the company name help desk. I'm calling because it looks like the robot that's on the way to make a delivery to you guys is stopped because of a fire alarm. And there's someone asking if they can just bring the supplies over to you guys. Did you send him?". three second pause "Uhh...no we didn't. Hold on". The lady on the other end leaves and puts me on hold. She comes back a few minutes later. "Yeah I had no idea who that was. He looked like he was completely out in space somewhere. Probably a junkie". And she's probably right. That robot was probably carrying hypodermic needles and drugs that could sell for a pretty penny. I feel bad for the dude and his addiction, but people need that stuff. I asked if he was violent or anything and she said he just ran away when he saw her coming so I guess it's good no one got hurt. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2020 05:24 PM PST In what seems like a lifetime ago, when I first got out of the Military, I started a job with a thermocouple manufacturer to work in the service department to work on instruments sold to companies that needed to monitor the temperature of equipment ranging from industrial machinery to fast food grills and deep friers. On my first day of work the head of the engineering department who would be my manager took me on a tour to meet the engineering folk and the manufacturing people. Our cast is the bright eyed technician (me), Chuck the head of engineering and Dick an all too full of himself engineer. Dick was troubleshooting units of a brand new design (his creation) that failed right off the assembly line. As Chuck and I walked up I could see Dick scratching his head. He had 3 oscilloscopes hooked up checking different points on the units motherboard. Chuck introduced me to Dick who clearly looked down on me from the start. He didn't care much for military folk. Anyway here is how the conversation went. Chuck: Hi Dick, I want to introduce you to Me, he is coming to us fresh out of the Air Force. Me: extending my hand "Nice to meet you" Dick: ignoring the extended hand..."I can't figure this out, been trying to fix this one unit for three hours." Chuck: Well I am sure you will figure it out, after all it is your design. Me: feeling slighted over the rude welcome..."Dick, that resistor is burned out." Dick: silence...blinks a few times then looks down to see I am right. Chuck: let's move on to the manufacturing floor. Dick the dickish engineer never learned to do a physical examination before breaking out the o-scope. TL/DR: first day on the job I diagnosed an issue that the designer failed to troubleshoot after 3 hours. Technicians look before acting, engineers over think things. [link] [comments]  |
| A spot of technical support has unexpected side-effects Posted: 01 Feb 2020 05:55 AM PST This is a tale about a relative of mine - lets call her Susan. In her mid-twenties, but never really got around to leaving her teens behind, and never achieved much at school. In a dead-end job as a small cog in the large machine of an out-of-town supermarket. Red-headed, both literally and figuratively. No known technical intuition. In summary: not exactly the sort of person you'd trust with a screwdriver. Susan is a cashier, and consequently has to deal with POS terminals. And, as the regulars here will know, both of the traditional meanings of that acronym are applicable. One particular terminal had been especially flaky for weeks, and the penny-pinching management were finally persuaded to replace it. Out came a man from this year's lowest-bidding support contractor and he replaced the terminal. Well, at least he fixed the flakiness. When he'd gone, they found that the new terminal did not work at all. Susan was supposed to report things like this to her supervisor, who would have gone to a manager, who would ... you get the idea. But Susan's red-headed traits came to the fore - she questioned the installer's parentage, grabbed a screwdriver and started taking things apart. Removing a cover-plate revealed the connection of the terminal to the supermarket wiring. There were four coloured wires on each side of the connector block. The black wire connected to the black wire, the blue wire connected to the blue wire, the red wire connected to the ... yellow wire? Muttering imprecations, Susan unscrewed the mismatched wires and swapped them around. And, hey presto - the terminal worked perfectly. (OK, that last bit isn't strictly true. But it worked as well as any of the other terminals.) News of Susan's little success spread quickly, with the result that, as far as her colleagues were concerned, she was now local technical support for anything electrical. And Susan discovered, as many of us here have, that you can actually get surprisingly far by (a) pushing the power cable all the way in, (b) switching it off and back on again, or (c) reading the instructions. Now, few good deeds go unpunished, and she could have received a ticking-off for going outside her job description. But Susan got lucky. Her manager not only thanked her for showing initiative but even invited her to take management training. If you suspect that supermarket management courses are not exactly a short-cut to riches, you would be correct. But it did mean that Susan got a bit more responsibility, a bit more recognition, and above all quite a bit more variety. She felt less like a cog and more like an employee. This happened last spring/summer, and bits of the story were passed to me by other relatives. Recently I met Susan for the first time in a year, and she confirmed the story. But what struck me was that she's matured noticeably in that year, lost a bit of weight, looked better and generally seemed happier with life. And all because she spotted that two red wires should be connected to each other. [link] [comments]  |
| The AV Saga Part 10: Occam’s Razor Posted: 01 Feb 2020 07:28 AM PST The AV Saga Part 10: Occam's Razor Previously: https://redd.it/akrqz8 A little while after we finished getting our AV house in order, I was in a different office in a different town working on a project. Early in the afternoon I got a quick message from my Boss.
Giving me an IP address isn't completely useless, but I'm not sure why I have to do the work to identify the infected PC.
I plug the IP into our PC management console and spits out the laptop name of one of the department team leads in the office. I walk over to TeamLead's desk.
I take it back to the conference room I'm working out of when I get another message from my boss.
I can already tell by looking at it that it's an IP for this office's wifi network. Management console spits out the same laptop name. So it looks like we only have one infection. I form my own opinions on how TeamLead got an infected email while waiting for the meeting to start. 15 minutes later…
Click. Click. Send.
Seems like a bit of a stretch to immediately assume "we've been hacked!" but whatever. An hour later I got another message from my boss.
On my way back to the hotel I see a meeting invite for the next morning, 6:30am local time. Great. THe next morning, I just on the call while still lying in bed.
And thus we spent thousands of dollars for $ExpensiveITSecurityFirm to tell us they could find no evidence of intrusion. We also spent the next month fast tracking conditional access, and ended up breaking a lot of user's email access as we identified all the different ways and places user's connect to email, since like everything else in our environment, we have no idea about a lot of stuff until it breaks. We also turned on banners in emails for Office 365 users warning if an email was from an external sender. That was done with no notice to anyone, not even IT. And due to our environment configuration, any email sent from a user with their email account still on-prem, O365 considered external and added a banner. Most users immediately ignored those banners since a lot of the emails they were getting from internal employees was marked as external. That could be a tale by itself. MFA was enabled haphazardly at best, and many IT folk struggled for a week or so to regain access to the Office 365 tools they needed. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't improve security where we can, but CISO's tenure was filled with policies derived from poor decision making and just wild jumps in troubleshooting issues. [link] [comments]  |
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